Archive of Our Own

“Try this one,” said Jack, “and I’ll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn’t do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on that. It’s all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don’t never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you’ll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it. You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I’m not you. I can’t make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You’re too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.”

- Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (1997)

There are certain mistakes every lady should make at least once in her life. 

Agatha doesn't know how the saying found its way into her head. Most likely it was her mother. She snorts. Explains why it’s a crock of shit. 

Ain’t no mistake worth making, certainly not if you’re a lady who values her skin like she should. Ain’t no mistake worth–

An engine interrupts her.

There are mistakes worth making and there are mistakes that make themselves. 

Agatha glowers at the girl pulling up in a pick-up truck. She sorta hopes this one is neither.

Oil slick eyes, sun-fucked skin, collarbones she gets caught on. Agatha bites the inside of her cheek. She tastes blood. 

Long brown hair that falls in so many places that she thinks it must be trying to put down roots. The ghost of that hair winds itself around her fingers, opens cuts on her knuckles that she had promised herself she would keep closed this year. 

“‘Scuse me, missy. Mightin’ you tell me where the Farm and Ranch Employment Office is?”

Tall, dark, and handsome always was her weakness. Just not in the way it was for the other girls from her hick town. Their way got them hustled up the aisle with a pitchfork up their intended’s quick-drawing ass. Her way usually gets her driven out of town. 

“Miss?”

The girl swings that smile around like a fuckin’ scythe. 

Agatha stabs a finger at the sign on the office door. Then marches off without waiting to see if Tall, Dark, and Handsome is following.

She can’t help but feel like this is a mistake. 

The mistake was raised on a ranch near the edge of Utah, somewhere ‘round Sage. She’s a high school drop out, a country girl with no future, no husband, no horse. Which isn’t a problem, since–

“No way you goin’ up mountain.”

Joe Aguirre, gone to seed and shortly to meadow, points a meaty finger at Rio. 

“Lost near half my sheep last summer. Don’t want that again. Certainly can’t take a chance on a horseless, jobless fee-male.”

“You hired her.”

Rio jerks her chin in Agatha’s direction. 

Agatha thinks about getting those dark eyes even darker. Black and blue, maybe.

“She don’t count.” Joe chuckles, a little taken aback by her asking. “She’s Agatha.”

“And I’m Rio. I’ll work for half. Just give me a horse and point me uphill.”

Joe’s eyes are narrow.

“You’ll work for an eighth of what she gets and you’ll be grateful”

“A quarter.”

“A fifth.”

“A quarter and the cost of the horse comes out of your wages.”

Rope pulls tight; she can taste it.

“Done.”

She holds out a hand, finds it grubby, holds out the other.

“Agatha Harkness.”

“Rio.”

“Your folks just stop at Rio?”

She looks at Agatha like she’s deciding something. 

“Vidal.”

“Nice to know you, Rio Vidal.” Agatha thinks this one would trust her fingers more if they were covered in muck. “Since we’re gonna be working together, I reckon it’s time we start drinkin’ together.”

Agatha bullies their way into the bar an hour before opening.

She’s expecting to drink the new girl under a table, maybe leaving her there all summer. She’s good at what she does. She can do it alone. 

Only – Rio matches her. Drink for drink, then one more. 

“What’s your deal, Vidal? Just saw the sorriest excuse for a life going and figured you’d give it a whirl?”

That face again – like she’s deciding something. 

“Something like that,” Rio says, all too soberly. She runs her tongue up a sharp tooth. “Maybe I just liked the view.”

Agatha’s tongue copies the movement in her own mouth but it doesn’t feel like enough. Not when Rio’s breath smells like misted up windows in the morning, provided she’d gone to bed with a bottle of whiskey. 

“Is that your story too? You liked the view?”

“Honey,” Agatha waves a hand. “I am the view.”

It’s filthy under the table. Less and less, Agatha thinks she wouldn’t mind it. Wouldn’t care about the floor and the filth and the booze slopping out Rio’s glass as she tells a story that has Agatha throwing her head back. It’s a little for the laughter; it’s a little to do with baring her throat. She stays in her seat. Her boot burns a hole through the floor. 

Rio bullies their way into staying an hour after closing. 

Agatha wakes up with the worst hangover of her life. It rides out with her, all the way to the mountain. 

One of them stays with the sheep through the night, way up on the mountain; one of them stays with the camp. 

For some crazy reason, Rio volunteers to sleep upslope. 

For some crazy reason, Agatha agrees. 

The mountain air has a habit of waking her up early. She pretends to mind, even as the morning curls up quivering on her bedroll. She never opens her eyes. She has a suspicion about who the dawn would put her in mind of.

They keep themselves to themselves, most of the time. Each one hardly sees the other at all. Agatha spends her days chopping firewood, cooking, meeting the supply wagon that arrives by the creek every Friday. When she’s not making her way towards Agatha, Rio’s up on the mountain.

Come a blowy hailstorm in August, a few sheep make a break for something better. They take themselves off west, get caught up in a flock in the valley over. Agatha can’t resent them. She thinks about doing the same sometimes. And then the resentment comes rushing back in because it costs three miserable days to wrangle them back. Rio and a Chilean herder with no English spend hours trying to sort the two flocks out, the task an impossibility with the paint as worn and faint as it always is by this time of the season. 

“Vidal!” 

Shouting is a mistake. Shouting means she has to open her mouth. She gets a throatful of sleet for her troubles. Besides, she’s got a feeling that insults aren’t exactly a deterrent for Rio. 

“Quit shouting, girlie. M’right beside you.”

Agatha scowls. 

“Have you ever even held a rope?”

“What, this thing?” She slings carelessness around as easy as the lasso. “I’ve dabbled. Why? You want some pointers?” Agatha swears the girl’s canines are sharper than they were. “Give you a lesson if you like. Though you’d have to ask me real nice.”

“Your line’s too tight,” Agatha says. Then, because she can’t help herself – “Wouldn’t have guessed too tight would be your problem, Vidal.”

The line slips out of Rio’s hand entirely.

“Cmon. I’ll take the left flank. You come at them from behind.” Agatha slaps the hindquarters of Rio’s mare. “Reverse, cowgirl.”

Agatha checks the numbers as they get Aguire’s flock back up the mountain. They’re all right, every sheep accounted for. That’s what the numbers say, anyway. Agatha knows in her tired bones that the numbers might be right, but the sheep are mixed. Everything’s all mixed up these days. 

When Agatha finally collapses in camp, tired in that boneless kinda way, she thinks about the rope in Rio’s palm, her fingers pressing it into her skin. What did that line mean again? Long life? She had thought about wrapping the rope around Rio’s neck, so perhaps not.

She’s sore between her legs. Too long in the saddle.

She would never admit it, but she worries for Rio, up on that mountain at night. Wouldn’t sleep a wink herself, she’s so bent out of shape about it except–

She watches Rio, sometimes. When she grabs a few hours shut-eye at basecamp. She watches the fall of her breathing: the way it’s sudden, sometimes, sharp then slow. Jeez, you’d think she was still getting a grip on it. 

No matter how she gasps, one thing never changes. It’s the only thing that eases her mind, if only a little. Makes her think Rio might not mind it so much up there. 

She sleeps like the dead, that one. 

In daylight, Agatha scans the distance between them and sees Rio, a dot moving over the rock outcrop like she must look to God; Rio, in her dark camp, makes Agatha into night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain. 

It’s lonely at night. 

Three summers herding and she never felt lonely near the mountain. Not ‘til Rio came along.

She wonders if there’s a word for that. 

“Four hours a day,” Rio says, tossing the axe for firewood from hand to hand. The motion makes Agatha’s head hurt, like there’s something missing from its centre. An axe, maybe. She would let Rio put it there, she thinks, then tosses the thought into the creek. “Agatha?”

“Huh?”

“I said, I’m coming in for breakfast, going back to the sheep, tending them all day, coming in for supper, going back to the sheep, then spending half my nights checkin’ for coyotes.”

Agatha should be annoyed. It’s the job. Rio knew what it was she was signing up for.

She’s about to tell her as much when a voice that sounds an awful lot like Agatha fuckin’ Harkness says–

“Want a switch?”

Rio’s mouth twitches like it’s toying with the idea of being amused. 

“Wouldn’t mind one.”

Agatha wants the axe in her ribs; wants to watch Rio press down and split her thigh open with silver. 

“But I was thinking bigger,” Rio says. “Aguirre’s an old fool. I say we both stay here, in the camp.”

“Only one tent–”

“I’ll sleep outside.”

Rio’s quick there. Eager. It’s the only time Agatha has ever thought her young.

“I killed a wolf once,” Agatha volunteers the next evening. She tosses the remnants of her meal into the endless dark that is everything which is not their camp, palms an apple, and sets about peeling the skin into one long strip. Rio watches her fingers as if hunger is stored there. Rio watches her closely enough that she wonders whether it is. She hopes her razor has some bite left in it. “Vicious bitch she was. A mother, I reckoned. Prol’ly had a litter to guard. Teeth the length of my arm.” She undoes her shirt a few buttons, drags Rio’s forefinger up her throat, along a ridge of skin higher than the rest. “Right there. And there. Nasty. Got any scars?”

Rio shakes her head slowly. 

Agatha shakes her touch off the same way she laughs. 

“In the end, took three slugs to slow ol’ canis lupus down. Even then, I had to finish her off up close. And I was only nineteen at the time.”

“You were on the mountain at nineteen?”

“No,” Agatha says and Rio opens her mouth like it’s still got questions of its own. Agatha heads her off. “This was back home.”

The silence is only broken by the sparking of the fire. 

“You got wolves back home?”

“No,” Agatha says softly. “We don’t.”

They stay by the fire the whole night, toasting its remnants for being the only thing burning. Rio shovels fried potatoes and goat jerky down her throat, washes it down with what must be a quart of whiskey. She eats like she’s still learning what it is to have a mouth, to feel something from her throat to her stomach. Agatha wants to show the girl the finer points, unscarred as she is. 

She starts dreaming.

Figures. Give a girl the brightest sky she’s ever seen. What else can she do ‘cept toss and turn beneath it? 

She’s facedown in a bedroll, hard and dirty and of course it’s like this. Quick fingers on her belt buckle, tugging her untied. Her tongue unravels along with it. Even in her dreams, no one loves her enough to fuck her eye to eye. She travels light, and she sleeps the same. She might wake herself from laughter. She might wake herself with weeping. 

Her tongue tastes like leather here. Sure, that never lasts long. Pretty soon into all Agatha’s dreams, her tongue starts tasting like something else entirely. 

They move the flock on. There’s talk of wolves a valley over. 

It’s a hard day’s work. Agatha’s been riding all her life and even then, she knows she’ll feel it tomorrow. Rio–

The girl must have been born on horseback. She’s braided her hair back – Agatha watched her do it – but strands of black keep coming undone. Agatha knows the feeling. It makes her fingertips buzz or maybe that’s just the nip in the wind. Winter isn’t far off. The other rider doesn’t seem to notice. The speed Rio rides, the way her posture never falters, not once… Agatha wonders if she can outrun the season. Could drive it back. She wouldn’t mind whiling away a few more months on the mountain. 

If Rio reins in – well, all that work with the reins. It’s just showing off. 

“Hey, cowboy,” she says, easing into a walk beside Agatha. 

Agatha grunts. 

“What’s the matter, Harkness? Rough ride?”

She snaps on instinct, hits out with the first thing that comes to her–

“I’ll show you a rough ride.”

Rio cocks her head. 

“Have to catch me first.”

She’s going to run the cocky bitch off the mountainside. 

But Rio’s right. She does have to catch her. Rio’s laughter gets swallowed by the gallop. She spins around in the saddle like she hears her, rides backwards just because she can, and she’s right again. Agatha’s gotta catch her. 

God, she wants to catch her. 

Another evening and Rio brings her something.

To be more specific, Rio brings her somewhere.

Agatha is hot and dusty and fine, pissy. She wants to be done with the day, even if that means she has to kill it herself. 

There are a great many things Agatha wants. 

The rancher’s fingers are on her wrist. They dig little crescent shapes into her to match the moon and Agatha tastes it on her tongue: cornflower; first fall; milk and honey, speckled; all white. Children learn the world by getting as much of their mouth around it as they can; she lost the art long ago. 

Rio yelps and dives off the path. 

Agatha keeps council with the moon while she waits – five seconds, ten. She doesn’t mean to hold her breath. 

A fist punches into the air. It is red and bloody and Rio licks what it is which trickles down her wrist. Agatha bites the inside of her cheek. 

“Strawberries,” Rio pants, offering Agatha her hand. “Wild strawberries.”

There is a palm holding out red berries; there is a hand bloodied though it never threw a single punch. 

Her jaw aches all the same. 

“They’re all the better,” Rio tells her, “the further up you go. It’s the cold. They like long days, lots of sunlight, but you ain’t to give them warmth. They grow too fast that way. They need frost and light. That way, you get the sweetest fruit.”

She has Agatha eating out of the palm of her hand. 

She does not put her other hand against Agatha’s head to draw her down for more. There are no long fingers twisting against Agatha’s scalp, tugging on her hair a little like reins. To the left, that’s it. Easy, girl. Agatha is not aware of wanting such things until she does not get them. 

There are a great many things Agatha wants, now. 

A hand wipes the juice from her lip. She licks two fingers white. 

Love is like strawberries; the seeds get stuck in her teeth. 

Camp is still firelit. It is as if it kept itself simmering on the stove in their absence. 

Rio’s hands are still on her wrist and she does not want them there. 

There are a great many things Agatha does not want. 

She does not want a mouth in which her teeth cut her tongue. She does not want to choke on this, on the taste of herself. She does not want Rio by her side. It is too easy to think about throwing her to the ground, pinning her arms; putting her teeth in the side of her neck and her fist through her teeth. And there are the worse kinds of violence, common on nights like this. Fingers on her wrist, even if they dig too deep. The smell of frost, passed between the two of them as if it were a bottle. The kind of mistake every lady should make at least once in her life, even if she has already had her share. 

It is too easy to have Rio by her side. She does not want Rio by her side. She wants her pinned to the ground so she can stop wanting to put her there. Just this once, she wants to dull her teeth on something other than her tongue.

She still tastes strawberries. 

She hits her. It’s easier than the alternative.

Rio raises a hand to her jaw like it’s something to be curious about. Maybe it is. Looking at Rio, she could almost think no one had ever landed a blow there before. A sick little thrill goes through her at the thought. 

She stays awake to watch the bruise bloom. 

Rio still sleeps like the dead. 

Rio never cried out when the blow came. 

In a clump of trees a day later, Agatha flinches when she does. 

The days keep turning. 

Days do little else.

Though the difficulties Agatha has rising make her wonder whether the sky has to work as hard to stay on its course as she does. It’s always something, whether it’s the way the bedroll is always warmest right before she leaves it; or the way she keeps waking with her tongue between her teeth. She sticks her head out the tent one morning and catches the sun on its side, head tucked under the horizon. 

She makes a deal with the sky. Starting Sunday. 

“You keep on going and I will too. You and me, we got a job to do.”

Rio cocks her head from across camp. 

“You say something?”

“Not to you!”

“Anyone ever call you a crazy bitch, sweetheart?”

(The last town had paired the insult with a flurry of stones.)

“What do you think!”

She is glad over breakfast when Rio doesn’t pass the question back to her.

She wouldn’t care to tell what occupies her thoughts these days. 

September is a vicious cold-skinned bitch. Usually a gal like her would be right up Agatha’s alley. Not this year. This year, Agatha is chasing the sun. One of these days, she might even ask her to stay. She’s still deciding. 

Besides, September nearly kills them both.

“Found myself an extra blanket,” Rio says, words whiskey-warm. 

“That’s not an extra blanket. That’s a sheep. That’s a dead sheep.”

“S’actly. She won’t be using her fleece anymore. All the more for me.” 

Rio tosses her knife up in the air and catches it. Admittedly, she catches it blade-first. A thin trickle of blood drips onto the sheep’s coat. Agatha tastes iron. 

“Jesus friggin’ O’Reilley, quit yammering and get in here. Bedroll’s big enough.”

There are certain mistakes every lady should make at least once in her life. 

Agatha’s always been an overachiever. 

She doesn’t even wait for Rio to get into the tent. 

It’s hard and bleak and honestly, she was planning on kindness this time, but Rio’s still on the ground. What’s a girl to do? She gets a fish hook finger in Rio’s bottom lip and brings her home. 

Rio is arching her back before she even hits the ground.

Agatha snorts.

“Quickdraw.”

Rio brings one heel to her ass. She lets her leg fall. 

Agatha’s vision blurs at the edges.

“Could say the same for you,” Rio snarks. 

There’s not much time for laundry on the slopes. Rio’s clearly… Lightened the load. Just a little. How she rides like that, Agatha will never know. 

Agatha wonders what other handy tips Rio’s been hiding. The other rancher saves her wondering and dips a finger in herself.

She makes it to the second knuckle before Agatha intervenes. 

Honestly, Agatha’s astounded it took her so long. Even if she did have to remember how to breathe. 

Agatha doesn’t so much move as launch herself at Rio, kicking and screaming.

Rio wraps Agatha’s hair around her fingers, dragging her near, close, in. There are hands, roving over every piece of skin up for grabs; there are bits of Agatha being grabbed hard enough that she makes a mental note to check for internal bleeding. Tomorrow. She’s busy right now. She’s got a girl to catch. 

She presses down on Rio’s other thigh, gets it matching the first. There’s not many girls who’d get someone symmetrical before they fucked them. What can she say? She’s dedicated. 

She dedicates her tongue to sliding up Rio’s skin. It tastes like milk and honey; it tastes like religion always sounded to her, like hushed voices in another room; it tastes like it could be fresh off the branch. She stops every few inches to suck a bruise onto Rio’s skin. It makes sense. She always snuck into the kitchen and ended up with sticky fingers; she always liked the sound of praying; she always climbed the tallest apple trees. She drags her tongue up Rio’s centre. She thinks it’s nice to know she always had a heading, even if she didn’t know it at the time.

Which is about the last breath Agatha takes in the space of time between diving into Rio tongue-first, and everything that comes after. When she finally comes up for air, she may as well be a thing with gills.

“Can I?”

Rio sounds uncertain. Lunacy, coming from the girl who just screamed loud enough to cause a landslide. 

“Fuck me,” Rio whistles. Never mind that she just has. Rio’s not talking about that, though. She’s got a grip on the inside of Agatha’s thigh; she’s getting first hand’s proof of how badly – “You really want it. Huh, Harkness?”

Agatha can’t remember wanting anything so much in her life. She has to stop herself running a hand over her ribcage to check if something’s shifted. She should get a handle on that. Should remember who the fuck she is.

Rio’s middle and pointer finger spread on her tongue, making a vee. (Like Agatha needs a reminder of where this is going.) 

She can remember who she is later. Now, right now, she’s going to let Rio call her whatever the fuck she wants. The girl can rearrange her veins to spell out her own name for all the thing that was once Agatha cares. 

Rio’s fingers press down. Hard. Sure, if she wants to play it that way… 

Agatha moans onto Rio’s fingers, sucking down at the same time. It’s still not enough. She doesn’t just want to bite the hand that feeds her, she wants it three fingers deep. 

That’s not the reason she puts Rio’s hand between her legs. It’s got nothing to do with getting to where she needs to be. 

It’s the too-gentle way Rio is looking at her. Like the soft light in her eyes could bruise. Especially around a girl who’s always fallen for dark eyes.

Rio gets both hands on her wrists. 

Agatha seizes up, something under the surface of her skin thrashing at the momentary loss of control. She’s heard rumours. Guys faking it, luring some poor soul away with a shitty motel room for a siren song. She’s heard of men like her being left in the family way. Her family’s way. Dead and gone and good fuckin’ riddance. She runs through every move Rio’s made for the last few months. Nothing concrete, just… Fish hooks. Enough to condemn a girl, provided she was guilty enough in the beginning. She just needs to find a way of keeping this one quiet. Blow to the head maybe, if she can get Rio to look the wrong way one more time and–

Rio kisses Agatha’s pulse point.

She’s not taking her hostage. She’s taking her pulse. 

Somehow, she doesn’t feel any less afraid.

The tent stinks of sweat and smoke and sex and whiskey, of wet grass and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap. Neither of them ever notice. Agatha’s got Rio over every inch of her. She’s under her fingernails, coating the inside of her nostrils, right down her throat. She keeps meaning to wash her off. She will, one day. For now, the stream is so very far from camp. For now, the bed is warm when she is in it. 

Rio lands in the saddle and winces. 

“Rough ride?” Agatha asks innocently. 

“I. Am. Going. Side-saddle. And there better be nobody here with so much as a syllable to say about that.”

“Fine by me.” She inspects her nails like there aren’t eight corresponding semi-circles on Rio’s back. “Though I thought we’d already done that position.”

Rio’s a hour late to the flock. She rides side-saddle the whole way. 

They carry on that way all month. Agatha hefts September’s legs around her shoulders and fucks it to pieces along with her lover’s.

Oftentimes, it's more fight than fuck. (Agatha’s never going to be able to have a proper bar brawl again after this.) It’s hard and dirty and so fucking good that sometimes Agatha takes a tumble off her saddle, just for the rush of air before the ground rushes up to meet her. The fall reminds her of Rio. 

Less often, Rio sits in Agatha’s lap. They can stay like that for hours in the tent, folded around each other. Their clothes come off and they sit knee to knee and elbow to elbow. It’s like they’re huddling for body heat. In a strange way, that’s the best description of what they’re doing. Sometimes they’ll fuck, sweet and lazy, but they don’t need to. Maybe they pass a cigarette between them. Agatha likes that. It gives her something to do with her hands, even if it’s only a controlled burn. The cigarettes taste worse than old rope. One day she’s gonna choke on them.

Here, Rio cups her face when she kisses her. 

Agatha’s stomach never feels so hollow as it does in those slow, gentle moments. She can handle cruelty. It was always kindness she never could get a good grip on.

She takes a drag of their last cigarette ‘til the last of supplies come in. Then she takes it and slowly, deliberately, stubs it out on Rio’s upper arm. 

Her hands are gentle, if it makes a difference. 

She expects the other girl to jerk her arm away. To whimper, to curse. She’s banking on it. It makes the sick sensation in her stomach softer for a second; the fire at the base of her spine gets somewhere to go. Violence makes desire permissible. That or desire is begging to get its head kicked in. 

Only Rio doesn’t falter. 

She holds Agatha’s stare as she burns her mark deep. 

Tilts her head back, even, and–

Is she getting off on it? Is she pretending?

Either way, it’s so deliciously fucked that Agatha thinks maybe they don’t need the cigarette after all.

When it’s done, the damage is a bright red circle half an inch in diameter. 

Agatha imagines it’s a kiss. Rio wears it like it is.

It makes Agatha wish she had used her tongue. 

There’s a finger tracing patterns on her spine. 

Agatha imagines it’s impatient, reads its taps and twists as evidence that her bones could do with rearranging. Maybe another body could do a better job than her. Could be a better rider, a better lover, a better man. Why else would she get this close to bursting out her own skin so often? It could be a relief. For her sharp little bones to finally split the skin and walk away afterwards, clean. Picked clean. 

A mouth joins the finger. 

She decides to stay awhile.

“What?” She turns, getting an eyeful of Rio twisted up in blankets. “What is it?”

Her voice doesn’t sound as impatient as it used to be where Rio was involved. She kisses the other woman to see if she can taste the change. Their teeth hit against each other – they’re still learning how the other moves against them. Filing their sharp edges down so they fit. 

Rio gasps into Agatha’s mouth and she swallows it. 

Rio’s hips stutter against her. She swallows that down too. 

Rio drags her hands through her hair. There’s the sweet kind of contradiction in the way she does it, the way she tugs just a bit too hard and hard enough all at once. Same way gentleness cuts her skin and she doesn’t bruise like she used to. 

“Agatha?”

The name gets an inch out of Rio’s mouth before it turns to frost, falls to the ground. It shatters. 

“You gonna tell me what it is? Or do I need to fu–”

“If you ever tell anyone, I’ll kill you.” 

Agatha freezes at every place she’s slotted against Rio’s skin. It’s not the threat. It’s that Rio sounds uncertain. Like a child in a new frock, the way she tries out violence. Agatha thinks it’s the only thing she hasn’t seen her suit. 

“You know that, right?”

Her tongue slides against Agatha’s. Agatha wonders if she could pull it out at the root. Whether that would stop whatever she put there from growing or if it’s already too deep in her. 

She wants to call her my love, only it’s harder to put the word next to a woman than it is a mountain or a sunrise or things long dead. She settles for mí vida. Something Rio said once, late in the night. She can always pretend not to know what it means. 

Rio’s eyes are dark enough that they’re almost black. Agatha kisses the space in between them. Gets off a little on it: that she can be this close to someone and not be seen.

“If I ever told anyone,” she tells Rio simply, “I’d already be dead.”

The days keep turning. 

Agatha wishes the days would make up their traitor minds. The days are filthy turncoats because she wants to stay here, now. She wants to stay with her. 

It’s like this: Agatha knows damn well what she is. 

She is, first and foremost, a survivor. 

Whatever else she might be, it can get in fucking line behind that one simple fact. 

It’s like this: there are moments with Rio when Agatha is first to forget. 

Neither of them needs to say it’s ending.

That’s how Agatha knows it’s gonna last. 

Rio crawls into her lap, same as always. It’s cold enough now that she needs to. Agatha misses the hazy kind of warm it got in the height of summer. She knew for sure then that Rio wanted her. She may as well be a warm body now. The thought makes her go cold. 

“Don’t go,” Rio says. It’s not the mountain she’s asking Agatha to stay for. “We’ll make it work. Just gotta figure out what to do. Could work a few years, come back here in the summers. Make enough to get a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, our horses. It could be a sweet life. Come on, Aggie. Give a girl something to live for.”

They’d end up dead. Agatha knows that. 

Even then, she’s tempted. Something tells her death couldn’t catch Rio with that gallop of hers. And her? Well, she’s always been a survivor. 

She kisses the top of Rio’s head. She still tastes like strawberries. 

“We could see. Next summer, maybe. Ask me again.”

Rio shoves her backwards. She’s up and out of the tent, jabbing a finger at Agatha’s chest before she’s even there to be clawed at. 

“Don’t – just don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Fuck you, Harkness.”

Agatha laughs, high and cold. 

“Don’t tell me maybe in a few years. Don’t say you’ll come back to me but forget to give me a forwarding fuckin’ address. If you’re going to tie me to a porch you’re never coming back to… Don’t put me on a short fuckin’ leash and tell me you’ll cut me some slack in a year or so.”

Agatha lets her bottom lip curl. 

“Oh, honey. One of us has to. And you never really got the knack when it came to the ropes.” 

She’s disgusted with herself but this is how she gets by. Why rewrite a hit?

Rio offers up the other cheek without being asked. Agatha wonders exactly what it is they’ve got themselves in for. 

The slap rings throughout the camp, cleaving something.

Rio wears herself out with pacing after a few hours. She even comes back to bed. 

Agatha almost wishes she wouldn’t.

Almost. 

They shake hands. It’s polite. Friendly even. 

They exchange pleasantries about the possibility of next summer, the price of getting here. They ignore the way Rio’s wages are barely enough to last the next week. They shoot the breeze stone dead until then there’s nothing left to do but leave. 

“Nice knowing ya, Vidal.”

Rio hits her with the same cocksure smile she came with. 

“You too, sweetheart. Steer clear of she-wolves.”

“And risk never running into you again? Please.”

Rio angles the brim of her hat against the white sky’s glare, checking there’s no one around. 

“C’mere.”

When she’s sure, she reels Agatha in. 

The same goes for letting her go. 

A mile out from the ranching office, Agatha feels like someone’s got a grip on her guts and is hauling them out of her one yard at a time. There are certain mistakes every lady should make at least once in her life. Agatha wonders how many she’s making here. She stops at the side of the road, barely makes it to her knees before she’s retching. The first frost, still settling on the ground, goes unmarred. She wonders whether it crawled down her throat and froze whatever poison she might’ve spat. It’s the same old story. 

Nothing makes it out her mouth.