Here with you
"God, I had a terrible day" Liz sighed as she changed into her sleeping cloths which included Red's shirt and her underwear.
She had found him on the armchair next to her bed, reading a book with full attention. He was wearing his dark blue unbuttoned vest with fitting trousers, white shirt and his reading glasses which was placed low on his nose; he still never ceased to amaze her how incredibly sexy he looked when he was sitting like this. As he slowly closed the book and took off his glasses he looked up at her with a small smile on his face.
"Want to talk about it?" he asked as he stood up and undressed himself until he was wearing only his white undershirt and black boxers.
"No…" she sighed and put her hands on her hips "Yes."
Red smiled and rested himself against the headboard as he patted his thigh to invite her in his arms which Liz accepted happily. She turned off the lights and put a pillow in his lap then she rested her head on it as he gently stroked her hair at her scalp.
"Tell me." he ordered gently and carefully tucked her in.
"Ressler wanted to change the world with his charm. Again. Aram still takes a pity on me as Samar always invites me to drink with her."
"Maybe she just wants to get you laid." Red chuckled as he never stopped caressing her and Liz playfully hit his thighs.
Times like this she didn't want to go out of the cruel world again. She didn't want people to look at her as a puppy who'd just lost her owner in the middle of snowstorm. All she wanted was feeling this man's arms around her, hearing his shooting voice, inhaling his comforting scent.
Red never took pity on her or at least he didn't show it…no, she was sure that he did NOT feel sorrow for her. Maybe he was a mastermind criminal but he was also a man, vulnerable and quite exposed in her eyes.
A man who, in spite of his actions in the past, deserved happiness as did Liz. Maybe that was the reason why they had found themselves in the middle of a romantic related relationship.
They'd shared misery as they'd shared happiness as well.
Two broken hearts collected their pieces and created a new, common one which was stronger and wiser than ever.
"Why everybody treats me like a broken toy that needs to be repaired?" Liz whispered as she turned to her back so she could touch and watch his face as the moonlight danced at the edge of his incredibly long eyelashes.
"Sweetheart, you've been through a lot of bad things since we had finished the Blacklist. You lost your job, your old life." He swallowed hard and he continued in much smaller voice. "Your father. And the top of that you lost your husband." he caught her wandering hand and kissed her exposed wrist.
"I didn't lose my job and I have you." she smiled up at him then this smile turned into a grin when he rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, the taskforce remained but what you do all day? Profiling the criminals from the FBI's famous list which comes out every year like the new collection of Tommy Hilfiger. It's interesting to a nerd who has just finished the school but not to a breathtakingly beautiful and intelligent woman who happened to work with one of the smartest AND sexiest criminals."
"I don't know Red…Dembe is really good-looking but he's not my type." Liz sighed and bit her lower lip to hide her grin.
"I referred to myself, thank you very much." he murmured as he let out an annoyed sigh.
"So you would be that smartest and sexiest criminal?" she asked with faked disbelief, pushing just the right buttons on him and it worked because Red suddenly reached under her pillow as he was searching something. "What?" Liz furrowed her eyebrows and lifted her head to see what his hands were doing.
"I'm just…looking for my balls." he said with slight panic in his voice but Lizzie knew that he was just playing his role in their foreplay. "I'm pretty sure that they had been there somewhere but it looks like they disappeared with my male pride."
She cupped his cheek and kissed him softly while she slowly lingered her other palm on his groin. "Hmm, I think I found your big male pride exactly where we left." she whispered seductively into his ear and enjoyed the voices that escaped his throat. It sounded like a cat, purring happily after taking a long nap in front of the fireplace and drinking lot of warm milk.
Red was her personal purring alpha-tomcat who had just spooned against her back and meowed gently with his low voice as he kissed the skin behind her ear.
"I want you to go and hang out with Agent Navabi. Go to a karaoke bar, drink plenty of alcohol and enjoy your youth."
"I'm enjoying my youth here with you." she pressed herself against him further, desperately searching the warmth of his body.
"Sweetheart, I won't be here forever. I don't want you to give up your life because of me. You're young and beautiful. Take an advantage of them." he almost insisted so there wasn't any room to argue.
"Fine. But promise me one thing." she kissed his knuckles.
"What?"
"You'll be here tomorrow night."
"Oh, Lizzie, I'm dying to see you drunk." Red chuckled but it died at the moment when she poked his ribs with her elbow
"Not funny." she hissed. "Promise me or I won't go."
"I'll be here with you, sweetheart."
###
As much as she wanted Liz just couldn't let herself in properly.
Instead she literally burst into her apartment and it took ten minutes to place the key into the lock and close the door.
The last shot of tequila wasn't certainly necessary, she noted as she swayed into her bathroom and lowered herself into her bathtub. She grabbed a towel for pillow and closed her eyes to stop the spinning room around her.
It seemed like she had just closed her eyes for a second but when she reopened them the sun began to climb into the sky. However, every cell in her body refused any movement she reluctantly stood up and brushed her teeth because she felt like she had just swallowed a complete bar with lots of smoke and alcohol then slowly she gave to her dehydrated body a big glass of water when she noticed her man sitting on the edge of tub with amused gaze.
"What?" her voice was harsh from yelling because she and Samar had been at a karaoke bar to sing something nice but they had already been pretty drunk so they had just yelled and danced. However, the audience hadn't made any complain.
"Were you two having fun?" he chuckled and tilted his head.
"If somebody offers me tequila again, I swear, I'm gonna kill everybody in the room." she murmured and sank under the cold water for a moment and when she raised her face she didn't see his reflection in the mirror anymore.
Panic ran through her which didn't help to her throbbing head but at that moment her physical pain was irrelevant. "Red?" she came into the bedroom but he was nowhere to be found. "Red! Red, don't do this to me!" she was at the edge of crying. He couldn't leave her like that! He would never!
As her throbbing head allowed her she ran to the downstairs and sighed in relief; he was sitting on the couch and he was watching as the light broke free between the trees and filled her living room with intimate colors. Red was waiting for her with a pillow on his lap and blanket next to him.
"I thought you left me." she sobbed and lied down next to him, putting her head into his lap and hugged his thigh.
"I'll always be here, my love." he whispered and kissed her temple.
She was watching the morning lights with him until he lulled her to sleep with soft touches at her scalp; he had always known how he could calm her down and put her mind at ease.
###
It was half past twelve when her annoying and terribly loud phone woke her up.
Samar didn't even wait for her to say hello. "Are you alive? Because I'm dying." her voice was as crippled as Liz felt herself at that moment.
"You're not helping to my splitting headache with yelling." Liz murmured and pulled the blanket above her head to hide her sensitive eyes from the bright light. "Tell me that we don't have to work until the end of this year."
"Unfortunately I can't say that. But at least we'll have two days to recover. I just wanted to check on you but I think it's the best if I hang up and die silently on my own."
"I'll do that, too. Bye Samar." and she hung up. She checked the time on her phone and couldn't help but notice that she turned into thirty-five today.
Great, she groaned.
At least she hoped that nobody would want to celebrate her birthday today. All she wanted was sleeping off her hangover and enjoying the night with Red who had left her again but she knew he would come back for the night.
Later that day, after many pain killers and a long bath Liz was sitting on the couch and watching TV when somebody knocked on the door. Until that point she'd survived he birthday with three phone calls but now she was afraid that Ressler or Aram showed up at her doorstep to celebrate but she wasn't really in the mood to play the happy, now thirty-five years old woman.
She sighed in relief when she saw a guy in green uniform.
"Are you Elizabeth Keen?" the delivery boy asked as he held a middle-sized box in his hands.
"Yes." she nodded and took the box from his hands. "Thank you."
She must have got something from her aunt, Liz thought.
She sat down on the couch and placed the box to the coffee table; she didn't see any address which worried her a bit because there was a bunch of criminals who would happily kill her with a mail-bomb but at the end her curiosity opened the box.
She put her hand to her mouth when she saw a smaller Sacher cake in the box with 'Happy Birthday, Sweetheart!' on the top and a letter next to the cake.
She slowly opened the letter and when her eyes caught the familiar red inked handwriting she sobbed loudly.
"My love,
First of all, happy birthday! Wow, you're thirty-five! I'm so sad that I can't be there with you to count your invisible wrinkles which I believe you already started to discover on your angelic face but I'm sure you're more beautiful than ever. I hope you like the cake which is made by that small confectionery in Vienna where we first kissed. I'll never forget those sweet lips of yours. I'll also never forget that night when I had the pleasure to hold you in my arms and see you as the first sight in the morning for the first time. I think it was the moment when I'd utterly fallen in love with you. I thank the fate every moment I spent with you and I'm afraid I'd never be able to express how much you mean to me, how happy you made me when you married to me in Poros. I'll be always with you as long as you keep a small room in your heart for me. But you have to live your life. I want you to find a man who will love you and give you that I could never offer. Live your life, experience many things, be a wonderful mother, a great agent. For me, please, be happy and don't be alone! I'll always love you! And now, please allow me to say goodbye with the tool of poetry:
And that moment Liz raised her watery eyes and saw her man, standing in front of her in coat and fedora with his trademark smile on his lips; he crouched next to her and gently squeezed her thigh:
"When the day should come
That it seems I am gone:
I will be still around.
(…)
I will be still around
Standing guard over the silence of the woods,
And over your dreams.
Any time you want to feel me near
Just drive through the forest
And stop somewhere along the road.
(…)
Just smile
And I will be smiling back at you
From eternity."
When he finished the poem Red kissed her forehead affectionately and he disappeared in the late-afternoon lights.
Raymond Reddington had died in 2017, six months after they had finished the Blacklist and they'd got married. A careless driver'd hit him with his van and after three days suffering at eight o'clock in the morning his heart stopped beating.
He must have known what would happen to him as always and maybe Mr. Kaplan or Dembe'd helped him to succeed his plan to deliver his last declaration to her.
It had been almost eight months but there wasn't any night when he didn't appear in her dreams or in her alcohol-driven hallucinations.
But when the morning came, Liz knew; Red had died and part of her'd gone with him, too.
The end.
Sorry for the angst but it just struck me. The poem at the end is 'I will be around you, somewhere" by Wass Albert.