Sand
Her long legs stretch out towards the ocean, the rolling waves illuminated by the setting sun. He watches her gracefully uncross her feet at the ankle and dig her toes into the sand. Her toenails are painted pink. Pink. A skinny band holds her windblown hair back from her face and the fashionably large sunglasses, as to fit in here in Europe, she had said, rest on the bridge of her nose.
She senses his approach, some sort of Raymond Reddington radar that she has developed over time, or maybe it has always been there, either way. The salty breeze displaces the sand long dry on her shins and blows it to the striped blanket beneath her.
She can't hear him. The trees sway, their dark fronds tangling and releasing. The call of a seabird draws her attention up, and the gentle monotony of sound that is the ocean at the shore covers up any other movement. But she knows he's there. Watching her, as he is apt to do. She smiles but doesn't turn.
Her skin, still fair due to the practiced usage of sunscreen, contrasts with the black top and blue bottom of her bikini and he traces the skin in between with his eyes. He knows the rise and the fall of each of her breaths, the dip and the swell of her hip bones, her chest, the taste of the skin there.
He watches her. She flips her sunglasses up.
She raises her arms above her head, extending them to their full length, and stretches. The pull of her muscles a welcome relief after the hours on the sand. She must have dozed off. Her kindle fallen to the side and switched off.
She likes it here. Wherever they are. This place with the sand and the beach and the trees.
And him. He is still behind her. She can feel him. She smiles.
A second bird joins the first and suddenly the avian line fills the sky turning this way and that, the leader gliding into place at the front of the formation, and they head out to sea.
Their calls still echoing. Together.
He likes to watch her like this. It's never an intentional act. He doesn't plan to stop and stare, to just look at her. But he does. And it is in these moments, these moments where she looks so young, so free, and, most of all, so alive, that he feels the remainder of the world fall away.
When she looks so at peace, and beautiful, and free. When she is his.
When he can trace the lines of her with his eyes. See her and remember her the night before. Remember her cries and the way she moved with him, beside him, when he was with her. When she was his.
See her and anticipate…anticipate the moment when he will walk across the sand. Lean down and press his lips to hers. Lean down and kiss her.
Because she is his.
He gets to do that. He gets to be the one that kisses her. She allows it. She wants him to, wants (and that thought, he hasn't quite gotten there yet, let himself believe that he might be so lucky).
And she kisses him back.
And in this moment, here on the sand, he feels joy.
And it is such a foreign sentiment for him. Such a long time removed from his life that he is amazed, everyday amazed, that joy has seen it fit to possess him again.
He is a lucky man, Raymond Reddington.
She was, is, his second chance.
Because she loves him.
Because he loves her.
And he walks across the sand.