AN: Better late than never, I hope.

"Lizzy…" He cupped her cheek and gently freed her lip from her teeth with his thumb. "I feel like I've lost you. Getting cold feet?"

She shook her head as emphatically as she could with his hand still at her cheek. "I need this. I need something reliable, concrete… something that feels real. I need to decompress. I think you do, too."

He searched her face for a long moment, stroking his thumb over her lips. Just when she was sure he was about to lean forward and kiss her, he spoke.

"I do. I need this. But if you're going to regret it, I want no part of it. If I were a better man, I'd turn down what you're offering just to be sure, but I won't. Where were you just now? It seemed like you were miles away."

"It has nothing to do with Tom, I promise, just…" She trailed off, scrambling to come up with an excuse for her mental detour that wouldn't ruin the mood the way I'm worried that one of these days you're going to get yourself killed might do. "Hitchhiking naked in the desert? Really?"

He snorted a laugh and then sighed, looking at her fondly with the ghost of a sad, wistful smile on his lips. He could tell she was deflecting, but apparently chose to believe her assurances that she wasn't having second thoughts. A moment of silent understanding passed between them and her lips twitched into a tiny, awkward smile in return.

"Did anyone ever pick you up?" she asked, tracing the lines of one of his tattoos, no doubt a faded souvenir from his Navy days.

"Eventually. A sad, naked man wandering around aimlessly with a driving need for tacos apparently doesn't ping everyone's 'might be an ax murderer' radar. Probably because there's nowhere to hide an ax."

"Is the high really worth the loss of control? I've never really understood the appeal."

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "I needed the distraction."

"From what?"

"Things weren't going my way," he said simply, rubbing a tendril of her hair between his fingers. While his words were evasive, they had a weight to them that felt oddly significant. He dropped his gaze to her lips again, but it felt a lot like it had earlier when he wouldn't meet her eyes, a purposeful avoidance.

"This was two years ago?" she asked, her mind struggling to remain present in the conversation; it was becoming more and more difficult to focus as he traced his hands over the skin between the unbuttoned sides of her shirt, starting at the hollow of her throat and moving slowly downward.

"Mmm-hmm." Smoothly, he unzipped her fly and slipped a hand into her pants.

"Tom and I got married two years a—Jesus," she gasped, clinging to his shoulders as he worked two fingers inside her and rubbed his thumb against her clit. "God, you have nice hands."

"I'm glad you think so," he said, his breathing almost as ragged as her own. She rocked against him, properly distracted now herself. She'd let him get away with diverting her attention from her questions for the time being as long as he kept doing what he was doing.

"Has your mind been in the gutter since this afternoon, Lizzy?" he asked, his voice pitched low, his cheek pressed to hers. His stubble scratched at her face as he spoke; that and the timbre of his voice had her hips moving more and more urgently against his hand. "Have you been picturing me naked, vulnerable, at your mercy?" He shifted his hips again, making sure she could feel how hard he was, and another wave of arousal crashed over her. "Have you ever imagined yourself taking control, having your way with me? I have."

All of a sudden, he pulled his hand away and leaned back into the sofa cushions, leaving her stranded on the edge of climax.

"Red, what are you—?"

"Go ahead," he said, spreading his arms in a perverse show of supplication. "Have your way with me."

"You bastard, do you have any idea how close I…" He looked up at her, a smug, self-satisfied smirk on his face. "You do. Fuck."

"That's definitely on the table. Or the couch, or the—" She interrupted him with a growl, laced their fingers together and pressed his hands against the back of the couch. Her mouth was near enough now to feel the humidity from his breath escaping from his parted lips and she could smell the lingering scent of the Scotch they'd drunk so long ago.

"Kiss me," he said again, lips brushing hers as he spoke, but this time he didn't try to close the minute distance between them; he waited for her to do it. He was lucky she had no interest in teasing him anymore, not after he wound her up like he had, because teasing him only tortured herself.

Liz hadn't felt the sweet anticipation of a first kiss in years. Tom had been forward enough with his advances that he kissed her before she really got the chance to build up any suspense. When she finally met Red's lips, she decided tonight more than made up for the recent drought.

Her stomach clenched as his mouth moved under hers, her hips rocking a few times of their own volition, seeking to relieve some of the newly insistent pleasure-pain building up inside her. He gasped into her mouth, his own hips moving in counterpoint. She brought her hands to his head so she could better direct the kiss, tilting her head and parting her lips. He deepened the kiss with a groan and ran his hands underneath her open shirt and around her back, pulling her more snugly against him before moving up to unclasp her bra.

Without warning, he tightened his arms around her and tipped them both to the side. Once they stretched out along the length of the couch, he knelt between her legs and helped her shrug out of her shirt and bra. As soon as her hands were free, she went to work on his belt.

"You are a terrible influence," he said, sucking in his stomach reflexively in response to the light, ticklish contact from her fingers as she undid his buckle.

"I'm a terrible influence?" She spared a glance at his face as she slid the belt from its loops to find him staring down at her hungrily, only to curse under her breath and quickly refocus her attention on the task at hand. Leave it to you to have pants with a button fly, she thought.

"Someday we'll have to argue about who seduced whom tonight. Up." He coaxed her to lift her ass off the sofa so he could slide her pants and underwear off and gently guide her legs out of them.

She braced herself on her elbows and licked her lips in anticipation as he picked up where she left off with his own trousers; his hands froze with his fingers hitched around his waistband when he noticed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself.

"Don't give me any ideas," he snarled. She could see him twitch in his trousers despite himself.

She wrapped her legs around him, pulling him off balance, and he caught himself on his hands before he could land roughly against her. She shoved his trousers and boxers down his thighs as far as she could with her hands and then her feet before wrapping her legs around him again.

"Come on," she said, urging him on with a squeeze of her thighs.

He lowered himself to his elbows slowly and reached down, brows furrowing in concentration as he eased himself inside her, sweat beading and running down the side of his face. His rapid, shallow breathing looked almost pained. She rolled her hips, luxuriating in the feel of him, causing him to slide deeper with a groan she felt as much as she heard.

He was thicker than Tom and her nerve endings sang with each push and pull of his hips. The heat of so much of his bare skin against hers was both a shock and balm, overloading her senses and soothing them at the same time. He sought out her eyes, looking nearly as overwhelmed as she felt and more than a little lost.

"Lizzy?" he said, his voice halfway between confused reverence and a whine. She ran her thumb across his cheek with her own bemused, hysterical huff of laughter before she grabbed him by the neck and pulled him down to capture his lips in a frantic, hungry kiss.

She dug her fingernails into the skin of his shoulders and she vaguely registered that his sharp intake of breath and the warm, sticky feeling under her fingers must have meant she'd scratched deep enough to break the skin. It certainly didn't deter him in the slightest. He rolled his shoulders and moaned into her mouth.

Reaching for one of her legs, he coaxed it from his hip and hooked it over his elbow, pressing it back towards her body until the change in angle and pressure made her see stars. She tore her mouth away from his, lungs burning, and tried to bring her other leg up as far as she could. He quickly got the idea and helped her, holding himself still as he pressed it back like the first.

He met and held her gaze while he withdrew slowly and shoved forward again, establishing an ever-increasing pace that couldn't possibly last for either of them. Before long, his thrusts grew more and more erratic and forceful, driving her to new heights as he reached his peak; he buried his face in her neck and let out a guttural groan, pulsing inside her. The warm rush pushed her over the edge with him.

Liz blinked blearily, roused from her post-coital dozing by the sound of Red's voice.

"Wow. I don't mean to sound so surprised, but that was… wow."

She hummed her agreement and took mental inventory of herself. At some point in the aftermath, he must have pulled his heavy gray overcoat from where it was draped over the back of the sofa and arranged it over the two of them as well as he could. Neither of them seemed interested in moving any further than necessary. She felt like she was boneless, almost floating, and was utterly, utterly relaxed.

He pushed himself up high enough on shaky arms to meet her eyes. "We should do that more often," he said, eager but drowsy. He let himself collapse next to her, an arm and a leg thrown casually across her body as he tucked himself between her and the back of the sofa.

"If it takes us hitting rock bottom to get to this point, I'm not sure it's a good idea."

"Maybe it can be our way of avoiding rock bottom. Everyone needs a hobby to help blow off steam at the end of a long, trying day. Last time I checked, you had The Real Housewives and not much else."

He propped his head up on his elbow and began tracing his fingers over her skin, raising goosebumps as he went. She shivered despite the warmth from his body and his coat.

"Did you break into my Netflix account?"

"Like I said, everyone needs a hobby. By the way, you have to choose a password that's more difficult to guess than your dog's name."

"So let me get this straight… I'm your hobby and sleeping with you should be mine? And somehow I'm the terrible influence."

"I can make it worth you while," he said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

They dissolved into a fit of uncontrollable giggling, giddy from their release, their mounting exhaustion, and the absurdity of their pillow talk. They laughed until their cheeks hurt and their stomach muscles felt weak, but they still couldn't stop for longer than a few seconds, another bout of laughter triggered whenever they met each other's eyes.

"All joking aside," he said, still struggling to get his facial muscles under control. "I feel lighter than I have in months." He bent forward and pressed a lingering kiss to her lips. "Thank you."

She had to admit he had a point. Here in the afterglow, things didn't feel quite so bleak for once, the path ahead wasn't so tangled and twisted. There was a decision she had to make and for once she felt like the right choice was clear.

"I'm going to leave him," she said, her voice thick with sleep. "I have to. Even if he's only guilty of pressuring me about the baby, it wouldn't be fair to stay, especially now. And if he's guilty of more, well… all the more reason to leave."

"You'll have to expect a long and messy divorce, Lizzy. He's not going to make it easy on you. He needs to keep you close."

"But you're not going to tell me why, are you?"

"I hope someday soon you'll be able to understand."

She searched his face for a long moment, but right now she couldn't find it in herself to press the issue. If he said the answers would come, they would come. And if they didn't come soon, she would just have to find a way to make them.

"You know, if it weren't for this case, I might have let him get to me. I was heading in that direction. Trapped with a child in an increasingly loveless, unhappy marriage… That's not how I envisioned my life. You helped me avoid that. I'd like to return the favor."

"And how do you propose to do that?"

"Let me help you find the truth you're searching for. And maybe that's already what we're doing and you just haven't said, or maybe I'm a diversion while you pursue it in the background, I don't know, but you've been at this for twenty years. Maybe a new pair of eyes is just what you need to see it through. You came to me and wanted us to be partners, Red. Let's be partners."

"That word has a multitude of meanings, Lizzy."

"I realize that." She reached out a hand to cup his cheek and traced his lips with her thumb. "You don't have to do this alone anymore if you don't want to."

The corner of his lip twitched into a hint of a smile under her thumb. He shifted suddenly, covering her body with his again, and framed her face with his hands.

"I would be a fool to turn down such a compelling offer," he said, before capturing her lips in a searing kiss.