Chapter Text
As Rio leaves Lilia’s office, with the stack of red-slashed paper a hand high that represents her life’s work, a.k.a her not-quite-finished dissertation weighing down her bag, it starts to rain. Fucking fantastic, she thinks as she flips her hood up.
Her phone buzzes and she brings it out of her pocket, mindless of the rain, and reads the message with a sinking feeling in her stomach.
I will be home late. Debrief with M
She shoves the phone back in her pocket without replying. A second later, she takes it back out, and opens her conversation with Billy. can’t, have to spend the night writing, she replied to his invitation to grab a beer with him, Alice, and Jen.
Right now she can’t imagine anything worse than having to stare at her laptop screen all night while Agatha is out with Margaret, and so she quickly taps out: that beer still a possibility?
“Wow,” Billy says, as Rio slumps down, soaking wet, into the seat across from him at the bar. Someone, probably Alice, has had the wherewithal to order for her, and so Rio grabs the beer in front of her and takes a big swig.
“If this is what almost being done with your dissertation looks like, I’m not sure I want to get there,” Billy adds, fingers tapping nervously on the coaster in front of him.
Rio buries her head in her arms, the table’s wooden surface wonderfully cool against her arms. “Take Eddie and abscond into the wilderness while you still can,” she mutters. “Save yourself.”
Someone – probably Jen – pats Rio on the head. “There, there. It’s going to be fine. You just have to…”
Rio sits back up. “If you’re about to tell me to think positive thoughts, I strongly urge you to reconsider while you still can.”
Jen holds up her hands. “Fine. Don’t come crying to me when your bad aura starts fucking up your life.”
“Jen,” Billy hisses at her, but Rio is too desolate to care.
Every time she thinks of her dissertation, printed out and meticulously commented by Lilia, waiting for her to fix and work through the one million little things that are still not done, that needs to be rewritten and re-thought before it’s finally finished, she wants to run away and hide somewhere in the woods and never come back. She’s so close to the finish line, but it doesn’t feel that way; it feels like a circle, turning upon itself, a labyrinth she will never find her way out of, the Minotaur seconds from gobbling her up.
“I hate my life,” Rio says, and takes another big drag on her beer. Even behind the bottle, she can feel the other three exchanging glances over her head. “What?”
“Is Agatha caught up in her supervising duties tonight?” Jen asks, innocently.
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Rio mutters. The bottle makes a too loud sound against the table as she puts it down. “And it’s not supervising – Margaret presented her project outline at the seminar today and she and Agatha needed to ‘debrief’ afterward.”
“And you’re mad that Agatha is doing her job for once…?” Jen asks, clearly helpless not to. It’s been two years, but she has yet to warm up to Agatha.
“That’s not her job,” Rio says sourly. “If Lilia took me out for drinks every time I got some harsh feedback on my work, I would be a raging alcoholic by now.”
“Yes,” Billy says, sounding like he’s trying hard to suppress his amusement, “we are all very well aware of Margaret’s many, many deficiencies as doctoral student.”
“And of how boring her project is,” Jen adds. “And how much you hate her headbands.”
Rio frowns at them. “If there is something you’re trying to tell me here, Jen, just spit it out.”
She regrets it immediately when Jen says, “You’re jealous.”
Rio snorts. “Of what? Her inability to not be a complete waste of space? I just don’t like her, it’s not that deep.”
The thing is, Rio hates Margaret and have done so since she first laid eyes on her. Absolutely despises her, and her stupid dark academia vibe, with her wide, doll-like eyes, shiny, bobbed hair, and penchant for black velvet, oversized knitwear and dapper white shirts. Loathes her and her stupid project, on the role of witchcraft in modern esoteric movements, and the fact that she has a Sylvia Plath quote tattooed on her arm. But that doesn’t mean she’s jealous; it’s just an objective fact that Margaret sucks and Agatha should spend her time on more worthwhile things than coaching a glorified BookTok girl through writing a dissertation.
“I’m not jealous,” Rio says. “What do I have to be jealous of? I’m almost done with my dissertation and that little idiot can’t even receive feedback on a chapter without needing a ‘debrief’ and Agatha to hold her hand.”
“No, I agree,” Jen says, sitting back. “You’re really taking this with complete equilibrium. It seems that you’re dealing with it in a super-healthy, totally emotionally responsible way.”
When Rio finally Ubers back to Agatha’s place, she’s had maybe one too many beers. She’s not yet officially moved into Agatha’s apartment – not until after she gets her degree, at Agatha’s insistence – but she can’t remember the last time she spent a night in her and Billy’s – now his and Eddie’s apartment – and mostly uses her old room for storage.
When Rio stumbles in, Agatha’s already there, on the couch with a book, both cats snuggled up close. She’s still in her office clothes, but barefoot, and on her nose are the reading glasses she’s finally, with ill grace, has conceded to wearing, and something loosens in Rio’s chest at the sight of her, here, in what is, for all intents and purposes, home.
It’s been a while since they’ve had a night together – Rio’s writing crunch and Agatha’s academic responsibilities keeping their schedules separate – and despite still going to bed together at night and waking up together every single morning, Rio realizes that she, ridiculously, has missed her.
“Have you eaten?” Agatha asks as Rio collapses down on top of her with a groan. Sparky immediately jumps down from the couch with a disgruntled meow, while Rio mashes her face into Agatha’s shoulder, and nods a sloppy yes.
“You okay?” Agatha brushes the hair away from Rio’s forehead.
Rio makes a muffled indeterminate noise into her collarbone, lets her fingertips slide in under Agatha’s jumper, to rest against the warm, soft flesh of her stomach.
“It’s only a couple more months, my love,” Agatha says, her hand still slowly stroking through Rio’s hair. “And then you’re done. You will get through this, because you’re fucking brilliant, okay?”
A little floaty from the beer and warmed by Agatha’s presence and her praise, Rio lets her hands wander, lured by the siren song of Agatha’s warm skin, her breasts beneath the smooth white of her jumper, the intoxicating smell at the nape of her neck.
Agatha lets Rio reach up to kiss her, but when Rio moves to deepen it, she puts her hand on Rio’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, love, but I need to get through this–” She indicates the book in her hand, “before tomorrow.” She kisses Rio’s cheek. “I’ll make it up to you, okay?”
And Rio pulls back and nods, as what little warmth Agatha’s embrace gave her quickly recedes.
When Rio drags herself out of bed, a tad hungover and feeling a little bruised, a bit fragile, Agatha is already on her way out. She looks amazing in a long, form-fitting black dress, and the longing Rio feels for her in that moment is eclipsed only by the vague, irrational annoyance she feels at the thought of Agatha going to work and looking this good in front of Margaret of all people.
Agatha, busy with the clasp of her bracelet, smiles at Rio as she shuffles into the living room. “Hey, you.”
By rote, Rio reaches out and takes her wrist, clasps the bracelet shut for her, over the feel of Agatha’s pulse thrumming beneath her fingertips. “Morning.” She puts her hands on Agatha’s hips, leans in to drag her nose along the soft skin at the back of her neck. “You look good.”
“You should see me out of it.” Agatha grins and then makes Rio’s whole system short-circuit by taking her hand and drawing it in under her dress, letting her feel the silky edge of her stay-ups and the rippled lace of her panties. “It’s all for you, baby,” Agatha murmurs into her ear, and kisses Rio deeply, in a flash disbanding every dark, shadowy cobweb in Rio’s mind as if they were never there to begin with.
Five cans of Monster, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and six hours perched in front of the computer later, Rio calls it a day and heads over to her old place. She’s pretty sure she has some notes from a lecture back in the early days of her PhD that could help her flesh out parts of her literature review, if she can only find it, save her a bit of a rewrite.
She’s only been searching for a few minutes when she hears a key in the lock. “Hi, Billy!” she calls from her room – feeling it’s an 80–20 chance it’s him this early in the afternoon – when she hears the door open.
“Hi!” Billy calls back, over the rustling noise of him kicking off his sneakers. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m just looking for some old lecture notes,” Rio says as Billy comes into her room. “Trying my darndest to avoid having to rewrite something I know I’ve written down somewhere. Eddie working late tonight?”
“Yeah.” Billy stretches out on Rio’s bed, and watches silently as she rifles through her chest of drawers for a minute. “Are you doing something tonight?”
“Writing,” Rio says, with a sigh. “Writing, writing, writing. I need to get through most of Lilia’s comments before Monday.” Also, hopefully, fucking her girlfriend for the first time in two weeks, but she’s not divulging that part to Billy.
Billy shifts on the bed, puts his arm behind his head. “Ah, the famous end of the tunnel,” he says. Despite his words the other night, he sounds envious – he still has a fair bit to go before he’s at the finish line.
“Yeah, well, let’s just hope it’s not a train,” Rio says distractedly, flipping through a stash of loose papers, trying to see if anything looks like what she needs.
“I think you’re going to do great,” Billy says, inadvertently echoing Agatha from last night. He frowns and shifts some more on the bed. “Ah, what is that?” he mutters, annoyed, and sticks his hand in under Rio’s duvet.
“What?” Rio says, still not quite listening, lost in trying to decode her own terrible handwriting.
“Oh my god,” Billy says, and at the sudden note of awe in his voice, Rio looks up.
He stares at the little black velvet box he’s pulled out from under Rio’s pillow, stashed there a couple of weeks ago.
“Oh my gods,” he repeats as he opens the lid, eyes widening as he shows it to Rio, as if she somehow would be unaware of its contents. “Oh my god.”
“I’m not proposing to you, if that’s what’s causing your brain to malfunction,” Rio says, snatching the box out of his hands to close it.
“Hey, no, let me see it!”
Rio hands him back the box. He looks almost reverent as he opens it, tilting it back and forth to let the ring inside catch the light.
“Wow,” he says. “I mean, it’s, like, too much, but it’s so Agatha.”
He’s not wrong – the stone is certainly massive. It’s black onyx, serrated by a vein of deep viridian, giving it a cold, greenish tinge in the light, set into an intricate silver band.
“I know right?” Rio says, leaning forward eagerly, suddenly happy that he’s found the box, that she can finally share this with someone. Out of all her friends, it’s Billy Agatha gets along with the best – they’ve forged a weird bond Rio doesn’t know to call parental or sibling-like, but right now she’s very glad of it. “It’s an onyx, so it’s not, like, super fancy, but it felt right.”
“Black onyx,” Billy says solemnly. “A powerful protection stone that absorbs negative energy.”
“Okay,” is all Rio, who has not quite bought into Billy and Jen’s joint fascination with crystals, says to that.
“When are you going to ask her?” Billy closes the box, puts it back under the pillow.
“After my defense,” Rio says. “But I haven’t really made a plan yet.” It’s not quite the truth; she’s made many plans, but not really settled for one. Every so often she looks over at Agatha and thinks, amazed, I’m going to ask you to be my wife, but exactly how she’s going to get to that moment she hasn’t figured out yet.
“Agatha Vidal,” Billy says, as if trying it out to see how it sounds. To the doubtful face Rio pulls, he adds, seriously, “Mark my words.”
The next day Rio, needing a change of scenery, goes to the campus library to write. A decision she most bitterly regrets when she, around noon, is interrupted by someone asking, “Can I sit here?” and looks up to see Margaret, of all people, smiling down at her, a pile of books in her arms.
“Uh, sure,” Rio says, making no effort to move her stuff to make room for Margaret.
Margaret beams at her. “Great,” she says, plops down her books on one free chair and sits down on the other.
In addition to being a spawn from hell, Margaret is a prodigious networker, and she seems dead set on becoming friends with Rio. Weeks ago, she sent Rio a follow request on Instagram Rio keeps pretending she hasn’t seen. Margaret’s account is open, of course, and all she seems to do is to post aesthetically pleasing images of herself writing or selfies at lectures and symposiums, tagging in the speakers to share her thoughts of how groundbreaking and important their contributions are, to her personally and to the world.
As if that isn’t enough, she’s also chatty. “Whew, doing a PhD sure isn’t a joke,” she says to Rio as she unpacks her bag, puts her Macbook, Stanley cup, and an organic granola bar on the table. “I spent hours down in the archive yesterday, but today I’m practicing self care by making sure I get some sun in my face.”
“Mhm,” Rio says, trying desperately to indicate that she’s not interested in hearing Margaret prattle on without outright saying so.
Not picking up anything of what Rio passive aggressively is putting down, Margaret leans forward and says conspiratorially, “Do you know what the hardest part is, though?”
Rio offers no thoughts on the matter, but that doesn’t stop Margaret.
“Being professional around one’s supervisor,” Margaret says and giggles. “I mean, you’re asking me to be cool about a brilliant, older woman taking me under her wing, imparting her wisdom on me, and guiding me safely through the pitfalls of academia? Hello, I have way too much eldest daughter syndrome to not make that weird.”
“Well, I’m a middle-child myself,” Rio mutters, but that doesn’t deter Margaret either.
“Anyway,” Margaret leans in closer again. “You’ve been here a lot longer than I – I bet you know all the good gossip.”
Probably not as well as you, Rio thinks uncharitably.
“Do you know if Agatha Harkness is into women?”
At that, Rio looks up from her computer.
Margaret laughs, seemingly oblivious. “I mean, I know what you’re going to say, starting something with your supervisor never ends well, and I get it, but she’s just so... ferocious, you know? God, I want her to step on me.”
Rio feels as if she’d had a pen in her hand, it would have snapped by now. She’s back to staring intently but unseeingly on her screen, trying to telepathically compel Margaret to please shut the fuck up.
“I think she has a girlfriend,” Rio mutters at last.
Margaret raises a well-plucked brow. “Really? Agatha? You sure about that? I haven’t really seen any signs of that, if you know what I mean,” she adds meaningfully.
Rio wants to strangle her.
Rio hadn’t planned on attending the faculty’s usual autumnal shindig – it’s always boring and she has to dress up for it – but then Agatha announces that she’s going around the same time as Lilia starts telling Rio that she really should go. “A night away from the dissertation is exactly what you need,” she says. “A party, some good conversation, a change of scenery will do you good at this point. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to let go.”
Her intentions are probably good, but what taking her advice ultimately results in is Rio sourly standing in a corner nursing a glass of horrible white wine and watches as Margaret and Agatha across the room, Margaret sidled up to Agatha and agitatedly engaging her in conversation. What’s worse is Agatha humouring her – Rio can count the number of people Agatha is nice to on the fingers of one hand, and she doesn’t like that Margaret is suddenly one of them, even if it is for work purposes.
Agatha is in a dress so deeply purple it’s almost black and leather boots, her hair loose and wild across her shoulders, and she looks so good it simultaneously makes Rio weak in the knees and inexplicably angry that she’s not the one hanging off Agatha’s arm. Usually, she’s more than happy to comply with Agatha’s wish to keep their relationship on the down low until Rio’s finished with her PhD, but tonight it makes her seethe, the idea of being consigned to the shadows while Margaret is free to steal all of Agatha’s attention out in the light.
As she watches, Agatha laughs at something Margaret says and Rio’s grip on her empty wine glass is suddenly white-knuckled.
When Agatha finally – finally – glances over at her, Rio catches her gaze and jerks her head towards the corridor. Without checking if Agatha has got the gist or not, she downs the rest of the terrible wine, puts her glass down, and strides towards the door.
There is a cloak room just down the hall, abandoned at this early point in the evening. Rio rounds the corner into it and only has to wait about a minute before Agatha arrives.
“Hi, baby,” Agatha smiles and leans in to kiss her sweetly, hand going up to cup Rio’s face, but that’s the opposite of what Rio is after. She kisses back viciously, backs Agatha up against the wall, and slides her tongue filthily into her mouth.
She’s already scrabbling at Agatha’s dress, pulling it up, revealing her smooth, creamy thighs. She kisses her harder, pressing her against the wall. She’s breathing heavily, keyed up, feeling unmoored, as if Agatha’s skin under her hands and her mouth against hers is the only thing keeping her tethered to reality. Fingers hook under the waistband of Agatha’s panties, pulling them down.
“Rio,” Agatha whispers, a hint of warning in her tone.
Rio responds by dropping to her knees, looking up at Agatha. She doesn’t know what’s on her face in that moment, and it doesn’t matter because Agatha’s head falls back against the wall, hands guiding Rio’s head in between her legs, groaning as Rio’s mouth opens to worship her, tongue sliding home against Agatha’s clit, Agatha’s fingers gripping hard at her skull, and Rio feels, for the first time in days or perhaps even weeks, fully at peace.
Afterwards, as they put themselves back together, Rio’s clingy and dreamy, not ready to let go of Agatha, buries her nose into her hair with a sigh. She hasn’t come yet, and in her mind they’re already on their way home to their bed, where she will strip in front of Agatha’s attentive gaze, and then have her like that, with her fingers or maybe the strap, have Agatha straddle her, bare beneath her lovely dress, and slide into her just like that. She imagines Agatha riding her, slowly pulling down her dress as she begs Rio to play with her breasts, Agatha half-dressed and debauched above her, Agatha riding her hard, demanding another orgasm from Rio before Rio gets hers.
But instead what happens is that Agatha kisses her softly, pulls up her underwear, and says, “I’ll see you at home, okay, love?” and before Rio has a chance to reply, she’s gone, striding back to the party.
“I think Agatha is leaving me for Margaret,” Rio proclaims, loudly, to make it carry over the thumping beat of the music, but no one seems to take her seriously. Billy and Jen laugh while Alice just gives Rio a sympathetic look.
Agatha is away on a three-day conference with Margaret in tow and Rio is handling it as well as can be expected, meaning that she writes all through the nights and spend the days in an anxiety-ridden haze, stalking Margaret on Instagram. According to her reels, she and Agatha are having the bestest time ever in Montreal and every session they attend is a revolutionary contribution to the field of women’s history, eclipsed only by what Margaret herself is bringing to the table.
Rio’s brain has officially checked out; every time she lets her thoughts wander, she ends up thinking about Margaret and Agatha fucking across every conceivable surface in the hotel. She knows she’s being insane, but she can’t help it, and her only recourse now is to get spectacularly drunk, tagging along with Billy, Jen, and Alice to a club. The music is shit (“You always say that,” Billy protests) and the drinks are worse, but it gets the job done.
“I’m not thinking about Agatha at all!” she shouts into the air on the dance floor, letting Billy spin her round in a circle, and they all laugh. Four shots in, she can barely remember what it was that had her so bent out of shape.
I hope you have fun at the conference xoxo, she texts Agatha an hour later. Fifteen minutes later she sends her a group photo.
“God, I love Agatha,” she sighs dreamily into Billy’s shoulder as they step out for a smoke, leaning heavily against him against the roiling of the world beneath her feet. She sends Agatha another text to that effect before they head back inside for another round of drinks.
By 2 AM she’s so drunk she can hardly stand, but she doesn’t have to: the nice girl she fell into on the dance floor is happy to hold her up, pressing Rio against the wall as they kiss.
By the time the club closes, Rio has come full circle and is back to her state of morose despair, sick with the realization that she has made out with another woman.
“She will never come back,” she says later, miserably, to the night. She doesn’t know where the others have disappeared off to; she only knows that she’s all alone in a cold and uncaring universe and that she needs to fix this somehow. She thinks about calling Agatha to explain, make her take her back, but she’s a bit unsure about where she’s put her phone.
When Rio wakes, she feels like she’s died and put back together wrong. She’s completely disoriented, but when she finally manages to unglue her eyelids, open her eyes, and brush her hair from her face, she realizes that she’s at home, in her and Agatha’s bed, the clock on the bedside table informing her that it’s three in the afternoon.
“Fucking hell,” Rio groans. Her mouth tastes like a swamp and her head throbs viciously. With another groan, she very laboriously rolls over, only to feel a sharp, shallow pain lace through her left side. “What the fuck.”
It takes a heroic effort to sit up, but at last she manages it. Gingerly, she lifts the hem of her t-shirt – the same as last night – and pulls it up to reveal a square of plastic, gummy and opaque with black ink, taped to her ribs.
Suddenly, an image from last night flashes vividly in her mind, accompanied by a low buzzing sound, and she hears herself say, surprisingly clearly for the state she’d apparently been in, “It’s A-G-A-T-H-A – with an H.”
She stares down at the plastic, nausea building inside her like a horrible, unrelenting tsunami of crap. “Oh, no,” she says. “Oh fuck no.”