Crystalline Knowledge of You

by evgar, Salong3

Summary:

1994.

One storm. One train. Two strangers.

Stuck on the tracks with somewhere to be but nowhere to go, a chance encounter might just be what they were both looking for.

Notes:

• For evgar.

Fun fact: what happens in this story actually happened to me. Apart from, you know, all the fun stuff.

My biggest thanks to the big bang brigade for arranging this event. You’re all off the tracks cool.

And, folks, having Eva as my artist on this… holy shit. We are truly blessed to have her in this fandom.

The first snowflake fell on the tracks somewhere on the outskirts of Philadelphia. But the little crystalline jewel wasn’t lonely for long as it was soon joined by a fellow, who settled not inches from him; silent but welcome.

The two fellows were soon joined by a flurry of their friends. The flurry became a deluge until they were so numerous that one of their brethren fell over a hundred miles away and had a soft landing on the head of a frustrated commuter making her way to her train.

Unaware of her new passenger, on the platform at D.C.’s Union Station, Agatha Harkness tightened her scarf around her neck, huffing out a hot breath into the cool air and watching its steam curl before her face.

The platform was almost empty. People had been scared away from train travel by the threat of the incoming storm. But spending another night with her mother was far more frightening than any storm could ever be.

Besides, she hadn’t even seen any snow yet.

She adjusted her scarf again, for what reason, she didn’t know. It just felt like something you did when it was cold, when you wanted to show to the few strangers milling about that you were frustrated. Read: don’t talk to me.

Her car was Car A, First Class. Or Premier Class, or whatever they called it to get away with not providing an actual First Class experience. But, whatever, her job paid for it because she’d lied about her need to go to Washington for a meeting so a complementary drink and a small bag of nuts was all she needed.

Plus she would be away from the general public. Apparently something about her face often screamed “come talk to me” when Agatha would, in fact, rather die than make small talk.

Especially when it was with the men who usually approached.

She walked along the platform, head down, walkman playing the dulcet tones of Toni Braxton. It was like white noise at this point. Toni’s voice was so familiar that she was barely able to register it anymore. But it was comforting and listening to something was better than being alone in the world.

Alone with her thoughts.

A particularly bad place to be after a weekend spent with her mother.

Car A was just up ahead and Agatha tightened her hold on her bag, strangling the life out of the leather handle. The bag was heavy but not unmanageable. But the cold of the wind had frozen her fingers and she guessed that by the time she was in the car and had found her seat they may actually be blue.

But it was fine. The train would be warm and in three hours and thirty minutes she’d be stepping onto the platform at Penn Station. Then she’d get a cab to her apartment and she’d be curled up in the bed she’d missed after the fraught few days spent with her mother.

She’d warm her fingers up with work, anyway.

And wine, she considered, that would warm her body up too.

Whilst her mind was focused on the warmer environs of the train she was soon to be on, her body moved of its own accord. She was focused ahead, her eyes on the white and blue car of the Amtrak train car bearing the letter ‘A’.

But because she wasn’t focusing on her feet she took a misjudged step and tripped, stumbling diagonally a couple feet with the weight of her bag pulling her at an awkward angle.

Her shoulder clipped another body mid-fall and she felt a hand grab her arm, preventing her from falling farther. She grunted, a small noise unintentionally released at the shock of the slip, the suddenness of the stop.

Her frozen fingers had released her bag and as she looked now she saw it sitting between her own traitorous feet, and those of the stranger who’d saved her from mortifying herself more on the close-to empty platform.

Toni was still singing in her ears about heartbreak or longing or something similar but another voice penetrated through the barrier of her headphones.

“You okay there?”

She looked up from her bag, suddenly aware a hand was still holding her arm. She shrugged it off, oblivious to the fact that it was a rude thing to do when this person had just been so kind as to not let her fall flat on her face.

Fueled by mortification and indignation, she cleared her throat and pushed her headphones off so they lay around her scarf-covered neck.

Her eyes made it as far as a black scarf hanging loosely about the collar of a bulky leather jacket. She registered that this stranger was a woman, that she had dark hair falling about her shoulders, but dropped her gaze before she registered something so identifying as a face.

“Thanks,” she muttered, already bending down to rescue her bag. The stranger had bent too and their heads collided, making Agatha rear back and lift her hand to her affronted head.

“Watch it!”

Her hand happened to land over the place the snowflake had fallen. Now it sat in a different form, an infinitesimal molecule of liquid, warmed beneath a pale palm. And as Agatha glowered, the tiny droplet, fragile and all alone, followed its nature.

What should have happened: a brief glisten, a surrender to water, and then, nothing. But this, this scientific certainty, this tale as old as time, did not occur.

Instead, the snowflake had hesitated, as if deliberating its next move, as if it had infinite choice in the matter of its material form.

It seemed to listen, to absorb rather than be absorbed. The heat of Agatha’s skin was a pulse, something insistent, life itself.

And so, having heard the rhythm of Agatha’s very being as she stood before this stranger, it did not melt. It softened, and then sank.

Agatha didn’t notice. She couldn’t have noticed. For what living human notices the change from ice to water on such a minute scale.

Inside of her the molecule, the memory of snow, carried along her bloodstream. It journeyed to a racing heart and slipped inside undetected and unchanged by the warmth around it.

Agatha’s heart didn’t falter but it seemed to listen the way the sky listens before the snow falls.

The rest of her though, now beyond embarrassment, and unaware of the transformation that had just taken place, glared at the stranger who’d just saved her, only to find that the stranger wasn’t glaring back.

Instead, she was smiling, looking, as far as Agatha could tell, vaguely amused. The tip of the woman’s nose was pink, her cheeks equally so, and despite looking as frozen as Agatha felt, there was a warmth to her gaze and Agatha felt hot beneath it.

“Here,” the woman offered, bending to rescue Agatha’s expensive leather bag from the indignity of sitting on the damp concrete of the platform. “Need help on to the-?”

Agatha snatched the bag. It whacked into her front, the weight making it swing as she stole it back. The woman before her blinked, but her smile didn’t fade. It only grew, revealing a gap between her teeth and apparently a delight in Agatha’s reaction.

Not that Agatha stuck around to experience the full wattage of the grin now aimed at her. She turned her back on it and strode away, gaining only two feet of distance before she heard the woman again.

“Pleasure’s all mine, sweetheart.”

“What did you just call me?”

Agatha whipped back around, only briefly considering that it was a stupid idea to get into a public altercation. But then there was hardly any “public” to speak of.

The woman with the grin shrugged, her hands now buried in the deep pockets of her ridiculously large jacket.

“I says as I sees.”

Agatha scoffed.

“‘Says as I sees,’” she repeated back to the woman, now giving her a once over.

Scuffed leather boots, dark jeans, the godforsaken leather jacket, and what? A nose piercing?

She scoffed again.

“Who says that?”

“I says,” the woman responded immediately, her eyes matching the twinkle of her smile.

Maybe she was stupid. Maybe Agatha was being needlessly cruel to a person with limited mental capacity.

But something about the way her grin remained bright and her eyes somehow hopeful made her want to destroy her.

“Pathetic,” Agatha spat out before spinning on her heel and marching towards the door to her car.

With each step she somehow became angrier. How dare she? How could she? She reached the door, took the step up and looked, then, sparing half a second on the woman who was now watching her from across the platform.

Agatha turned sharply away, feeling somehow caught. She hesitated and then looked back again, wanting to somehow gain some dignity. But the woman was no longer looking, seemingly no longer interested in Agatha’s little power play. She instead remained where she was on the platform but now was lighting a cigarette, her face illuminated by her cupped hand and lighter.

Agatha turned away again. Pathetic, she repeated to herself as she turned to step into the vague warmth of the vaguely luxurious car.

Agatha was alone. She’d suspected she might be, but still. The usual busy commuter line being not only quiet, but entirely empty, was a bit of a surprise.

Not that she really minded. Alone meant quiet and quiet meant peace. Peace away from strangers with stupid grins.

Peace to work, peace to decompress from the weekend spent with her mother. It had been a necessary evil, one that only occurred twice a year, so really she couldn’t complain too much.

She saw her mother at Christmas and over her birthday, a strange custom that most of her friends didn’t understand, but that had to be adhered to. Afterall, Agatha had been born at the behest of her mother.

An unwanted baby. Fatherless, loveless, she just wished motherless too.

She’d been born to a religious mother who believed more in dogma than raising a child with love. She was cherished as any other child is cherished in the womb: allowed the necessary ingredients of life to grow for nine months. But that was it. Because then she’d been born. And then she was a leech, a disappointment, a waste of oxygen.

Her penance, now she was twenty five and not entirely reliant on her mother for food and shelter, was to spend every birthday weekend with her. And every other day of her life to live with the knowledge that she’d been held as a child only to be fed, and the person who should have loved her the most in the world in fact despised her. She was her mother’s ruin, and so from the ruins of her own birth, she’d worked hard to build a life she could be proud of, alone in her tiny apartment in Manhattan.

This weekend she’d done her duty, paid her penance for the year, and spent her birthday weekend with her mother. Duty done, a train ride through the promised snow should be peaceful, should give her time to relax and think of things other than how much she hated that she’d been born to the woman she had to call “mother”.

Only now she felt riled up again, an obstinate flash of brown eyes had shaken her, thrown her off track.

She took her seat, not her assigned one, but one she wanted. It was one about a third of the way along the car in a little set of four. She threw her bag down under the table in between the two seats opposite each other. But then huffed and reached down to rummage for her clunky laptop to place it on the table in front of her.

Huffing again, though no one was around to hear it, she settled in for what was sure to be a miserable, but at least quiet, journey back home.

Despite having now set up her work station, her fingers remained still on the chunky keys. On the platform outside, small flurries of snow began to fall and Agatha watched them for a while. The sight of the swirling ice in the wind made her shiver. She tugged her jacket tighter about herself and wished she’d thought to bring more layers.

But in a little over three hours she’d be off the train and soon home.

And if Agatha could withstand anything, it was prolonged misery.

By the time the train was moving, pulling its way slowly from the platform, she’d already decided she didn’t want to work. And she gave up entirely by the time they hit Baltimore. She slammed the screen shut and the noise created a butterfly effect that culminated in the arrival of the drinks trolley, along with an elderly attendant.

If you believed in that sort of thing.

Which Agatha certainly did not.

Agatha grunted her order of white wine and wasn’t at all surprised when she was handed a plastic cup and provided with a meagre amount of screw top Chardonnay.

She didn’t acknowledge the pour, and turned back to look out the window.

The weather was worsening but not to any degree that Agatha was worried. In fact, she wasn’t worried about anything at all. The burgeoning white on the window, the soft snowfall in the fields, it was all somehow calming.

Helped along, most likely, by the cup of wine she sipped to completion.

Trains, to Agatha at least, were a means to an end. A form of transport only. A way to get from A to Hell and back again.

As the white outside grew and began to illuminate the dull car with its lustre, Agatha soon grew bored of her thoughts. Not bored, frustrated. When left idle, they always took her back to arenas she’d rather stay out of. A soft whispering from the warm chambers of her heart told her how lonely she was, how she could never let anyone in, let alone stay after she’d used them for the night.

And the wine, as sharp to the taste and as pitiful an amount as it was, actually hadn’t helped at all.

She turned instead to her book, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a recent bestseller and a book her friend Jen had been pushing on her for a while now. It was was entertaining enough to pull her away from her own inadequacies and the thoughts that slowly darkened with each passing second of quiet.

Time passed at an excruciating pace. The view outside became more and more obstructed by fallen snow but Agatha paid attention to nothing other than the words on the page.

After all, the story of a love affair is far more interesting than the happenings of a major weather event.

Another glass of wine, tens of pages later, and just outside Philadelphia, the train slowed to a halt.

Agatha looked up as the lights flickered and the sound of engines powering down could be heard through the traincar. There was a dull crackle over the intercom and then silence.

Agatha could hear the dull thud of her heart in her chest as she raised up slightly from her slumped position back against the window. No sound. No movement.

Book now forgotten, eyes alert, she sat up properly and slid her feet from the chair beside her. The car was empty and still. There was no noise to be heard or movement to see.

She turned in her seat to look out the window and saw nothing but snow. The outskirts of the city had been laid to rest beneath a thick blanket of heavy white nothing.

Shivering for the sight of it, she tugged her jacket back up that she’d let loose about herself as she leant back against the window to read.

The lights flickered once more, more static, and then: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve had to make an emergency stop due to the weather. We’re on the outskirts of Philadelphia and will keep you informed as to our next movements. Apologies for any inconvenience.”

“No,” the first word Agatha had uttered since her last wine refill over thirty minutes ago. The only word Agatha could think to say to the empty car.

She stood, forgetting her company-issued laptop, her book, her bag, her Walkman, and began to march.

Car A was at the front of the train so it didn’t take long before she was knocking on the door to the driver’s cab. Her foot tapped in tandem with her fist and her face remained stern, tight, prepped for a fight.

It took a few seconds of continued knocking but the door to the cab soon opened and Agatha was greeted by the pale face of a young driver.

“Yes, ma’am? You shouldn’t be up here.”

“Why aren’t we moving?”

“Ma’am, please, if you just-.”

“I paid good money to get home tonight,” technically a lie, she’d not paid a penny but that was besides the point, “I demand to know why-.”

A surlier, weather-beaten face appeared behind the nervous one she’d been in the midst of arguing with and interjected before Agatha could continue.

“Ma’am,” he uttered, speaking the word far too flippantly for Agatha’s liking, “Return to your seat. There’s nothing we can do. The tracks are blocked and there’s ice on the overhead lines, not to mention the visibility issues and frozen brakes.”

Agatha bristled, shaking her hair back to give herself a second to think.

“Then let me off.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that, ma’am.”

“Why not? Let me off, then arrange a cab to take me further up the tracks until I can get on a train with a competent crew.”

The surlier man scowled and Agatha flexed her jaw, the fist that had once been curled for knocking now tight by her side.

“Please take a seat, ma’am. We’re doing all we can.”

Agatha remained where she was for a second longer and then turned on her heel and crashed almost instantly into a conductor making his way to the cab.

She was grabbed and held up right for the second time that day.

Far from even a cursory ‘thank you’ the words that instead slipped from her mouth were: “Don’t fucking touch me” as she stalked around the bewildered man and marched back to her seat.

Agatha threw herself down into her chair and huffed in a dramatic performance of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Only, there was no audience to witness it, so she soon stopped her huffing and instead stared angrily, but silently, out the window.

The snow continued to fall, silent and uncaring about the woman through the glass pane who witnessed it all with a slowly softening gaze.

The flakes danced in the wind, finding their resting place amongst their peers with little worry about where they landed, merely worrying about landing at all.

Agatha allowed the slow dance to calm her, though it was the reason for her earlier fury. She watched for a long while, unaware that she herself was now part of it.

The snowflake that had dissolved into her hand, that had paused for her rhythm of life, that had settled itself into the unhurried chambers of her heart, was waiting now with infinite patience.

Her silent passenger had the patience of old, an ancient understanding that its time would come, and that it would be soon.

And Agatha, with nothing else to do, and certainly nowhere to go, soon returned to her book. She would escape the train in one way or another, and so, for now at least, she chose to escape it only in her mind.

Time passed slowly, and Agatha was offered more wine, which she gladly, though rudely accepted. She drank it quickly, needing to take the edge off her growing frustration.

Thirty minutes had passed and they’d had no further information from the staff.

Agatha flicked the page of her book, now vaguely aware someone was approaching along the narrow walkway between the sets of seats. She pushed her empty plastic cup towards the end of the table, a silent demand for a refill of the cheap white wine considered “premier class”.

The person said something but Agatha’s thoughts were too loud, and her concentration was on the words on the page so she didn’t quite hear and just muttered, “thanks.”

Only, her gratitude didn’t result in more wine. It resulted in a movement she wasn’t expecting. She looked up and to her surprise saw a woman, a familiar woman, sat opposite her in her little section of four.

The woman smiled, showing off a gap in her front teeth.

Agatha blinked. She slammed her book down.

“Are you following me or something?”

Nonplussed by the less than polite greeting the woman just continued to grin at her.

“I thought I deserved some luxury if I was gonna be stuck here for the next few hours. The other fancy car had a bunch of suits in it so I kept going and then… found you.”

Agatha raised her brows, wondering if she’d in fact had too much wine and was now imagining the gap-toothed stranger from before grinning at her.

“Well,” she started, unsure what exactly to say to the woman, “These are my seats.”

She realised too late that she sounded like a child. A petulant child.

“Oh,” the woman said, her expression slipping easily from pleased to comically surprised, “All of them?”

“Yes,” Agatha huffed tritely.

The woman grinned again, raising her own brows in a direct mirror of Agatha’s. It was then Agatha looked at her properly. She must be around the same age, her first instinct had been correct. She had smooth tanned skin, pronounced cheek bones, large round eyes, soft-looking lips.

She looked away immediately.

“There are at least thirty seats in this car, go sit at one of those.”

“Technically I am sitting in one of those.” A hand shot out and Agatha glanced at it. The woman had a thick silver thumb ring and long fingers that wriggled for her attention. “Rio.”

Agatha looked back up, ignoring the hand. “If you don’t have a ticket for this car you can’t technically be here.”

“I’m pretty sure all rules go out the window when you’re stranded on the tracks, aren’t you?”

The hand with the wriggling fingers was still being held out, still wriggling, and still being ignored by Agatha.

Agatha stared at the stranger, doing her best to stare her down. For some reason it didn’t seem to work. The woman continued to grin at her, slowly giving up her silent request for a hand shake by leaning back in her seat and dropping her hand onto the table.

Agatha’s eyes darted down to her outfit, or what she could see of it above the table. She was no longer wearing the scarf. She wasn’t sure why she even remembered that she had been wearing a scarf. Instead, she could see a plain black t-shirt beneath her oversized leather jacket. Plastic, definitely, now she had a better view of it, her mortification no longer blinding her to details like fabric types or whether or not this woman happened to have soft-looking lips.

She internally cringed and spitefully, as if to make up for her mind drifting back to soft lips, she thought: cheap and plastic, definitely.

“Like what you see?”

Agatha’s eyes jumped back up. The stranger’s head was tilted now, her grin a smirk.

It was enough to make Agatha move. She slammed her book shut, ignoring the fact that she slammed it on her thumb. She began to shuffle along the seats, hurriedly grabbing her discarded bag and mostly untouched work laptop.

“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. We were just getting to know one another.”

Agatha scoffed, and didn’t look back up before she turned on her heel and marched halfway down the car to sit in the very middle. She took up the same position as before, feet on the seats, book in her lap. The stranger hadn’t followed.

She took a deep breath, shivered a little for the sudden air-change that came with moving to another part of the mildly cold car, and tried her best to focus back in.

Ten minutes later a shadow made her look up again. It was on the tip of her tongue to snap “fuck off” but instead of it being the stranger it was a woman offering her wine. She gave her a considerably less frosty reception than she would have if she weren’t currently pouring that same cheap wine into her glass.

It never tasted the same in a plastic cup but who could she complain to.

The woman, without being prompted, left a couple small bags of mini pretzels and left. Agatha heard her wheeling the trolley down the car and she couldn’t help but pull herself up to see over the seats.

Sure enough, she’d stopped where the gap-toothed stranger had been. Agatha watched as the lady with the trolley gave a significantly warmer smile to the woman she now couldn’t see, hidden behind the chair.

And then, to her horror, she saw a bottle being exchanged.

Agatha threw herself back down and stared at her measly, half empty cup. She’d smiled at the woman, hadn’t she? Said thank you this time? She’d been as polite as it were possible to be when stuck on a train in the middle of bumfuck nowhere somewhere along the east coast.

She huffed, pulled her knees up as she got comfortable again, and by way of causing herself more distress, she finished down the pitiful amount of wine she’d been given in her pathetic plastic cup.

“A peace offering.”

Agatha choked on her last gulp, her body jerking up as she coughed. The wine, as sharp and acetic as it was, burned her throat as she continued to choke. The stranger now standing by the end of the table raised her brows and leant over to pat her back.

Agatha slapped away her hand even as she continued to cough.

Soon recovering as best she could she cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair.

“Don’t you know,” she growled, “when you’re not welcome?”

The woman, to Agatha’s great horror, simply smiled and went to sit opposite her again, already opening up the wine she’d secured from the trolley.

“I figure you’d want some company if we’re going to be stuck here all night.”

“All night?!” Agatha almost choked again, but on shock this time rather than Chardonnay.

“Mhm,” the brunette hummed, finishing filling up Agatha’s plastic cup much more than the train attendant had. “Spoke to a ticket inspector earlier, said it’ll at least be a few hours, which means you’ll be all alone on a dark, cold train next to a car of suits.”

“And what?” Agatha huffed, quickly taking a sip of the wine that had just been poured to clear her throat if nothing else.

The woman grinned at her where she was filling her own plastic cup.

“You’re here to protect me from a bunch of businessmen?”

“Something like that.”

Agatha scoffed, and took another sip. It didn’t burn as much this time and she was getting used to the taste.

“Like I need help.”

“Well, company, then. Someone to entertain you, watch your stuff if you wanna sleep.”

Agatha scoffed again, her fingers tapping now at the plastic of her cup of wine as she leant back against the window. She surveyed the woman before her, careful to not look too long at her lips which were curved up into a smile.

“Where are you from?”

“Oh, rural nowhere.”

“What do you do?”

“A little of this, a little of that.”

“Why were you in Washington?”

“Doesn’t everybody want to see the White House at least once in their life?”

Agatha narrowed her gaze at the woman before her. At, what was it? Rio. She paused as she took her in again. Large brown eyes the colour of molten chocolate. High, rounded cheek bones. A disarming smile, the kind of disarming that could get a whole bottle of wine where Agatha could only get half a cup.

“Rio?”

“Yes.”

““Rural nowhere...?””

“Yep.”

Agatha hummed. “Latin?”

“Puerto Rican.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

Agatha scoffed, the third time in as many minutes, and made a show of lifting her book up and pretending to read.

The stranger didn’t say anything for a while and Agatha managed to fake-read two pages before she was being spoken to again.

“So, I’m not going to get your name?”

“I’m reading.”

“Your book’s upside down.”

Agatha blinked, actually focused on the page before her; it was upside down. She cleared her throat and said nothing as she turned the book around without a fuss.

Inside, she wanted to die.

“So,” this Rio said, as casually as if she hadn’t just mortified Agatha, “Where are you from, sweetheart?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What should I call you if I don’t know your name?”

“It’s Agatha.”

“Agatha? Old school.”

“As opposed to Rio? Which is just plain weird.”

The woman grinned as Agatha glowered and found her eyes drifting back down to the stranger’s lips.

Far from being softened by her broad smile, she felt herself become defensive.

“Can you leave me alone?”

The stranger shifted where she sat and a hand moved across to take the plastic glass that sat before her on the mottled grey table.

“You really want that? All alone on a cold, dark train?”

Agatha scoffed and where Rio was just toying with her plastic cup, Agatha took her own up and knocked it back and winced at the sting of the acidic wine against the back of her throat.

“I can take care of myself.”

As if testing this theory, the electricity above flickered out and Agatha looked up to see the dying of the light. Rio, continuing to tap a soft pattern against her cup, kept her eyes on Agatha.

“Looking real brave there, sweetheart.”

“Don’t,” Agatha insisted sharply, turning again to look at the smug stranger. “Call me that. Strangers shouldn’t call strangers things like that.”

“We’re not strangers, I know your name.”

“Then use it. You don’t know my life. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Is that what it takes to not be strangers? Knowing someone’s life?”

“I’d say so.”

“You’re straight?” Rio said, taking a guess at something in a deadpan, almost bored way. Or maybe not.

“I don’t think who I sleep with is any of your business.”

“I’m not asking who you sleep with, I’m asking who you’d prefer to sleep with.”

Agatha scoffed, sipped her wine, looked out at the vast expanse of nothing out the window. Rio exhaled through her nose, a smug, self-aggrandising noise that made Agatha want to strangle her.

She worked her jaw, tasting the acrid wine on her tongue. Perhaps she’d had too much of it because all she could think about right now was how not straight it was to be thinking of the soft, smirking lips of the woman across from her.

She turned back and looked at those lips.

She looked for long enough that Rio’s smirk became a surprised grin.

“Oh,” she said quietly, “Maybe not so straight after all.”

Agatha raised her gaze up to dark eyes but said nothing as she took a small sip of her wine.

“You know,” Rio said conspiratorially, as she leant forwards in her seat, “no one’s around. If you want your first time with a girl to be with someone with plenty experience then-...”

“It is not my first time!”

Agatha snapped her mouth shut the second she’d shouted what she’d shouted. But the reaction from Rio had been immediate. Her tongue was poking into her cheek and she’d relaxed back in her seat again. And Agatha could just tell she had spread her legs beneath the table in a stance that screamed “smug as shit”.

She thought about strangling her again.

“And here I thought you’d have a cleanly shaven boyfriend with a small dick and a trust fund.”

“Like you stand a chance anyway.”

Agatha adjusted the scarf around her neck, mostly for something to do, but also because the cold was starting to really creep in. The heat had died with the light and she glanced surreptitiously at the snow building up around them.

Rio was watching her, her dark eyes taking in the embarrassment on Agatha’s face before they moved down to where her pale hand stood out against the purple of the scarf.

“Here,” she said eventually, in a different tone than before. She was no longer teasing and instead Agatha recognised an earnestness in her voice that made her uncomfortable. She shrugged off her oversized leather jacket. “Take it. You’re cold.”

Agatha scoffed, now crossing her arms over herself.

“I don’t want it.”

“Fine,” Rio said, now sans her jacket and shrugging with a smile. “Then neither of us will have it and it’ll just sit on the chair.”

She dropped it down beside her on the seat and Agatha looked at it before she turned back around at the woman who now sat in just a black t-shirt in the cold of the car. It was then she noticed three things and became incapable of figuring out where she should be looking. Thing one: Rio wasn’t wearing a bra. Thing two: Rio had both nipples pierced. Thing three: across Rio’s right forearm she had a fine line tattoo of some creeping flower and Agatha stared between her tits and her arm for long enough that Rio noticed.

Thankfully, she didn’t call her out on the boob thing.

“Honeysuckle,” she said easily, turning her arm over so Agatha could see it properly. But Agatha was struggling to keep her composure, so embarrassed she’d been caught and had even been staring in the first place. “It means devotion and good luck. I was once told I'd only fall in love once but when I did, it would be forever. So I thought a little talisman like this could help manifest it.”

“Who told you that?”

Rio smiled, looking down now to where Agatha’s eyes still rested on the flowers across her arm. She touched the petal of one of them and traced along the vine.

“A psychic. Kooky Sicilian broad but all signs so far seem to suggest she was probably right. Seeing as I’ve been with plenty girls but never been in love.”

Agatha scoffed, but remained transfixed on the journey of Rio’s finger.

“You believe in that crap?”

“I believe,” Rio said slowly, her finger now paused at the apex of the vine twisted round her bicep. “That I’m made for one woman, yes.”

Agatha raised her eyes from Rio’s steady finger to her even steadier gaze. Something about it disquieted her. It sparked something in her chest that had long since been dormant.

“No one is made for only one person.”

Rio’s lips twitched as she moved her hand back down her arm and Agatha’s gaze fell to the movement again. She had a sudden strange desire to touch her there, on the tattoo that meant devotion. And her body made an involuntary movement to do just that. She twitched in that direction, her hand lifting from the table and moving an inch outwards until she caught herself.

But Rio was faster. Rio had read Agatha’s mind before she’d read her body language.

She’d reached for Agatha’s hand and Agatha gasped at the warmth of Rio’s hold. It sent shockwaves through her body that reached her heart and the memory of the snow that had absorbed there quivered for the feeling.

Rio placed Agatha’s hand down against the inside of her wrist where the tattoo began and Agatha kept her gaze on Rio’s watchful eyes as she allowed her fingers to be used as a soft stylus that traced along the lines of the art across her skin.

In order to reach fully up her arm Agatha moved forwards where Rio leant in. Beneath the pad of her exploring finger she could feel the ripple of a muscle restraining itself from flexing. But Agatha could tell, by sight and feel, that Rio took care of herself.

The vines running along the length of her arm were woven over warm, sculpted marble and as Agatha’s fingers came to a rest at the very top of the tattoo, high enough that Rio had had to push up her sleeve, Agatha looked back to the journey she’d just traced.

For the first time she took control of her own movement and gently moved her hand down so Rio let go. Her fingers journeyed to the first flower on the inside of a bicep that finally, beautifully, flexed for her.

Agatha looked to it and felt her mouth felt suddenly dry. Her fingers moved to caress over the flower and she felt the tension in Rio’s arm that caused her stomach to flip and her breath to catch.

Neither said anything as she slowly pulled away and the moment went entirely unacknowledged as Agatha focused on calming her racing heart and Rio focused on the way Agatha’s fingers flexed as she went to lift her cup.

Swallowing down a mouthful of cheap wine, Agatha cleared her throat and motioned to the discarded jacket on the seat.

“Give me that.”

Rio lifted it over the table for her and Agatha snatched it without a word and used it as a blanket as she returned to her earlier position across both seats with her feet up.

An inexplicable feeling of warmth settled over her that Agatha knew was far more than the physical warmth the leather jacket could have provided.

But she shook it off by dramatically shivering and when she went to pour herself more wine she found that her glass was already full.

“I’m just going to find us food,” Rio said, her voice almost imperceptibly more shy and softer than it had been before. “And water. Any preference on snacks?”

“Something not disgusting, if at all possible.”

Agatha glanced up at the woman now standing across the table and let her eyes dart down to the goosebumps visible across tanned arms. Now standing and not wearing her jacket, Agatha could see she was wearing well-loved black baggy jeans and sported a purple carabiner with a couple keys attached in the left belt loop. Agatha looked away, fearful she’d be caught staring again. She tugged her makeshift blanket closer but made no move to offer it back to Rio.

But if Rio had noticed she was being checked out she didn’t say anything. Instead she’d simply smiled and was soon marching down the car as Agatha lifted up to watch her go.

Rio stopped at the car door and when she reached for the handle she turned and caught Agatha watching her. Rio’s smile was slow but Agatha’s didn’t appear at all.

Instead, she maintained eye contact for just a second longer than she meant to, before she settled back down in her seat and heard the soft noise of the door closing behind Rio as she left.

Alone again, finally, naturally, Agatha stared out the opposite window at the expanse of snow that now glowed ominously in the dim light of the late evening. Unaware she was doing it, she rubbed her thumb over and over the pads of the fingers that had traced the warm honeysuckle along Rio’s arm.

The phantom feel of it made her heart inexplicably flutter again and Agatha grew angry for the way her body betrayed her even as she was burying herself further beneath the stranger’s jacket.

In the silent car Agatha tried to keep her mind on more practical things like how long they’d be here, when the heat would come back on, what time she’d be home and was anyone worried about her.

But her mind, traitor that it was, kept jumping back to a gap-toothed grin and a firm bicep. She wondered how many women that smile had worked on. The clearly fake story about the tattoo and the psychic; surely just a come on to make her look like a romantic, a story intended to make girls think they could be the one so Rio could get into their pants for the night and leave before the dawn.

“Honeysuckle,” Agatha scoffed to herself, shaking her head and determinedly stopping the brush of her thumb against her fingers.

The sound of Rio’s return made her jump where she sat and previous thoughts of her being a lying lothario died upon seeing her stand before the table cradling a whole mess of snacks, water, and wine looking as proud as she was suddenly adorable.

“There’s no more white,” Rio explained as the snacks and plastic water bottles tumbled from her arms and spilled out over the table - she kept hold of the wine bottles though. “So I grabbed a couple red.”

“A couple?” Agatha asked as she picked up a suspicious looking Twinky. “Trying to get me drunk?”

“Trying to keep us warm,” Rio responded, now moving to sit back in her seat.

As Agatha placed the Twinky down she looked up to Rio who shivered as she began opening the first of the screw top wine bottles. Beneath her layers of sweater, her own jacket, and now Rio’s, Agatha grew a little warmer, feeling something almost like shame.

Rio handed her a full glass of red wine and Agatha avoided eye contact as she accepted it.

Their fingers brushed as the cup was exchanged and Agatha felt the warmth of Rio before it was suddenly gone, replaced with the false warmth of a cheap merlot slipping down her throat.

“Red has warming qualities,” Rio explained as Agatha took a sip, because they still had half a bottle of white left. “Science.”

Agatha rolled her eyes.

“You couldn’t do any better than stale Twinkies and chocolate?” Agatha asked after swallowing the mouthful of wine she’d taken.

“Well, if we were at my place I’d make you a slap-up meal but seeing as we’re stuck with no heat, electricity, or actual food… you’ll have to make do with sugary treats and cheap wine.”

Agatha scoffed, now wrestling with a snack pack of Oreos. “There’s no chance in hell I’d ever be sitting in your place waiting for you to make me a meal.”

Rio reached to snatch the Oreos away from her and opened the pack with ease as she asked: “And why might that be, Agatha?”

Agatha snatched the open pack right back as she said: “Where do you even live? A hole in the ground?”

“Beneath the honeysuckles,” Rio responded, her grin in place again as Agatha took a bite of the first Oreo.

Not needing, or wanting, to be reminded of the flowers trailing up Rio’s arm now visibly covered in goosebumps, Agatha focused on eating her Oreos and drinking her wine. Across from her, Rio occasionally shivered but always tried to pass it off by shifting in her seat, by reaching for her glass, for food, or by filling their cups.

Whilst Agatha ignored it every time, she couldn’t ignore the niggling voice in her head that told her to give back the jacket she kept draped across herself.

“What would you make?” She asked, keen to distract herself, and now done with her small pack of Oreos. “In this hovel of yours?”

Rio hummed, a slow laugh bubbling up from nowhere that made Agatha look up to her again for the first time in at least five minutes.

“I like to make my own pasta. Spinach ravioli with a walnut sauce.”

Agatha blinked, placing her wine cup down as she buried her hands beneath the leather jacket across her, seeking the warmth it could provide.

“From scratch?”

“From scratch,” Rio agreed, a bright grin on her face as she threw a jolly rancher into her open mouth.

“I’d wine you and dine you with delicious food, better wine than this crap, and excellent conversation.”

Agatha scoffed, watching the way Rio’s jaw worked as she chewed the candy.

“Like I said, incredible you even think I’d come over, let alone be charmed by it.”

“You’re not charmed?” The charmer in question asked as she swirled her merlot in her plastic cup. “Not even a little? C’mon, I’ve given you my jacket, got you all the best wine and food this train has to offer, even let you feel me up.”

“I have not felt you up.”

Rio shivered as she sat back in her seat, an honest to god, genuine shiver. Agatha’s stern gaze dropped to her tensed body as she adjusted her stance, still smug even in the cold.

“You can feel me up again, if you like? Keep me warm.”

Agatha rolled her eyes in the hopes of distracting Rio from her rapidly warming cheeks.

“You’re so gross.”

In sitting up she hauled Rio’s jacket over the table, narrowly missing the bottles of wine that stood in the centre of it.

“Here. Take it back. You’re shaking. It’s terrible to look at.”

In Rio’s face Agatha saw a brief glimmer of what looked like hurt but she looked away fast enough that it barely registered on her mind. All she felt now was the chill left behind that Rio’s jacket had just been able to take the edge off of.

She distracted herself from the rush of cool air by taking another swig of her wine, keeping her eyes on the snow that continued to fall in the silence of the darkening world outside.

Rio, during this time, hadn’t put her jacket back on. Nor had she draped it over herself like a blanket. Instead, her eyes bored into Agatha’s face until the latter could no longer stand it.

She turned her head back to look at the woman across from her and snapped: “What?”

“If we sat together we could both be warm.”

The words were softly spoken, as if they contained a universal, obvious truth. One that Agatha wasn’t aware of.

“I’m fine,” she said, too quickly, much too quickly to be casual. But Rio just nodded, just shrugged her jacket back over her shoulders and Agatha watched as she tugged the collar of it closer around her neck.

“You had a scarf earlier,” she commented. “Where is it?”

Rio’s brow arched curiously and Agatha hated that she’d given herself away.

“There was a kid who looked cold as I was boarding. Gave it to her.”

“Yeah right,” Agatha scoffed. “Sure you did.”

Rio said nothing and Agatha grew uncomfortable in the silence and turned her face away again.

She adjusted her own scarf and briefly considered offering it to Rio but decided not to. Rio was no longer quivering and Agatha no longer had to stare at the honeysuckle winding its way up her arm, so she had no desire to part with the scarf that kept her own neck warm.

Wherever Rio’s scarf had gone, surely not to a cold kid, she’d have to deal with it herself.

For the next ten minutes they sat in a silence that was disturbed only by the occasional rustling of plastic as Rio tried almost every snack on offer and the occasional static as the train operator kept trying to kickstart the electric.

Agatha could feel Rio watching her but she couldn’t bring herself to look. It felt like she could see through her with those dark eyes and that cool grin that appeared across her face any time a snack was particularly delicious or Agatha looked particularly annoyed.

And soon Rio’s hand, the one not busy opening packets of pretzels, was laid out casually on the table between them.

Agatha knew now what that hand felt like, knew that even as it lay exposed in the cool air of the car, that it would still be warm and soft. She knew, though she could barely admit it to herself, that if she took it, she’d not be able to let go.

“Do you have someone?”

Agatha looked then. She looked up to Rio’s tilted head, her curious eyes, her stupid grin.

“Pardon?”

“Are you with anyone? Boy? Girl? Anything in between?”

Agatha shifted where she remained leant back against the window and frowned, her eyes briefly darting to the hand still laying across the table. She realised now that Rio had turned it so her palm was up, her fingers casually curled towards the ceiling.

“That’s none of your business.”

Rio’s brows twitched skywards but she said nothing for a while and Agatha decided that she could no longer ignore her staring. So she watched Rio, just as Rio was watching her.

Her molten eyes were more golden than she’d previously thought. Perhaps it was the dim of the car around them, or the glare from the snow outside that cast a ghostly light. But they seemed alive with something Agatha couldn’t name but felt deep in her chest.

She shivered, but not for the chill.

As her eyes drifted to soft lips, Rio moved, standing so suddenly that Agatha felt a spark of fear flash through her. But she wasn’t frightened of Rio. She was frightened she might leave.

“Move forward,” Rio said, a command more than a request.

She now sat on the edge of her set of two seats and bent down to undo the lace of her tattered leather boots.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting with you.”

“You absolutely are not.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. We’re both freezing. The heat isn’t coming back on any time soon and,” Rio turned over her shoulder to grin at Agatha, “I never miss an opportunity to hold a pretty girl.”

“Oh,” Agatha scoffed, furious her cheeks were heating up again, “so admitting to being a pervert now?”

“No,” Rio said matter-of-factly as she stood to her full height and turned to look at Agatha properly, standing in her socks in the middle of the aisle. Agatha struggled to keep her gaze on Rio’s smug face, on her golden eyes, on the hoop in her right nostril, on the gap in her grin.

Because Rio had flexed her arms, holding them at an angle as she opened them up, and Agatha could clearly see the curve of the bicep she’d just caressed, “I warm up quickly, is all. I can keep you warm, keep you comfortable so you can get your beauty sleep. It’s getting late, sweetheart.”

Rio indicated with her head to the pitch black of the night sky outside and Agatha followed the movement to see the dark descending.

She turned back and shook her head, allowing herself one brief glance at a honeysuckle-covered bicep before she turned away completely.

But Rio just stood there with infinite patience as Agatha chewed on the inside of her cheek, and stared at the seat Rio had now vacated. She was freezing, that was for sure. Without a blanket or Rio’s jacket back, she would never be comfortable enough to get any sleep.

But more than that, worse than that, she couldn’t bear the idea of agreeing and letting Rio feel smug that she wanted something only Rio could give her.

Warmth, yes, but something else. Something inside her that told her she wanted to be held by this woman. If only for a short time. If only for the duration of a stranded train, stuck in the snow.

A voice inside her head said: when was the last time someone offered to hold you?

Fine. She cleared her throat and chose not to look around as she shuffled along the seats, giving Rio maybe inches of the second seat behind her.

Rio took this for what it was: an invitation.

She moved slowly, carefully, to slide between Agatha and the table and in doing so Agatha held her breath and stared down at her knees so as not to be too cognisant of their sudden proximity.

Even as Rio settled behind her, squashed between the wall and Agatha’s back, Agatha could feel the sudden warmth. She could feel her tense, cold body ease already into it as Rio threw her left arm back and hovered it against the back of the chairs.

“This okay?”

Agatha knew the question meant that soon that same arm would be around her and so she let Rio linger for a while, letting her suffer with her exposed arm out in the cold until eventually she nodded.

It all happened at once then.

Rio looped her arm expertly beneath Agatha’s own and around her middle and just as if she’d been doing this very thing for years she pulled her back into her side. Agatha was silent, holding her breath for the strong hold across her front.

Agatha’s hands were unsure for a heartbeat and then they found their place on Rio’s arm, crossed over her own body. Rio’s arm was warm despite the goosebumps still across her skin.

She sat silently, she sat still. She allowed Rio to adjust herself somewhat until she was comfortable and then to dislodge them both and lean across to grab her jacket back from where she’d discarded it at the end of the table.

Rio used it as a blanket, covering herself with it and partially covering Agatha’s right side too. Agatha helped by holding the jacket in place, but kept her other hand on Rio’s arm and cleared her throat as she shifted.

“Comfortable?”

“As I can be.”

Rio hummed behind her and squeezed Agatha’s waist where she held her above her jacket.

“You’ll feel warmer soon, I promise.”

Agatha said nothing, and soon relaxed enough to shuffle down, her knees rising more as her body settled. It was both the most comfortable she’d been all day and the least.

Not that she’d ever admit to the former, and she was soon acting on the latter.

“I need the bathroom.”

An excuse, more than anything, to get away. But Agatha didn’t wait for Rio to respond or to loosen her hold. Which only meant as she moved away from her that Rio’s hand brushed along her front and Agatha felt a tightness in her chest as she shuffled ungracefully away.

She marched down the car to get to the little bathroom cubicle through the car doors without looking back. Once inside she exhaled everything from her lungs and went lightheaded as she leant against the locked bathroom door.

Her body had warmed up. Rio had been right about that. Plus she felt calmer than she had been before, an unexpected result of Rio’s hold. And the hand that now rested above her heart had been warmed by Rio’s skin and longed to feel that warmth again.

Perhaps it was the wine, she thought, now using the disgusting facilities that the so-called “Premier Class” provided. Perhaps it was the fugue state that came from being trapped on a train in the middle of godknows where in the eye of a snow storm.

Perhaps it was molten brown eyes and warm skin.

Agatha shook the idea away as she washed her hands aggressively, wanting to scrub off the desire to feel Rio again, the yearning she felt to trace the lines of her tattoo that meant her search for devotion.

“Liar,” she muttered to herself, unwilling to believe the inky promise.

But though she’d scrubbed herself of her intense desire to feel that warmth again, she paused before she left to check herself over in the mirror.

She pinched her cheeks and bit her lip to rogue them without her vanity bag to help. She wiped under her eyes to rid herself of the slight stain of mascara that came from a day of hard wear. She fluffed up her hair, trying her best with the static it had absorbed from the rough fabric of the seats she’d been leaning against.

She didn’t look bad. Not by any stretch. But she could look better. She could look miles better.

Her eyes fell to the scarf around her neck and she adjusted it so it was no longer a tight knot about her throat but instead it hung with two strands either side. It looked more casual this way, belying the fact that beneath where it lay, Agatha’s heart was storming ahead of her brain.

She left the bathroom and shivered once in the wider space between the two cars. From here she looked out the door window and saw only white as far as the eye could see. She chewed on her lip for a while as she watched the storm outside and then turned to step into her own car. She threw her head back as she walked in, aware that somewhere in the forest of seats, was Rio.

By the time she could spot their little quartet, she was feeling better and more confident. Only, as she rounded the end seat and looked to what was awaiting her, she felt her stomach flip.

Rio had turned where she'd previously sat facing the table. Now she was in the same position Agatha had been in for most of the night. She sat with her back to the window, with one leg up on the seat before her, and the other down on the floor.

As Agatha stared, she held open her jacket like an invitation.

“You’re kidding,” Agatha deadpanned, staring in disbelief at the smug smile of the woman before her.

“This way you can be more comfortable and we can both be warmer.”

“Next you’ll suggest sitting naked for more body heat.”

Rio raised her brows and her gaze travelled slowly down Agatha’s body. It made Agatha shiver again, and Rio caught it as it happened.

“Come here,” she said casually, as if they’d always sat like this. “I promise you’ll be more comfortable.”

Agatha scowled, not for the offer, but for her desire to accept it.

She shifted where she stood and watched as Rio’s grin appeared again, self-indulgent and oh-so smug.

“Who wears such a short skirt in this kinda weather anyway?”

Agatha scoffed, and snapped her fingers to get Rio to look up at her from where her eyes had been on said short skirt.

“Forgive me for not checking the forecast every hour.”

“Forgiven, sweetheart. Just worried about you being cold is all.”

“Sure,” Agatha scoffed, feeling her cheeks heat up where Rio’s gaze dropped again. “Nothing to do with checking me out.”

Rio stuck her tongue into her cheek and released a breathy laugh as she swung her other leg up onto the seat too but left enough space for Agatha to sit if she wanted to. And she wanted to.

“Isn’t that why you wore such a short skirt? To have people look?”

Agatha opened her mouth to respond but caught the glint in Rio’s eyes that told her all she needed to know. She was being goaded, ragebaited. She slammed her mouth shut and ran a hand through her hair.

And Rio just watched, just seemed delighted that even in giving no response, she had somehow got under Agatha’s skin.

“M’lady?” Rio asked after seconds of Agatha trying to decide her next move. “Do you and your skirt wanna come sit?”

Agatha scoffed but for her own dignity, she made Rio wait. She made her continue to hold up her ridiculously large and heavy leather jacket and expose herself to the cool air. She made her wait as her eyes roamed her body, hovering most obviously around Agatha’s thighs for the most part.

It was enough to warm Agatha where she stood in the cold, but not enough to make her not want Rio’s actual warmth.

So she waited until the woman before her shivered, but not before her smirk had faded, and then she turned and in as dignified a manner as possible, she shuffled back until she was sat between Rio’s legs.

Agatha moved needlessly then, prolonging the agony that Rio must have felt with her arm still up in the air holding her heavy jacket. She shuffled, moving to adjust herself so she was sitting on her jacket rather than having it bunched up behind her.

She brushed down her skirt as best she could and kept clearing her throat in an almost nervous tick until, eventually, she settled back against Rio’s waiting body.

Rio’s arms came round the moment she was still and Agatha released a silent gasp of breath at the sudden comfort they brought. The warmth was secondary to the feel of the woman enveloping her so completely.

Rio’s left arm, having remained still against her own thigh during Agatha’s little show of getting comfortable, snaked its way around her waist. Unlike before, Rio’s hand on her side was now beneath her jacket, pressed in against the thin sweater she wore.

Rio’s other arm moved like a corvid’s dark wing to cover Agatha again in her jacket. The rush of warmth that it brought made Agatha turn her head to seek more of it and in doing so she found Rio had bent to place her chin on her shoulder.

It felt both too intimate and not intimate enough. Agatha’s whole body was screaming at her to turn more into Rio, to feel more of her against her.

But her heart, the engine of everything Agatha was, its rhythm had changed in the time since she’d left the bathroom. It now beat to a different cadence, matching with the one now so close by but trapped within the body of a stranger with the promise of devotion traced into her skin.

Soon, without a word, Rio’s hold had changed so that now both arms were wrapped around Agatha and Agatha’s hands were holding her in place. Though she couldn’t see it, Agatha’s thumb traced back and forth over a honeysuckle flower at the top of the vine.

Rio’s head remained close to her own, and so when she spoke, her voice vibrated against Agatha’s cheek, and was far from the teasing tone it had been earlier.

“You warm? Comfortable?”

“Fine,” Agatha responded, a tad curt for someone so warm and so comfortable.

But she just couldn’t give Rio the satisfaction.

She soon became aware that Rio’s hands were moving against her sweater. On both sides she was toying with the soft fabric and the gentle touches were enough to dull Agatha’s defenses enough that soon she was turning into Rio more.

It felt like a biological imperative, though Agatha told herself she was doing it only for warmth. Because the air around them was still cooling, and the flakes of snow that continued to fall outside the windows made it feel impossibly colder with each passing second.

So Agatha was just being smart. It was self-preservation; a survival instinct.

And Rio responded to it, though not verbally. The stranger behind Agatha turned her own head a fraction and Agatha felt the warmth of her cheek against her own. It was enticing, and she was no longer able to deny that far from wanting her warmth, she needed to feel more of Rio against her skin.

Rio’s wine-rich breath tickled her parted lips as she made the move to turn further. Despite the strain on her neck, despite the feel of Rio’s right hand now no longer moving but instead pulled back and laid flat against her stomach, Agatha gave in.

Her eyes fluttered closed as she angled her face up and in doing so delicately brushed her lips against Rio’s own.

Somebody gasped. Perhaps both of them.

But Rio’s right hand had moved up, a strong but slow journey to seek Agatha’s jaw, to touch it with the very tips of her fingers to let her know that was where she wanted her.

Agatha allowed it because her eyes were open again and she could see that Rio was no longer smug, but looked instead cautious, almost nervous.

They kissed again. Rio had moved first this time, kissing Agatha properly. Her lips had curled around Agatha’s pillowy lower one and Agatha felt her stomach do a somersault for the gentleness of it.

She’d expected Rio might comment, might gloat, might brag or smirk or somehow tease Agatha. But instead she continued to be gentle and as each soft kiss led to another, and then another.

They remained like that for a while, the delicate kisses of two people a little unsure but unwilling to speak on it, as unwilling as they both were to stop or to pull away.

But soon Rio had moved so the angle could be better, so Agatha remained ensconced in her but so that their faces could press together. She’d moved so Agatha could feel the press of her nose against her cheek as she kissed her, so Rio could request more with her tongue, so Agatha could soon gasp audibly when she gave it.

Agatha, a solitary person in so many ways, who often longed for company she could never quite let herself seek, suddenly felt a strange sense of belonging. Strange because she’d not sought it, stranger still because as Rio adjusted them without breaking the kiss, she found herself hungrier for it.

Rio was keeping everything slow, she was controlling the kiss, even as Agatha moved her hand up to bury her fingers in dark hair. She was being gentle still, allowing Agatha to adjust if she needed. But she didn’t. She was right where she wanted to be.

It was Rio who broke the kiss first but chased Agatha’s lips again as she gasped before her.

Panting, and with her eyes closed, Agatha swallowed thickly as she tasted Rio still on her tongue. But Rio was still moving. Rio was shuffling back then away in the small space allowed her.

Agatha had moved so her back was to the chair more solidly, which meant Rio slid her left leg back and could come more around Agatha until she was turning her by curling her hand around her thighs.

Allowing this, her eyes still closed, Agatha’s legs were soon draped over Rio’s right thigh, with Rio’s hand resting patiently by the hem of her skirt above a few inches above her knee.

“Is this okay?”

Rio’s voice was soft, barely a whisper. It was low too, lower than Agatha had heard it all evening. Outside, as the snow continued to fall, settling peaceably across the tracks and fields, the sky turned darker.

In the penumbra of the evening, as fully night descended, Agatha's eyes blinked slowly open to see the woman before her, holding and watching her carefully.

Agatha didn’t know how long she’d left Rio without an answer.

The position they were in meant that she was cradled by the seat, and by Rio. It meant she had the agency to turn more if she wanted to, or to turn the opposite way if she preferred. It meant she could take a breath and feel that Rio’s warmth had spread all over her own body. She had been somehow bathed in it, somehow wrapped in it. It seeped through her skin and into her curious heart and the silent passenger who’d been waiting for this since it had first settled.

As she watched, Rio waited.

The leather jacket had slumped somewhere beneath the table but Agatha didn’t care anymore. She cared that Rio’s hand was warm against her thigh. She cared that the vines of devotion were visible against her tanned arm. She cared that Rio’s eyes were focused on her lips.

“Kiss me.”

The kiss came harder this time. Rio had either forgotten to be gentle or felt there was no need when Agatha had asked for, no, demanded her kiss.

Agatha’s hands flew to Rio’s face and she was no longer being shy about what she wanted. Their tongues met with a force that soon meant their teeth met too.

And Agatha arched up as Rio tried to gather her into her body, as if she could possibly be closer.

The hand on her thigh was no longer content with where it lay. It moved as Agatha moaned against Rio’s open mouth and travelled the short distance it needed to go to be beneath Agatha’s skirt and inches away from where she so desperately wanted it to be.

Agatha’s lungs were screaming at her and so she pulled back, but only enough so she could breathe. Not enough to be able to think. Not enough so that she had any real distance from Rio’s soft pants against her wet lips.

“Don’t,” Agatha gasped, panting as she spoke, years of practice making her defences reactive even when there was no threat: “say anything. Don’t fucking-.” Rio had kissed her to silence her, catching the corner of her lips as she pressed her nose in against her cheek.

It was enough to make Agatha stop, to make her try to catch her breath and her walls come tumbling down. Her hands had moved to Rio’s chest and she tangled her fingers in the silver chain that hung below her collar.

Rio may have taken Agatha’s warning because she remained silent but her hands continued to move.

She was pushing Agatha’s brown cord skirt up, making it bunch by her hips so she had more access, was more able to touch without barriers.

But she wasn’t able to remain silent for long.

“Are you cold?” Rio asked quietly as she kissed the corner of Agatha’s mouth again and slipped her right hand between Agatha’s thighs.

Agatha gasped quietly but shook her head as Rio’s fingers flexed where they held her left thigh.

“You smoke?” Agatha asked, though she’d seen and tasted the answer.

“Do you not like it?” Rio asked back, now nuzzling their noses together before kissing Agatha again. “I have gum in my bag if-.”

“It’s fine,” Agatha whispered, unwilling to expand on just how fine the mix of the two vices, wine and cigarettes, combined to intoxicate and ruin Agatha’s judgment.

Rio hummed her response and Agatha’s eyes fluttered closed again as her fingers flexed and squeezed her thigh.

“This okay?”

Agatha, never feeling more okay in her life, flexed her jaw as she reached to grasp Rio’s wrist.

“Ask me that again and I’ll kick you off this train.”

The smirk that Agatha hadn’t realised she’d missed returned and Agatha released her hold on her enough that Rio could move again.

As Rio’s fingers flexed and stretched up, tickling the inside of Agatha’s thigh with a silent question, Agatha moved her hand steadily along the vines on Rio’s arm. Rio was kissing along her jaw now, descending slowly to her neck, having tugged her scarf loose and thrown it away.

And as Agatha tilted her head to grant Rio the access she requested, her gaze fell to where her thumb caressed over a flower just above the crook of Rio’s elbow. Though her mind was mostly on the fingers moving cautiously between her legs and the lips against her throat, she noticed this flower was smaller than the others, somehow more delicate.

Rio paused what she was doing when she felt Agatha’s thumb press against the smallest flower and looked to what she was doing: “It was too painful. It had to be smaller. I couldn’t-.”

But she had trailed off when Agatha looked around at her.

It was such an honest answer, so truthful and unashamed, that Agatha felt her stomach flip with something a lot like affection. Agatha looked up then, meeting the gaze of the stranger who wore her heart on her sleeve.

“Pathetic,” she whispered, unable to say what her heart was already whispering. For a second something flashed in Rio’s eyes that she didn’t like, something that made Agatha feel ashamed. But then her smirk was back and Agatha gasped for the sight of it.

Because with it came the movement of her fingers between her thighs.

Rio had stretched them enough, stretched them up, so the very tip of her middle finger ghosted over her centre. She stretched her thighs open a little and as she closed her eyes again, Rio kissed her once more.

Heat unlike anything she’d ever known. Heat that had been building in her lower stomach. Heat that now settled exactly where Rio’s hand was between her thighs.

Agatha’s tights were thick but by the sudden urgency of Rio’s kiss, and how badly she wanted her and had wanted her all night, she knew Rio would be able to feel how wet she was.

Rio’s fingers moved then, slowly at first, but applying more and more pressure and then… she tore a hole in the centre of Agatha’s tights. It made Agatha frown, made a protest appear on the tip of her tongue before it was swallowed again as Rio’s index finger pressed into the damp fabric of her underwear.

“I need your vocal consent if I’m going to fuck you on this train.”

Agatha scoffed, gritting her teeth as Rio’s finger began to trail slowly up and down her clothed pussy. She could definitely feel how wet she was now. But Agatha was too turned on to be embarrassed, too desperate for Rio to get on with it to be even remotely ashamed of what she wanted.

Only, Agatha Harkness didn’t beg.

And she certainly didn’t do as she was told.

She remained silent and Rio shifted an inch to be able to lean in and press a soft kiss to the underside of her tense jaw.

“I really do need it,” she teased, applying more pressure until Agatha’s hands became fists, one of them twisting the chain she held to keep Rio in place.

“No,” Agatha grit out, causing Rio to remove her hand entirely.

“So you don’t want me to?”

Agatha tugged at Rio’s chain so roughly that Rio was pulled closer so their faces squashed together and Agatha’s nose stung for the collision that only made Rio’s grin return wider than before.

“I don’t beg.”

But Agatha was close to it. She could feel the need that devoured her more rational brain, the side of her that was capable of denying even what she so desperately wanted. And Rio was so close now, so close that Agatha could see the way her pupils had swallowed up her already dark eyes.

She could see the muscles in her face contract at her brow, she could count the dark lashes devoid of mascara but so black and thick if Agatha were still rational she’d be jealous. Instead, she was transfixed and could feel herself beginning to fall.

“No? And here I was just asking for consent.” Rio was grinning, that sick, smug, ridiculously sexy grin that Agatha wanted to slap clean off her face.

Her irrational side took over. She could no longer fight with herself so instead directed her fury into a sudden, fierce kiss that made Rio moan within seconds. She didn’t relent until Rio’s lower lip was an angry red and pouting for the bite Agatha had gifted her.

“You just,” Rio laughed breathily, her voice deeper than before, barely even recognisable. She was now nuzzling where Agatha was refusing to be gentle and was attempting to snap at her lower lip. “Have to say, ‘yes’.”

Agatha huffed, giving up on her half-hearted attempts to capture Rio’s lip between her teeth again and loosening her hold on her chain. She shifted where she sat, her legs resting over one of Rio’s still. And, in huffing a little more, she took Rio’s hand and guided it back down between her thighs.

Rio’s eyes widened, her black pupils now absorbing all of the molten brown. And Agatha sucked in a sharp breath and raised her chest out, hungry for Rio’s gaze to remain as dark as it now was.

Once Rio’s hand made contact with her soaked underwear, Agatha’s stomach flipped for it and she reluctantly, petulantly, muttered, “Just fuck me.”

The instruction was taken almost immediately. Rio chose to tease for only a little while longer, touching Agatha through the fabric still. But with Agatha’s gentle huffs, with the kisses to Rio’s swollen lips that were now as frequent as they were surprisingly gentle, Rio changed her mind.

And Agatha realised that Rio had been holding out on her until she was sure Agatha wanted it. Which made her feel somehow more feral, knowing that Rio was a tamed beast, but a beast all the same.

Rio hooked her fingers expertly around the cotton underwear that would have been lace had Agatha known that they would be seen and touched by another person that day. For Rio they would have been Agatha’s best lingerie, her most expensive, just so she could be livid that Rio had ripped them, just so she could watch those pupils swallow her gentle eyes upon seeing Agatha in something tiny and intricate and devastating.

But thoughts of what Agatha could have worn for this stranger died as she felt the brush of Rio’s warm fingers against her. Suddenly Agatha didn’t care what she was wearing or what she could be wearing. She just wanted Rio on her, all over her, inside her.

Rio’s fingers were slow in their explorations and Agatha whined with her head inelegantly thrown back and her back arched as she was touched by the girl with an awestruck smile.

“You’re so wet,” Rio whispered, half in surprise, half in smug satisfaction.

Agatha groaned her response, lifting her head back up to glare at Rio who she now felt was taking far too much time and enjoying herself far too much.

“Do you know what you’re doing down there, or-?”

Agatha released a cry as Rio’s fingers found her clit and pinched her hard enough to make her body jolt. She blinked across at Rio when the shock subsided and had to bite down on her own lip to stop the moan that threatened to spill at the sight of her smug grin.

Her legs opened more and Rio’s eyes darted down to the movement before raising back up again and Agatha saw in her eyes the same desperation she felt. The beast was leashed again, but tugging, pulling, screaming out to be released.

So Agatha grabbed the chain around her neck and twisted until Rio’s face was pressed against her own and she could taste her wine-rich, smokey breath on her tongue.

She let their lips brush and smiled when Rio made a soft noise for it.

“I can see how desperate you are to fuck me.”

Rio made another noise, a soft acknowledgement from the base of her throat.

“So go ahead. Show me what you can do.”

Agatha barely got her words out before Rio was doing just that. As they’d been breathing together Rio’s fingers had continued their soft explorations, had been testing and teasing where Agatha was sensitive and how ready she was to be fucked.

But the moment Agatha had whispered “go ahead”, Rio’s fingers had pressed down, and Agatha had felt for the first time what it was to have Rio inside her. She held in her moan, but only just, as Rio fucked her slowly with her middle finger, making sure Agatha felt each curve and line as she pushed in and pulled out.

“Like this?” Rio asked with a smirk before flicking her tongue out to taste Agatha’s lip. “Slowly so you can feel everything I give you?”

Agatha swallowed thickly, her fingers unwrapping from Rio’s chain to instead curl around her throat. “You’re a talker,” she murmured, swallowing again where Rio curled her finger inside her. “You should be concentrating.”

“On what?” Rio returned, kissing the corner of Agatha’s lips, “Fucking you? I can multitask, sweetheart. I want to know how you like it.”

The whine that Agatha released was involuntary because Rio had stopped fucking her and instead was running the very tip of her finger up to her clit then back down to her entrance, trying to caress a response from her.

The response she got was Agatha squeezing her throat, pressing her fingers and thumb in at the sides. But Rio didn’t stop what she was doing and another whine didn’t make her stop either.

Unable to speak where all she could see was smugness on Rio’s face, she closed her eyes and shifted her hips in silent encouragement to do something other than what Rio was currently doing.

“Words, sweetheart. I’ll give you anything you want if-.”

“Full,” Agatha breathed, and she could feel her face heat up with the mortification of it, though her eyes fluttered open when she felt Rio’s hand halt. “I want to feel…,” Rio’s smugness had dissolved again and she looked entranced, as if Agatha were speaking some ancient spell of enchantment.

It made Agatha pause too, made her blush seep down to her chest where she felt warmth and an unusual tenderness settle.

“I want to feel full of you.”

Rio’s tongue poked out to wet her own lips and Agatha moved away only an inch to get a better look at her face. Rio looked still awestruck and Agatha experimentally squeezed at her throat again to try for a reaction.

But Rio only gasped quietly, testing Agatha’s hold on her.

Agatha felt her swallow, saw her tongue poke in against her left cheek, and gasped herself as Rio pressed inside her once more. They maintained eye contact as Rio fucked Agatha just as slowly as before.

Agatha had never watched someone’s face as they fucked her so she didn’t know whether it was normal to look so hypnotized. But Rio, Rio looked like she was the one being fucked. And Agatha was yet to even touch her.

Her eyes were wide and so dark her irises were practically nonexistent. Her lips were swollen and her lower one had an angry red mark that tasted of blood where Agatha licked it.

But her pace was steady and firm. She was curling her finger, making sure Agatha felt everything she was giving her, making sure she wanted it enough, was wet enough, for her to take her second.

And Agatha moaned as she did, allowing her eyes to close as she adjusted to the new feeling of fullness that made her thighs quiver slightly. She could feel Rio still watching her, and could practically map the movements of her eyes all over her face even if she couldn’t see them.

“Lift your chest for me,” Rio breathed after fucking Agatha in this new way for a little while.

Agatha grunted, but did not take the direction. It made Rio chuckle which in turn made Agatha squeeze at her throat and open her eyes.

“Arch up and I’ll give you more.”

Agatha huffed a breath that became a soft, surprised moan as Rio’s thumb brushed over her needy clit and she instinctively arched for her without meaning to give in so quickly.

“Good girl,” Rio breathed, making Agatha close her eyes as she squeezed in a third finger and Agatha’s jaw dropped for the intrusion.

In any other situation, in any other time, if a stranger had called her that Agatha would have ended it right there. Or ended them. Either way.

But in Rio’s soft whisper, with the feel of her moving inside her, she found herself wanting to hear it again. So she clamped her mouth shut and focused on what her body was doing, how it was responding, and how Rio seemed to know exactly how to fuck her with barely any direction.

Rio was still slow with everything, still fucking Agatha as if she wanted her to feel every ridge, every knuckle, every stroke of her insides. But she was now giving her clit the attention it so needed.

Every so often she repeated: “good girl, sweetheart”. And on one occasion, a low, enticing whisper of “so good for me”, that made Agatha clench around her fingers.

As Agatha’s hips began to move with every thrust and her breathing became more erratic she could no longer be silent and instead made another demand: “Kiss me.”

In other trysts, kissing was a way to take control, it was a way to dominate the other person, to not have to feel their eyes on her or to simply try to get through mediocre sex.

But now, all Agatha could think about was tasting Rio again as she fucked her. She wanted Rio to invade every sense and command her entire body as she felt closer and closer to coming.

And Rio readily obliged.

She slammed their lips together with a fervour that Agatha hadn’t been expecting and so moaned for. Agatha’s hand moved from Rio’s throat to the back of it to hold her in place as she moaned more with her tongue insistent and hungry in Rio’s mouth. Agatha had no fear of being overheard, in fact she almost wished she would be just to see what Rio might do if someone discovered them.

She clenched around Rio’s struggling fingers at the thought of Rio still fucking her as people watched, at the idea she might grow possessive and feral if Agatha showed off to an admiring public.

With images of Rio looking savage with anger as she continued to fuck her hungrily, kiss her desperately, Agatha came. Her thumb was rubbing tight, fast circles around her clit and Rio swallowed the sounds of her orgasm as Agatha jerked above her and dug her nails into the tender flesh at the base of her scalp.

As she came down from her impassioned high, Agatha sank her teeth back into Rio’s willing lip. She tugged at it, not satisfied until Rio was whimpering for the pain of it. Only then did she release it and it and soothe it down again with her tongue, a wet apology for a fierce bite.

Agatha could taste the metal of Rio’s blood as she panted quietly before her. Their foreheads were resting together as Agatha’s hold on her eased and Rio pulled her fingers slowly out of Agatha’s pussy but continued rubbing gentle circles against her clit.

“Who’d have thought? When I saved you from falling on the platform that soon I’d be fucking you in your skirt.”

Agatha laughed, a short burst of breathy noise that filled her chest as Rio’s fingers slowly retreated to the safety of her damp thigh.

She grunted quietly, feeling needy still where she was no longer being touched.

“I don’t usually take on charity cases.”

Rio hummed, either unoffended or simply vaguely amused as she began kissing along Agatha’s jaw.

“Is that right?”

“Mm,” Agatha agreed, tilting her head to grant Rio more access again. “You’re not my type.”

“No? What is your type, sweetheart? Five o’clock shadow? Big sweaty balls?”

Agatha scoffed, in her mind enough still to grab Rio by the back of her hair and pull her head back. Rio gasped at the sudden movement but grinned where she now looked at Agatha’s unamused face.

“No. Girls in shitty Docs with nose piercings.” Agatha drawled, adding an eye roll to emphasise just how ridiculous that sentence sounded.

But Rio, either too arrogant, or seeing right through Agatha’s sarcasm, caught the truth behind the deflection and cocked a brow as she licked her lips, drawing Agatha’s attention to the slash of ruby red where she’d broken skin earlier.

“Good for me because I’d really like to fuck you again.”

Agatha swallowed, and looked back up to meet Rio’s gaze.

Rio was smirking, and looked far too good to be denied. And Rio took her silence for the consent it was. She’d shuffled back, slipping down a little against the window, and had guided Agatha into a straddling position above her hips, never once removing her hands from either her thighs or her waist to help as Agatha’s legs felt less confident than usual.

Agatha threw her hair back as she rested her knees by Rio’s sides and settled comfortably above her, slipping her own jacket off and tossing it to the other seats. She wanted to pull back some control, to not give in even if she could feel the ache between her thighs that told her she wanted to.

“You’d look so pretty like this on my strap, sweetheart. I wish I’d brought it with me.”

Agatha rolled her eyes but lifted her skirt more where it had fallen and now sat uncomfortably against her stretched thighs. Rio’s eyes darted down to the movement; she lifted her hips enough to give Rio a view of her ripped tights and the twisted underwear pulled to the side.

“Of course you do.”

“You don’t?”

“Do you think I’d allow you to put your cock in me?”

Rio swallowed visibly and squeezed Agatha’s hips as she rocked them, trying to entice whilst trying not to think too hard about the fact that she’d definitely allow it.

“I think,” Rio swallowed again and Agatha looked up to watch as her tongue darted out to taste the blood on her lower lip. “You’d ask for it. Audibly. Loudly. Maybe you’d even beg. Just to feel full of me.”

Agatha forced a laugh because her cheeks were flaming as her own words were repeated back to her. And, to punish Rio for them, she pushed her skirt back down and raised her hips further up, pleased Rio’s eyes moved slowly up her body until they met her gaze again.

“Tell me about it,” Agatha said, taking Rio’s right, vine-covered arm and lifting her sweater so she could feel the warmth of her hand against her bare stomach.

Rio swallowed again as her slick fingers danced across the pale skin now on show with Agatha keeping her sweater held up to just below her bra.

“You’re beautiful,” Rio muttered, her eyes unfocused on Agatha’s stomach, her mouth half open as her fingers continued to explore and Agatha’s idly moved up and down the honeysuckle on her arm.

“Unbelievably so.”

Her words made Agatha pause her movements, her fingers absently resting where Rio had admitted the pain had been too much for her.

“Say it again,” she demanded.

Rio’s hand stopped too and she looked up to Agatha’s gaze and nodded before she whispered, “You’re so beautiful.”

Agatha slid her hand slowly back up to Rio’s that now lay across her diaphragm and she held it for longer than she meant to. She was still warm even as exposed as she was with no jacket and her sweater all the way up in the cool of the frozen train.

And Rio’s hand was even warmer, fuelling the engine of her body as it lay still against her.

Neither said anything else as Agatha directed Rio’s hand to skim slowly down until it was beneath her skirt again and she gasped as her fingers made contact with her pussy.

She closed her eyes as she felt Rio stroke through her, her long fingers taking their time again, just like before. She was exploring her in a way Agatha had never allowed herself to be touched by anyone else. Usually it was a quick fumble in a stranger’s sheets, because she never let them stay in her own. It was always just to scratch an itch that never truly went away.

It felt too intimate for her to be able to open her eyes to see the expression on Rio’s face as she did it. Though she was desperate to see, dying to see what simply touching her did to Rio’s dark eyes and panting mouth.

When she’d been closer it had been somehow easier to look. But the distance between them now made her feel more exposed. So her eyes remained shut, though she imagined what she might see if she opened them.

Rio’s index finger slipped down to circle her entrance and Agatha rocked her hips to encourage it as Rio entered her again, making a soft grunt of effort as her own hips stirred beneath Agatha’s.

And Agatha smiled even as her eyes remained closed because the fantasy of Rio fucking her with a strap was clearly as shared one. Rio’s hips moved with each thrust of her finger, soon two fingers, and Agatha rocked her hips in tandem as she too imagined a toy between them instead.

“Tell me,” Agatha whispered, “Tell me about it.”

Rio whined quietly, the rhythm of her fingers and her cantering hips remaining steady as she husked: “It’s green. Seven inches. Thick. You’d look so good bouncing on it.”

Agatha laughed, a breathy noise that only emphasised her inability to catch her breath.

“Bouncing implies willing.”

Rio’s left hand tightened her grip on her thigh and she husked, “You want it as badly as I do.”

Agatha bit down on her lip, finally opening her eyes to look at the mess of the woman beneath her. But she couldn’t give in, not yet, at least. To distract Rio from her non-answer, she lifted her sweater all the way to show off her black bra. At least this was sexier than the cotton underwear she had. This had black lace decorating the top of the satin cups. Not her sexiest, but far from her least.

And Rio’s mouth fell open at the sight of it as Agatha made a show of groping her tits and moaning softly.

Rio’s hips and fingers stuttered.

“You think I’d let you fuck me with something that’s been inside other girls?”

“N-no,” Rio said quickly, shaking her head. “It hasn’t. It… It’s new. I mean, not new I… It’s, I’ve been, I’ve been saving it.”

Agatha’s hips were the ones to stutter this time but Rio was so transfixed by what she was doing she didn’t seem to notice.

“And you want to fuck me with it?”

Rio raised her gaze again and Agatha’s hips froze in place as Rio’s fingers stilled.

“Yes. So badly.”

Agatha’s mouth felt dry and her left hand, still groping her breast, fell slowly down until it found purchase on Rio’s arm.

“So you wanna fuck me badly?”

Rio’s eyes narrowed and Agatha grinned for it, pleased she’d taken back control so easily.

“No. I desperately want to fuck you.”

Agatha bit down on the corner of her lip as she surveyed Rio, so smug yet so earnest and biddable. She held her by her arm for a while, feeling the warmth of her and the flex of her forearm as they both remained still and silent.

Rio had stopped fucking her and Agatha knew she was waiting for her command.

So she didn’t give it. She instead clenched around Rio’s fingers and studied the way Rio reacted to it. Her lips, already parted, parted more. Her eyes widened and her gaze dropped.

“Trying to milk me, sweetheart? Say the word and I’ll give you-.”

Agatha’s hand flew to Rio’s mouth and she shifted her hips up with the new angle. Rio took the hint and pulled her hand from her.

“Do you ever shut up?”

Agatha grimaced as Rio licked her palm and removed her hand to wipe it over Rio’s shirt.

“It’s honestly hard to keep my tongue in my mouth with you on top of me like this.”

Agatha scoffed but appreciated the compliment as Rio scrambled to sit properly beneath her and held her now by her hips.

Agatha watched for a while, and experienced the unusual sensation of someone appreciating her who didn’t completely disgust her. Not that the girls she slept with were disgusting, but she never looked at them long enough to make an opinion other than “they’ll do”.

Already she’d spent longer looking at Rio than any of the girls she’d spent the whole night with.

Already she knew Rio did the opposite of disgust her.

“You’re not seeing anyone?”

Rio hummed in surprise at the question, distracted from her task of creeping her fingers slowly up towards Agatha’s tits, below her shirt.

“No.”

“Not even your 'one'?” Agatha probed, her thumb pressing in on a honeysuckle flower on Rio’s bicep.

Rio looked up properly then as her hands cupped Agatha’s tits. She smiled and Agatha chewed on her lip.

“Well I haven’t asked her out officially but…”

The implication was clear; the grin hadn’t been subtle. Agatha, willing to admit Rio was more interesting to look at than any other girl but not willing to give in to her romantic fantasies, pulled back.

“Oh you’re so full of it.”

“Seems like you were the one full of me a second ago.”

Rio squeezed Agatha’s tits as Agatha rolled her eyes. It became clear that the only way to shut Rio up properly was to kiss her again. So she did.

She launched at her, the noise Rio made suggesting she was taken completely by surprise when she did. But it was worth it. Rio’s mouth was already open and Agatha wasted no time exploring it and soon was rolling their tongues together as she felt Rio struggle her hands down and grasp her hips.

She could taste pennies on her tongue and something that was deliciously, inexplicably, Rio.

They kissed for long enough that they had to take three separate pauses to catch their breath. But Rio never gave up on keeping her lips on Agatha somewhere, somehow. She kissed the corner of her mouth, along her cheek, she nipped at her ear, then nuzzled in against her jaw, licked her throat.

And Agatha, a woman who barely allowed touch that wasn’t directly linked to getting her off, allowed it all.

Every one of Rio’s touches built her up to offer something she rarely ever did with words she’d never once uttered: “Your turn.”

“You don’t have to,” Rio whispered, now taking over to press soft kisses to her lips between every breath Agatha took to calm her racing heart.

“No?” Agatha asked, her own smirk growing where Rio continued to kiss her.

“No,” Rio responded quietly, too focused on continuing to pepper soft kisses that trailed along to Agatha’s jaw. And Agatha let her for a while, smiling for each one and just as curious to see if Rio meant her “no” as well as how long it would take her to grow tired of peppering her with kisses. But she didn’t grow tired. She just kept kissing her over and over again, her hands exploring over her thighs, up to her hips, her waist, reaching her ribs and holding her steadily there.

Inside her ribcage, Agatha’s heart was telling its own tale. It battered against it and Agatha grew conscious that Rio could feel its plan to escape from beneath her warm palm.

So she moved her hand to hold Rio’s jaw and make her stop.

“Okay,” she said gently, her smile fading as she saw Rio’s soft features and the molten chocolate of her eyes again, “then let me talk you through it as you fuck yourself.”

Rio looked surprised and then positively wild with excitement as Agatha settled back on her ankles and reached down to begin unzipping Rio’s pants.

As she focused on going as slow as possible she felt Rio’s eyes not on her movements but on her face.

“Let me see you,” she whispered, making Agatha look up just as she saw a triangle of exposed camo underwear.

Rio had raised her hand to stroke along Agatha’s jaw and Agatha allowed it, meeting Rio’s gaze as she smiled up at her.

“Don’t read into this,” Agatha breathed, inadvertently leaning into Rio’s fingers as they traced up her cheek. “It’s just cold. I’m just bored.”

Rio raised her brows and Agatha bit down on her lip as a flicker of surprise appeared in brown eyes.

“If you want to be in control… you can be.”

“Hilarious you think I’m not,” Agatha shot back, a little meaner than she meant it to be.

Rio’s lips twitched at the sides and Agatha felt her own mirror the movement, though she hadn’t meant them to.

“If you’re uncomfortable I can-.”

Agatha tugged Rio’s jeans down by her hips, revealing the waistband of the boxers she’d caught a glimpse of.

“Shut up.”

Rio clamped her mouth shut and Agatha felt guilty for just a second before she forced herself to utter: “I want to see how pathetic you really are.”

Rio swallowed thickly and nodded, and in her speed to get her hand in her pants and her hips shifted so she could lay back, Agatha knew she’d made the right choice.

She wanted to slip her own hand beneath her skirt again and fuck herself at the sight of Rio already so desperately compliant as she stared up at her with her eyes wide and her lips parted.

“Tell me how wet you are.”

Rio grunted quietly and Agatha smiled for it, enjoying this new side to the girl on the train.

She leant over her, adjusting her knees by her hips so she could brace herself by her head and slide her other hand slowly underneath Rio’s t-shirt.

“S-so wet.”

“Mm? For me?”

Rio nodded quickly, her lips twitching as she bit down on them. But Agatha shook her head as she watched this happen and raised her brows, “No. I want to hear you. Tell me who you’re wet for.”

“You,” Rio breathed, gasping when she felt Agatha scratch at her abdomen. “All for you.”

“Pathetic,” Agatha chided, her nails digging in where Rio whined.

She pushed Rio’s shirt up all the way, her gaze darting briefly from smooth tanned skin to desperate eyes by way of checking this was okay, that Rio was fully on board. The woman below her had nodded, soft pants now slipping from her swollen lips.

So Agatha looked back to the skin now on show and pushed the thin fabric over the mounds of Rio’s tits, revealing them to be, as she had spotted earlier, both pierced. Agatha’s mouth salivated for the sight.

Both piercings were barbells, they looked titanium, but it wasn’t the colour Agatha was interested in. On her left side the piercing held a dangling laurel leaf vine; a half-crown for the jewel of Rio’s dusky nipple.

Agatha touched the tiny metal leaves and Rio’s breath audibly hitched.

“You like them, sweetheart?”

Agatha didn’t respond immediately, moving the pad of her forefinger from the metal up to brush across Rio’s nipple.

“Do they make them more sensitive?”

Rio hummed and Agatha looked up to her, seeing her eyes were closed and her brow furrowed in concentration.

“Never been with a girl with a piercing before?”

“Answer the question.”

Agatha moved her other hand up to cup Rio’s breast and Rio whined quietly, her hand still working at herself beneath Agatha’s body.

“Yes, yes, more sensitive I-… fuck!”

Agatha had dropped her head down and tasted metal and Rio on her tongue. She smiled when she got the reaction she was looking for and though she’d planned just one taste she opened her mouth to try again.

Rio’s movements below her faltered and Agatha experimentally grazed her teeth against the soft of Rio’s tit, her tongue swirling slowly around her nipple again.

But just as Rio’s free hand had moved to the back of Agatha’s head, she pulled up and smiled down at the woman now staring open-mouthed up at her.

“I barely give you anything and you can hardly keep it together.”

As Rio began to stutter a response Agatha clenched her thighs, feeling inexplicably desperate to be touched by this woman again, or fucked, or ruined.

“Pathetic.”

Rio whined quietly as Agatha squeezed her tits and her thumbs brushed over the piercings.

“You like it when I’m mean to you?”

It was clear she did. But Agatha wanted to hear it, just as Rio had wanted to hear Agatha’s consent earlier. She just didn’t register that it was the same sort of desire. She only wanted to know this was what Rio wanted. Agatha wanted to hear a ‘yes’ just as much as Rio had.

She shuffled back a little and released her hold on Rio’s tits to glance down between them and looked to where Rio’s hand had disappeared beneath her camo underwear, where the vines of her tattoo reached down between her thighs.

Agatha could see the working of her arm and she lowered herself more so it was rubbing against her chest as she hovered closer above her. Her hand slipped between them so she could tease Rio’s crowned nipple between her thumb and forefinger and hear more of the pathetic noises it inspired.

Agatha could see the desperation in dark eyes as she smiled and asked: “Are you pathetic?”

Rio whined quietly but nodded and Agatha wet her lips before whispering: “Tell me, Rio.”

“Yes.”

“For who?”

“Y-you. Only you. Just, just you.”

Agatha smiled, and moved her hand down to rest above her heart. She could feel the ferocity of it as it thrummed away in Rio’s chest. It felt like it was trying to escape, trying to beat against Agatha’s palm instead, just as Agatha’s had tried to get to Rio’s.

And Agatha watched as Rio continued to fuck herself but focused on her dark eyes, on her bleeding lip, on the furrow in her brow. She realised as she watched her that Rio was as beautiful up close as she was when sitting opposite her and smirking.

Her smugness was beautiful, her compliance even more so.

And Agatha couldn’t help it as she brushed their lips together, a brief softness before her next words:

“You sat all night shivering, just for me?”

Rio nodded, a little whine slipping from her lips and spilling out across Agatha’s.

“And now you’re letting me, a stranger,” Agatha’s hold around Rio’s ribs tightened and she imagined slipping her fingers through the spaces between them and wrapping her fist around her heart rather than waiting for it to get to her. “Degrade you as you fuck yourself?”

Rio whimpered again, louder this time. “Ah! Please, please…”

“Please what?”

“A-Agatha, let me come, please...”

“So soon?” Agatha asked, her eyes roaming down Rio’s body now as she lifted slightly to the arm that tensed between them. Rio’s rhythm was much more random and with every twitch of her arm her hips were rising slightly.

Agatha smiled for the sight and slowly moved to raise up on her knees. She had to do it slowly, to prolong Rio’s agony as much as to not look like she was feeling feral for the sight of the woman beneath her.

She lifted her skirt to rest at her hips and watched Rio closely as she ran her own fingers through the hole Rio made in her tights, shifting her underwear aside again to fuck two fingers inside herself with little resistance she was so wet.

Rio’s whining picked up, as she watched Agatha fuck herself. And only when tears appeared in her dark eyes did Agatha release a moan as she pulled her fingers from her pussy and reached across to place them on Rio’s waiting tongue.

She allowed the woman to suck her clean and watched as she moaned for the taste of her before she instructed: “Come for me.”

Rio came with a violent lurch of her hips and a gargled moan about Agatha’s fingers but she managed to use her free arm to catch Agatha as she tipped to the side towards the table.

The catch made Agatha gasp and for a second she just looked at Rio. She was half-sat up, her eyes as dark as they were wide.

And Agatha, for a moment, lost herself in them and she did something neither of them was expecting.

She leant forwards slowly and asked a question of Rio without making a sound. She’d nudged their noses together, her hands either side of Rio’s face and her thumbs applying gentle pressure to her cheeks.

And in her cautious nuzzling, Rio had nodded, telling Agatha she wanted what she was about to do. Agatha didn’t know why she felt it was necessary to ask after what they’d just done to each other. But something, an infinitesimal whisper in her heart, told her she needed to.

Agatha led the kiss this time. It was slow, as if they had all the time in the world. And Agatha adjusted herself as they kissed so that her legs could curl around Rio and in that way she could hold her closer.

Rio was holding her like Agatha might simply melt away at any moment and the fingers that made themselves known at her hips sent shockwaves through her body and disturbed the ancient crystalline knowledge that had made a home in Agatha’s heart.

In order to breathe again Agatha broke the kiss, and Rio, intent on keeping their lips together, continued to kiss her between breaths until Agatha laughed against her grinning mouth.

She pushed her fingers further into Rio’s dark hair and raised her brows. “Can’t get enough?”

“Something like that.”

Agatha’s laugh became a gentle hum and she adjusted herself as Rio’s tight hold changed. She slipped her hands back down to Agatha’s thighs and held her there instead but tightly still, just as tightly.

“Can I get your number?”

Laughing again, Agatha dodged the next kiss, “I’m sitting on top of you. Why do you want my number now?”

“Well where do you get off?”

“I just did.”

“No,” Rio said softly, her lips twitching at the sides even as her eyes remained wide and searching, “The train. Where are you going?”

“Again,” Agatha said, “none of your business.”

She watched as Rio nodded, as she swallowed thickly and moved her left hand down to trace the column of her throat; as if her tender touch would make up for the walls she kept throwing Rio’s way.

“New York,” she eventually said, watching the way Rio’s bleeding lip glistened in the light. “I live in the city.”

“I’m Philly.” Rio returned quickly, as if she’d been desperate to make it known. “I’d like to see you again.”

Agatha raised her brows and looked up to Rio’s gaze and saw it to be needy again, but in a different way to before. She was no longer panting, no longer whining, but as Agatha shifted her hold on her throat to press her fingers against her pulse point she could feel her cantering heart.

“You would?”

“Very much.”

“I degrade you on a train and you want more?”

“I could take you to Chestnut Hill. There’s a house there with vines all over it.” Rio said quickly, almost as if she were worried Agatha would stop her. But Agatha had no intention of doing that as her gaze dropped to Rio’s arm. She reached for it and wrapped her hand around the vines there. “I plan on buying it some day. I’d like you to see it.”

She looked back up and felt her heart leap to her throat.

“Why?”

Rio smiled, and Agatha’s gaze moved to it. She saw that stupid gap in her teeth and frowned as Rio said: “None of your business.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Not adorable?”

“No.”

“Then why can’t you stop touching me?”

Agatha dropped her hands from Rio immediately and turned away from her grin.

“It's cold. I’m trying to keep warm.”

Rio was the one laughing now and the noise filled a hole Agatha hadn’t known existed in her chest.

“I’ll sit back again and you can lay against me.”

Agatha cleared her throat and before she even knew what she was doing she was moving to stand and doing so ungracefully with the limited space they had. But Rio’s helping hands were never far from her and she realised as she stood that Rio was pulling her skirt down for her either to give her more warmth or to save her dignity.

But the only impact it truly had was to make Agatha’s cheeks heat up.

She moved as Rio adjusted her position to rescue the abandoned jackets and Agatha’s scarf. And when she had them in her clutches she turned to see Rio watching her, half-reclined against the window.

It couldn’t have been comfortable and certainly when Agatha joined her she would have been even less comfortable. But she was offering with her arms open and so Agatha, to save face more than anything, moved back over.

“Here,” she whispered, stealing her scarf back and folding it up into a makeshift, thin cushion. She leant over and Rio knew to lift her head so Agatha could place it behind her.

“Thanks, sweetheart.”

Agatha rolled her eyes at this but had already turned away, ignoring the hand that had raised to caress her cheek.

She sat between Rio’s legs, using both jackets as blankets and Rio’s arms as additional, very welcome, warmth as she held her against her chest.

“You know,” Rio whispered, her voice close to Agatha’s ear. “If you need a little extra warming up…?”

Agatha laughed, turning her head slightly into Rio as she pressed her cheek against her temple.

“So pathetic.”

“Only for you.” Rio whispered, and Agatha adjusted herself so she could see Rio’s face now, and Rio began to tug her up, not commanding but enabling.

“You’re so sure I’ll allow it?” Agatha asked with an amused smile, already feeling Rio’s right hand blaze a trail down to the hem of her skirt. This was easier, much easier than the too-earnest chat of before. Of seeing Rio again, of seeing a house decorated with vines that she wanted to one day own.

“I know you don’t like to say yes but I haven’t heard a no.”

Agatha scoffed as Rio made light work of lifting her skirt to bunch around her hips.

“I’ll go slow, sweetheart.”

“Call me that again and I will say no.”

Rio smiled, wider than before, and Agatha’s eyes dropped to it the moment Rio’s fingers slipped between her thighs and her breath hitched.

Agatha grabbed Rio’s forearm and held it tight, making Rio pause the explorations of her fingers.

“Maybe I’ll edge you until this train moves again.”

Agatha laughed and Rio began to rub slow circles around her clit, barely giving her any pressure.

“You’re just not built that way.”

“No?”

“Mm mm,” Agatha smiled a little, already feeling the pressure increase. “I haven’t touched you once and you’re so keen to make me come again. You couldn’t hold out even if I could.”

Rio nudged her nose against Agatha’s cheek, “So sue me for wanting to hear those pretty noises you make.”

“You’re so pathetic.”

But Agatha’s hand had travelled up Rio’s arm again as she’d said it and her thumb was pressing into the smallest flower on her skin.

And as Rio smiled now against her cheek Agatha had to turn into her and experience it against her lips instead.

She captured Rio’s injured lower lip between her own but was soft as she held it, whimpering quietly for the teasing of her sensitive clit.

“I don’t usually do this,” she murmured, her hips twitching every so often as Rio continued to tease her with a feather-light touch.

“Enjoy being touched?”

“No. With strangers. I don’t usually…” she moaned softly, hissing as she held Rio’s arm firmer. “Gentle.”

“Sorry, sweetheart. You’re so sensitive.”

Agatha grit her teeth and Rio just smiled as she dipped her fingers to gather more of Agatha’s slick and returned to her clit again. Agatha relaxed her hold on her arm.

As she continued to run slow circles around her clit, Rio’s smile soon dissolved into something much worse. Something that made Agatha’s racing heart and heavy breathing pick up exponentially.

Because the dark haired stranger looked positively enamored. She was transfixed, transformed into someone obsessed with the way Agatha’s eyelashes fluttered, how her lips parted, how her cheeks flushed.

And Agatha wanted more of it.

“Stop, stop,” she murmured, against her own desires. She applied unnecessary pressure to Rio’s arm because Rio was already pulling away with Agatha’s instruction.

“Lay back,” Agatha said, already moving herself away with some effort to do so elegantly. She stood at the end of the seats and looked down the passageway between the rows before she began to shimmy her underwear and ruined tights down her legs.

Rio now sat up straight as if to get a better view and Agatha rolled her eyes but smiled as she stepped from her shoes to remove the fabric that pooled at her ankles.

“Enjoying the view?”

“Obviously.”

Agatha scoffed and threw the bundle of fabric at Rio’s face.

Rio’s face scrunched up in response as she caught it but she laughed as Agatha climbed back onto the seats and settled on her knees between her legs.

“Can I keep these?”

Agatha would have laughed but instead she made a strange snorting noise because Rio had sat up sharply and grabbed her bare thighs.

The stranger was grinning with Agatha’s bundled tights and underwear fallen to her lap, which Agatha quickly moved to the floor.

“I thought you were cold?”

Agatha shrugged and had no shame as Rio pushed her skirt up again and her hands slid round to grab her ass, using it as a means to pull her closer as she settled back again and Agatha caught herself just above her with her hands on the window.

The heat of her hands against the cool glass made it misty and the impression of Agatha’s hand remained as she adjusted and held Rio’s shoulders instead.

“I figured this was the best day of your life so I should do everything I could to make it as good as it could be.”

Rio wriggled her brows, “what gave me away?”

“Oh,” Agatha mused, “maybe the stupid grin.”

“You know me so well already.”

Rio’s stupid grin was still there, so bright and wide that it made Agatha slowly match it, and before she knew it she was brushing a sweep of dark hair from Rio’s face.

It was an uncharacteristically tender move and as Rio’s grin faded, so too did Agatha’s. Agatha could see Rio taking her in. She could see her drinking her in, her eyes darting all over her face as Agatha’s did the same to her. They looked at each other for a while, Agatha biting down on her lip as she took in Rio’s dazed expression.

But a noise, as unexpected as it was unwelcome, made Agatha freeze and it took Rio pulling her down and tugging the jackets up again for her to realise what the noise meant.

“Close your eyes,” Rio whispered, “You’re covered. I’ve got you.”

Agatha couldn’t breathe suddenly, and couldn’t hear either. Her head was against Rio’s chest and she could feel only the heavy tattoo of her heart as someone walked along their car.

Her skirt was up around her hips and with only her own jacket covering her she felt exposed and incredibly stupid.

But Rio had her. She’d promised she had her and Agatha, stupid or not, believed her.

Far from her earlier fantasies, the reality of being caught like this was as unsexy as it was terrifying. She felt the presence of the intruder now nearby as Rio’s arms tightened around her and one hand slid down to cover her ass.

“She asleep?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause in which neither Rio nor the man said anything and Agatha felt her arm constrict around her waist and the hand on her ass grip her as if leaving her mark would tell the world no one could look at her but Rio.

Agatha’s heart thundered in her chest, the fantasy becoming more appealing again as Rio’s grip strength increased.

“You wanna wake her for some fun?”

“You should probably move along.” Rio’s voice was harsher than she’d heard it all night and she felt her hold become unyielding now.

And Agatha, less than totally sober and drunk on the feel of Rio holding her so fiercely, imagined the vines along Rio’s arm had come alive. They were snaking their tendrils around her and tying her to Rio. Slipping between her thighs and around her waist until she was covered in Rio.

“Don’t be like that, cutie. We’ve got some wine and can keep you and your sleeping friend here as warm as-.”

Agatha, wrapped up in Rio’s devoted arms, didn’t know what happened next. But Rio had jerked and suddenly hissed: “Hey, get the fuck away.”

Agatha’s breath hitched quietly and she curled her fingers round the collar of Rio’s t-shirt, half a warning, half for her own reassurance.

“Suit yourself, hot stuff.”

“Hey!”

It happened before Agatha even knew she’d done it. But she’d pushed up, ripping herself from Rio’s arms and the imagined vines that held her.

“Fuck off outta here!”

Agatha’s hand was still on Rio’s chest but Rio had sat up despite this, tugging Agatha closer to her in the process and making sure she was still covered where it mattered.

“Relax, sweetheart.” She whispered, her hold back to being so tight she was leaving her mark.

“Woah,” the guy with his arms up in faux-surrender announced, “Just a compliment, lady. You’re hot stuff too.”

Agatha made to rip herself from Rio but Rio was exactly as strong as she felt and kept Agatha exactly where she was; seething in her arms.

The guy scoffed, the noise making Agatha see red though she couldn’t really understand why. But he left, heading back the way he came having not found what he was looking for.

“Sweetheart, you okay?” Rio asked quietly, her hold still intense where Agatha’s body still felt tight.

But Agatha wasn’t. She’d realised the moment she’d heard the car door close exactly why she’d reacted the way she had. The intrusion had been a reminder that their little bubble was just that: a bubble.

Sure to burst. Soon to burst.

“Don’t call me that,” Agatha protested, struggling enough that Rio loosened her hold and Agatha was able to push her back so she could sit up on her knees between her legs again.

The jackets had pooled behind her with Rio’s slipping almost to the floor but the heat of indignity meant she didn’t bother to reach for either of them.

She was breathing heavily, the tips of her fingers resting lazily on Rio’s jean-covered thighs. Between them, a glimpse of camo underwear that soon Agatha was touching with a curious index finger.

“Come back,” Rio called softly, the tips of her own fingers just barely grazing Agatha’s thighs. “We’re alone again. Let me finish what I started.”

Rio’s soft touch and softer smile eased Agatha down from whatever indignant rage she could feel building up. But only enough to take the edge off, and only just.

She stared at where her finger tapped the pattern of Rio’s underwear and cleared her throat quietly, taking a second to think.

Rio was still touching her gently, and it felt reassuring, the kind of physical reassurance she wasn’t used to. But the kind that was still tentative, as if Rio were worried she’d push her away again or shout at her to fuck off like she’d just dismissed the guy who’d interrupted them.

She exhaled slowly and traced the small line along the waistband of Rio’s underwear visible between the opening of her jeans, two inches worth, if that.

Everything was quiet.

It was just Rio and the snow that surrounded them and the silent passenger patiently listening to Agatha’s heart.

“No,” Agatha breathed out, her gaze inadvertently raising to see her own reflection in the dark window. There she was, sitting tall amidst the falling snow. She looked softer, sort of hazy around the edges.

Her hair was wild; a nest of tangles from the static of the rough fabric of the chairs and from Rio’s fingers running through it. Her lips were swollen, her usually blue eyes much darker.

But something else, something about the falling snow and the pink cheeks made her look and feel different entirely.

Her gaze fell back to Rio, who was waiting for her, the person who had made her different. She had that same expression again. She looked totally entranced, unashamed of whatever her exact feelings were and that she was not only wearing them on her sleeve but on her face.

“Is there enough room to lay beside each other?”

Rio considered for a second and then nodded.

“Yeah, yeah, let me…”

Agatha remained still, watching her soft reflection and the softer snowfall about her. And Rio moved, pulling her leg free from beside Agatha’s unmoving body. She adjusted and then turned onto her side and Agatha soon followed, lying on her right to face Rio on her left.

It was uncomfortable but Agatha wouldn’t admit that and Rio would never have complained.

“Are you warm enough?”

The question went ignored as Agatha used her left hand to tug Rio’s shirt up enough to expose a flat stomach and the soft down of hair that led to the waistline of her underwear.

“You don’t have to,” Rio murmured as Agatha’s fingers explored over the warm skin. “This isn’t comfortable and-…”

But Agatha’s hand had pushed upwards and her fingers danced over the metal pierced through Rio’s nipple. It was a light touch but enough to silence Rio as she lay staring at Agatha.

There was a noise somewhere overhead, a distant crackling and the sound of metal on metal. It made them both look up and in instinctive synchrony they turned back to one another.

“Here,” Agatha breathed, spreading her fingers out slowly until they engulfed Rio’s breast fully and she held it properly in her palm. “Can you reach and…?”

Rio had anticipated her again and Agatha pressed closer to her as Rio reached up beneath her sweater. Agatha was used to women who could undo her bra with only a little effort.

What she wasn’t used to was a warm hand that trailed first along her spine and fingers that danced across her skin as if they were worthy of exploration and tenderness.

“Rio,” Agatha whispered, a question in her tone that was answered by Rio’s splayed fingers and warm palm pressing into the middle of her back as Agatha’s hand remained where it was on her chest.

“We have time,” Rio answered, “I want to enjoy you.”

Agatha bit down on her lip and felt her walls build up as Rio moved the inch she needed to nudge their noses together.

“Lift your head,” she whispered, moving so she could lift her arm between them, “Rest on my arm. It’ll be more comfortable.”

“You don’t need to,” Agatha started, but even as she did Rio had already moved and Agatha with her so she could rest on it.

“You ever allow anyone to look after you, sweetheart?”

Agatha scoffed, feeling goosebumps where Rio’s fingers tickled over her skin just below her bra strap.

“I don’t need looked after.”

“Maybe not,” Rio whispered, nudging their noses, “But I’m here and I’d like to.”

Agatha felt the soft ping of her bra being opened and was vaguely surprised at how efficiently Rio had done it. The surprise curdled into suspicion and she couldn’t even enjoy Rio’s fingers as they caressed along the skin of her back now free from the hold of her bra.

“You say that to all the girls?”

“I’m saying it to you,” Rio breathed, her hand moving to Agatha’s shoulder to curl around it. Agatha moved her own hand down to rest at Rio’s ribs; deciding if she weren’t getting much then Rio wouldn’t be getting any.

“If we were at mine,” Rio added as Agatha rolled her eyes, “I’d have you fully naked, warm under my sheets. And when I was done with you, I’d run you a hot bath and sit on the side and wash your hair. In the morning I’d-…”

“I’m more interested in the bits between the nakedness and the bath,” Agatha lied, fighting off the image of Rio’s hands in her wet hair, the imagined ache she’d feel between her legs being soothed by the warm water and soft attentions. No one had ever washed her hair for her before. No one had even offered.

Rio only smiled and slipped her hand across Agatha’s back until it rested in the small of it.

“Want to sit up so I can take your bra off for you? If you just pull your arms out of your sleeves you can leave your sweater on. It’s cold and-.”

“I’m fine,” Agatha lied again, the feel of her loose bra almost as aggravating as Rio not touching her yet.

She cleared her throat and tried her hardest not to appear too needy as she was the one to nuzzle this time.

“Touch me,” Agatha whispered, knowing time was running away from them and she couldn’t stand not to have Rio’s hands all over her for the amount they had left.

“Demanding,” Rio accused with that smirk, and moved her hand back up and round to Agatha’s front where she pushed between them and up beneath Agatha’s loose cup.

Rio kissed her as her hand enveloped her breast and Agatha moaned for the intensity of her squeeze and the taste of her mouth.

The kiss deepened as Rio lifted up and titled her head and Agatha had to fight off a moan for the subtle dominance of Rio as she palmed her breast and slipped her leg between her own.

Agatha moved her hand down to Rio’s hip and from there slipped her fingers below the waistband of Rio’s underwear to feel the warm, uncharted skin at the top of her ass.

Rio broke the kiss without warning and Agatha made a noise of throaty protest as she chased her lips.

“Wait, Agatha, wait.”

“For what?” Agatha huffed, her hand pushing down before it was taken away by Rio’s and Agatha now lay untouched and full of fury.

“Are you kidding?”

Rio grinned at her as she slid and managed to stand between the seat and the table.

“Rio, what-?”

But Rio had looked over the seats in both directions. She’d begun to push her loose jeans down over her hips and Agatha could only watch as they fell from her thighs and down her calves to pool at her ankles.

“I figured just because we’re technically in a public place, and just because it’s cold, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy everything I have to offer.”

As she kicked them off Agatha looked at the camo print of Rio’s boxers and raised up onto her elbow.

“Boxers?”

“Yes. I almost wore my favourite rocketship ones.” Rio said, glancing down at herself and then checked over the seats again. In the time it took her to look away Agatha had curled her fingers into the waistband at the centre of them.

She was toying between making fun of what Rio had just said and running her tongue all over Rio’s abs.

So she settled for something else entirely.

“Isn’t it a bit redundant,” she asked, trying to keep her tongue inside her mouth, “to have camouflage underwear? Just go commando, no?”

“Would you prefer I had?” Rio was grinning again and Agatha caught it as she raised her gaze up to her face.

“You’re so sure I’m into this.”

Rio raised her brows and crossed her hands over herself to do something Agatha wasn’t expecting. She’d taken her shirt clean off and revealed what Agatha had only seen glimpses of.

Rio’s gaze was back over the seats again, checking ahead and behind, but Agatha’s was hungrily washing over the expanse of skin on show for her. Despite the cold, as Agatha sat up, unable to process the sight properly from a right angle, Rio stood there with her smug grin.

“That naked body heat thing you mentioned earlier might be worth trying.”

“I am not getting naked on a train,” Agatha protested, no longer touching Rio but doing her best to keep her eyes on her face.

“That’s okay,” Rio, her eyes back up and down over the seats, said.

“You’ll get caught.”

“No one’s coming.”

“Unlike that guy?”

“What guy?” Rio asked, momentarily startled as she checked the car. She huffed when she saw no one was there but Agatha was distracted by the curves of a perfect pair of tits to take any great joy in her annoyance.

Rio placed her finger under Agatha’s chin to lift it up.

Agatha scowled.

“The guy earlier who interrupted.” She snapped as she pulled her chin away, clearing her throat dismissively. But her eyes roamed back to the shadow of abs as Rio stood a little to the side of her, moving to get a better view down the aisle.

“The sick fuck who tried to touch you?”

Ah. There it was. The reason Rio had jerked up and shouted. Agatha’s heart skipped a beat as she raised her gaze again and caught Rio staring down at her.

She’d been right before in her little fantasy; Rio would become a beast if anyone so much as looked at her.

It was this, the slight hardening of Rio’s jaw at the reminder of the intruder and the desire to see what might happen if there was a risk again, that made Agatha cross her own arms over herself and remove her sweater.

She shrugged off her fallen bra and lifted her hips to begin pushing down her skirt. But something stopped her. Rio stopped her.

Rio, who’d been standing tall, on lookout for anyone coming, now had her full attention on Agatha.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought you wanted us naked?”

Rio scoffed and Agatha smirked and held her hands up, “Are you going to help me?”

Rio worked her jaw but Agatha watched her eyes trail down her chest and there they stayed until she was kneeling before her, half below the table with her fingers now tucked into the top of Agatha’s skirt.

“Can you reach my jacket?”

“What?”

“My jacket,” Rio indicated with her head, “Put it over your shoulders. I don’t want you to get cold and…” she cleared her throat and Agatha felt her grip tighten as her dark eyes fell to her chest again, “it’ll keep you covered so only I can see.”

There it was again. Agatha had a hard time holding back her grin as she shrugged.

“I think I’m warm enough.”

She felt Rio’s fingers flex against her stomach where they remained dipped into the top of her skirt.

Rio raised up a little more and her eyes darted to Agatha’s tits as she took a deep inhale and her chest expanded with it.

“Seeing as I don’t get the privilege of seeing you in my t-shirt over breakfast in the morning,” Rio purred, the fingers of her right hand swirling up Agatha’s skin to circle her breast, “I’d really like to see you in my jacket while I eat you out, sweetheart.”

Agatha’s breathing had picked up, her cheeks and chest tinged pink again.

But Rio was so charming, and Agatha wanted her to do so much more than just tease her with her soft touch that she gave in.

But not so easily. She made a show of reaching only her left hand across for the jacket so Rio could keep a teasing over her tits.

“So demanding,” she muttered, making Rio scoff quietly and lick her lips as she slid her hand back down.

“It’s nice for you to listen to my demands,” Rio said with a smile so disarming Agatha almost forgot she was giving in.

She shrugged the jacket over her shoulders and Rio began to tug at her skirt.

“I’m only doing it because I’m cold and a little drunk,” Agatha reminded, making sure her chest was still visible in the opening of the leather.

Rio stopped her tugging and Agatha raised her brows down at her.

“Something wrong?”

“How drunk are you?” Rio asked hurriedly, shifting where she knelt.

Agatha scoffed and rolled her eyes. She lifted her hips to help Rio even as she remained still.

“It’s not funny,” Rio said quietly, leaning further up between Agatha’s legs. “Are you too drunk for this?”

Agatha tilted her head as she looked down at the woman between her thighs. She looked serious, and her furrowed brow looked as pained as it was concerned.

“Agatha,” Rio insisted, her hold on Agatha’s skirt dropping so her hands could move to hold her hips instead. “Is what we’ve been doing okay?”

Agatha was chewing on her lip as Rio’s concern sparked something in her that flamed from the left side of her chest outwards.

“I want,” Agatha said slowly, suddenly breathless with the ‘want’ she felt, “you to take my skirt off, and to be naked under your jacket. And I’m not too drunk for it. Okay?”

She’d reached for Rio’s chin and held her face in her hands, brushing her thumb along her cheek.

“But you should know that I’m not sitting my bare ass on these seats so as soon as my skirt’s off it’s going back beneath me. Got it?”

Rio’s lips twitched and Agatha sucked in a breath that hitched as Rio’s face calmed and her eyes closed as she nuzzled into Agatha’s palm.

Softer than the snow landing across the tracks, but infinitely more beautiful, Agatha held her breath as Rio kissed her there and then held her hand in place as she kissed the inside of her wrist.

“It’s just sex,” Agatha said, interrupting the vision before her. The vines that existed on Rio’s arm and crept up her thigh with her hold there seemed to ripple in protest at her words. “No need to be so soft.”

Rio kept her gaze down after that. She was still slow and gentle, and with every touch and tug of Agatha’s skirt seemed to be doing her best to make sure Agatha was okay, but she didn’t look up at Agatha again.

It wasn’t until Agatha’s hips had been raised and Rio’s t-shirt, rather than her skirt, placed below her ass, did Agatha realise that far from the comments Rio had enjoyed earlier, that this last one might have actually hurt her.

But Rio was still touching her, her lips never far from Agatha’s skin, her arms now looped beneath her thighs. Rio had felt how wet Agatha was and now she could see and smell it too. Her desire for Rio was painted all over her thighs. And Agatha wanted her to taste how much she wanted her, because she couldn’t tell her, but her body could do it for her.

Agatha had her hands in Rio’s hair. She was scratching and pulling and so focused on Rio’s hooded gaze that still hadn’t raised to meet her own that she felt no shame that she was spread open and exposed to a woman she’d just met in the middle of a quiet train car.

Rio’s fingers were pressing into Agatha’s thighs and she could feel the flutter of her breath against her as she held still.

“Hey,” Agatha prompted, tugging at Rio’s hair to try and get her to look up at her. But only when she moved her left hand down to cover herself between her thighs did Rio look up.

Rio’s dark gaze flickered over Agatha’s face, taking in every feature in turn. Then it began to drift, slowly falling down her throat, over her collarbone, hovering around her tits, then her abdomen, down to her stomach and where her hand lay.

Somewhere between fascination and reverence, Rio’s gaze made Agatha feel hateful for making a woman who’d carved fidelity into her skin kneel on a dirty floor.

“This isn’t what I want,” Agatha breathed, not a lie this time, but not the exact truth.

Rio’s eyes raised again but this time her body moved with them and she uncurled her arms from Agatha’s thighs and placed them instead parallel on the seat beside them as she raised up.

“Okay,” Rio agreed, a smile tugging at her lips that Agatha knew was placatory rather than honest. “We don’t have to do anything you-.”

“Use my jacket,” Agatha said, hurrying the words out before she could stop herself. “Under your knees.”

Rio raised her brows and Agatha rolled her eyes when she saw her tongue sticking into her cheek.

“Quickly.”

Rio grabbed her own jeans instead, folding them and then with some difficulty moving to kneel on them with the little space she had. When she was done she turned to Agatha expectantly and Agatha raised her brows as she watched her.

In the late hour, the glow of the snow outside their only light source, Rio’s dark eyes were midnight black with distant stars. Her lips seemed unable to touch each other and had been like that a while now; parted and waiting.

And Agatha reached for her warm cheek, endlessly entranced by the tilt of a head as it sought more contact from her.

Rio’s hand raised to hold her wrist and Agatha’s gaze moved to the inky vines that now stretched up to meet her own skin.

“Tell me what you want,” Rio breathed out, the words barely made sound but the motion of them in the still air enough to make Agatha gasp quietly.

Agatha’s thumb caressed a soft cheek and then she moved her other hand to uncover herself and shifted her hips forwards a little.

Rio’s gaze fell again as did her hold on Agatha’s wrist, which meant that Agatha’s hand fell too. But Rio didn’t go to where Agatha had been intimating.

At least, not immediately.

Instead, she raised up and held Agatha by her ribs as she pressed a kiss between the valley of her breasts.

Agatha gasped quietly as Rio’s lips trailed down her abdomen and she keened as Rio used her teeth when she got to her stomach. She’d nipped at the soft flesh there and Agatha felt her cheeks and chest heat with the flames of her desperation.

“Rio,” Agatha whined, feeling Rio’s hot breath getting closer and closer to where she needed it. But Rio didn’t respond, too busy placing open-mouthed kisses down to her right thigh.

“Go slow,” Agatha mumbled, one hand finding purchase in Rio’s hair, the other finding Rio’s own.

Rio looked up at her, her face just an inch from Agatha’s cunt. She opened her fingers to slip them between Agatha’s and in that way held her hand as it remained curled around her thigh.

“Okay, sweetheart,” she purred, “I’ve got you.”

Agatha lost her breath the moment Rio’s tongue flicked out and lapped once at her clit. She’d hardened it, so the very tip caressed over her clit with expert precision. And her hold on Rio’s hair and hand tightened as Rio began to deliver soft, slow kitten licks to her clit and Agatha’s head rolled back as she fought to keep her hips still.

Rio was true to her word and went maddeningly slowly. She was clearly a passionate eater. She explored Agatha with soft laps and broad, long strokes until Agatha felt mad with the need for release. And soon she’d slipped the hand that wasn’t holding Agatha’s around to finger her through it.

As Agatha’s breathing, as her moans and subtle movements, increased, so too did Rio’s efforts. Her delicate licks became longer, pressing harder, but she remained slow with everything she was doing.

If Agatha had any neurones firing she might have been impressed by her ability to do exactly as she was told.

But with her tongue exploring more, with her index finger thrusting in and out of Agatha, sometimes joined by her tongue teasing at her entrance, Rio added her own moans to the cacophony.

The sound of them, and Rio’s expert tongue, of the nose that bumped her clit whenever she dipped lower, it all made Agatha come harder than she had before.

And Rio didn’t stop. She didn’t let up or go easy. She seemed suddenly ravenous for whatever Agatha could give her. She continued to eat her out until Agatha’s moans turned to whines and she had to wrench Rio’s head back to make her stop, because she was as yet unable to use her words.

With burning cheeks and a scarlet chest, Agatha was panting as she looked down at Rio’s smug grin, and at the tongue that traced along it to take in more of Agatha’s taste.

“I said slow,” Agatha chastised, far from the gratitude she should have offered.

“Forgive me, sweetheart.” Rio laughed out, delirious, the lower half of her face slick with Agatha, “You taste so fucking good.”

Agatha’s hips shifted and Rio, her head tugged back at an uncomfortable angle, slid her finger from inside Agatha and moved it blindly up to brush against her clit.

Agatha grunted quietly, unable to not rock her hips with every brush of Rio’s finger just as she was unable to not comment on the way Rio’s lips glistened in the dim.

“And you,” she accused, “are a messy eater.”

Rio laughed as she licked her lips, “Forgive a girl for enjoying her meal.”

Agatha arched a brow and bit down on her lip as she whined suddenly for the protesting of her swollen clit. Rio took the hint and lessened her movements.

“Slow,” Rio whispered, “See? I can go slow.”

Agatha scowled, her hips stuttering from over-sensitivity but unwilling to give in to it.

“Can I clean you up? I promise I’ll be gentle.”

It was then Agatha let go of Rio’s hair entirely. And Rio smiled as she took the invitation and moved her damp hand to splay out across Agatha’s lower abdomen as she buried her face against her pussy again.

Her tongue swirled and lapped, licked and tasted, and Agatha could only breathe through it as she watched. Rio didn’t seem to be trying to build her up again. She was just doing as she’d said she would and was, by the soft noises she made as she did, enjoying every second.

“Enough,” Agatha husked when it felt like she couldn’t stand it any longer.

And Rio lifted her head and looked up at Agatha, not moving away by much but pulling her tongue back into her mouth, her nose just nuzzling Agatha’s neat, dark pubes.

“I can stay down here?” Rio offered, moving back enough so she could be heard, “Go so slow and so gentle you can sleep through it?”

Agatha’s throat was dry, so dry as she swallowed it almost hurt.

“Then how,” her voice was raspy, so much so that Rio’s brow twitched as she spoke, “how will I get you off?”

Rio bit down on her lip as Agatha cleared her throat once, then again. Agatha coughed, and scowled for it as Rio began to grin and raised up once more. They were still holding hands against Agatha’s thigh.

“If we lay back down we can both get off again.”

“I’m not lying on this seat naked,” Agatha protested even as Rio’s free hand raised up to brush down the pink skin between her breasts and calmed her rising indignation. Agatha simultaneously raised her free hand to wipe over Rio’s mouth and chin.

Rio nodded in response after she was done but seemed intent on touching Agatha still, rather than helping her put her clothes back on.

“Does this happen,” Rio whispered as she indicated the flush over Agatha’s chest, “All the time?”

Agatha arched a brow and glanced at Rio’s hand that was now tracing soft infinity symbols across her chest.

“When…,” Agatha started and then cleared her still dry throat, “Just sometimes.”

Rio nodded. She trailed her fingers to circle Agatha’s left breast and framed her nipple with her fore and middle fingers.

Agatha watched as Rio licked her lips and considered it for a while before she slid her hand down to her stomach and scratched across it. It felt like she was being memorised; as if the dark of Rio’s eyes were trying to absorb as much of her as possible.

Rio’s hand moved slowly back up her stomach and Agatha kept her eyes on Rio’s spellbound gaze as she spread her fingers across Agatha’s sternum. If any other woman had touched her like this Agatha might have slapped their hand away, told them to stop or to get on with it.

But she couldn’t move. She was frozen in place beneath Rio’s touch, which, though warm, could not fully melt away the ice that had built up over years of practiced, preserving cold.

Still, it was melting away the edges of her, and Rio’s soft touches, the exploration of her body from her thighs to her jaw, lasted Agatha didn’t know how long. But she could have sat there all night if it meant seeing Rio so transfixed.

A shiver was what ended the show. Rio had looked up as Agatha’s body betrayed her and reminded them both that it was cold, that they were practically naked on a stranded snow-bound train.

“Let me help,” Rio whispered, “I’ll help you put your clothes back on.”

Agatha could only nod, but didn’t move much otherwise. Their hands disentangled and Agatha flexed her fingers, wondering why they felt stiff and strange without Rio’s between them. But she shook it off, suddenly incessantly shivering for the memory of the snow.

Rio raised up to stand between her legs and grabbed her sweater from where it had been thrown to the side.

She looked over the seats as Agatha looked up at her and waited for Rio to make her next move.

But as Rio turned back to her to help her out of the jacket, Agatha came back into herself. She couldn’t stand the indignity of letting Rio do it for her. She wasn’t a child. She wasn’t incapable. She wasn’t frozen in place by the abs on display before her.

She shrugged the jacket off quickly and snatched her sweater back to pull it over her head as quickly as possible, and in doing so she shut herself off from Rio’s help.

So instead Rio took up her bra and folded it gently to place on the table and Agatha blushed for having forgotten it in her haste to become decent again. Neither said anything about it but Rio stepped aside, giving Agatha more space.

But this pissed Agatha off more, and made her snatch her skirt up before Rio could reach it.

“Hey,” Rio uttered, her hand reaching out to stop Agatha as she was shuffling to slip her skirt back over her feet.

“You okay, sweetheart?”

“Fine,” Agatha managed, but could barely meet Rio’s gaze, even as she sat beside her and was trying to turn her head to look at her.

“Are you tired? We can just-…”

“Enough. I’m fine. Lie down,” Agatha hissed, managing to struggle into her tight corduroy skirt, and pull her head away from Rio at the same time. She threw her hair back in an attempt to make it less like a bird's nest and more the soft blow out it had once been.

“Agatha?” Rio asked, her tone as soft as the sky’s white offering that surrounded them, “We have time.”

“Could you just lie back?” Agatha whispered, shuffling now to return to her earlier position but holding herself up on her elbow to wait for Rio’s arm.

Rio obliged, as Agatha knew she would, still in nothing but her boxers and now sporting the repeated braille of “cold” across her tanned skin. Agatha cleared her throat when she settled and moved her hand to Rio’s hip, tracing her fingers over the skintight camo fabric there, reading her body with a soft, warming brush over her thigh.

Rio, nuzzling in as she had before, rubbed up and down Agatha’s arm. It softened her. But only slightly.

“You’re kinda mean, you know.”

“I thought you liked that,” Agatha said, her voice as flat and uninterested as she could possibly make it.

“Usually girls are much more appreciative when I go down on them.”

Agatha scoffed, enjoying Rio’s slight flinch, being so close.

“You want to talk about other girls right now?”

“I want to talk about liking that you’re a little… frosty.”

Agatha’s tongue, ready to spit vitriol, froze in her mouth. She blinked and pinched the fabric of Rio’s underwear as a means of distraction.

“Was that… a pun?”

“Maybe,” Rio shrugged, “Did you like it?”

Agatha rolled her eyes but Rio had pressed a kiss to her lips before she could respond and muttered: “I’m taking that as a yes.”

She couldn’t help the laugh that she released, encouraged by Rio’s smile against her cheek as Agatha tried to hide her face against her bicep beneath her head.

“Pathetic,” Agatha managed to say as Rio hummed against her. Her hiding soon became nuzzling and Agatha sought more heat from Rio, turning her face back to find her lips again and kiss them.

Rio hummed into the kiss and Agatha smiled because it sounded like an agreement. They kissed slowly, and Agatha, aware that Rio’s skin was warm but it was still so, so cold, began to rub up and down Rio’s side.

“It’s okay,” Rio murmured, responding with a shiver that gave away her lie, “Here.”

She peeled away, causing Agatha to shift for the movement of her arm beneath her head. Rio returned with her jacket and Agatha watched carefully as she spread it across the both of them.

It was large enough that it covered both their top halves and Agatha felt some of that same strange warmth she’d felt the first time she’d put it on. She knew now it wasn’t the jacket that brought the warmth.

Agatha let her fingers dance up to Rio’s stomach and watched her dark gaze as she slipped her hand beneath the waistband of her underwear.

Rio’s breath hitched and Agatha smiled for the sound.

“Maybe this is a good way to show my appreciation. I think you’ll enjoy it more than whatever those other girls can offer,” Agatha whispered, her tease hiding her hope.

She said it as she pushed her fingers below the waistband of Rio’s underwear and she gasped for the feel of damp curls and a pussy so wet she knew Rio must have been feeling desperate for so long.

Rio’s eyes had fluttered shut but Agatha encouraged them open again by tracing her parted upper lip with the tip of her tongue. It was enough to shock Rio back to life and for her hand to slip between Agatha’s thighs and continue what it had started earlier below the skirt.

“Slow,” Rio whispered, “Don’t rush.”

Agatha almost protested, almost simply ignoring Rio but something about the look in her black eyes, or perhaps the way she could feel the warmth seeping in from all sides, made her listen.

And maybe, maybe they were both thinking on time and how pleasure of any kind hastens it. So slow, as Agatha had asked for, and now Rio too, could trick the clock into unlearning the language of time.

It was painful, the pace, the angle, the position they were in, how sensitive Agatha was. But neither said a word. Neither complained. Neither adjusted.

Agatha’s hand, intent as it had been when she’d first got on this train, to type, to work, was now fucking a stranger and doing it slowly, as purposefully as she could. For a woman who liked to get off and get out, the change in tempo felt unusual. But her body, the very rhythm of her heart, had adjusted to it as ice turns to water. Her fingers had melted into Rio’s warmth and she twisted her hand to thrust two fingers inside her, her thumb now brushing up alongside her clit with barely-there friction.

And Rio was matching her almost movement for movement. Her thrusts were a little stronger and Agatha kept looking at the vines that seemed to come alive with each flex and ripple of a strong bicep as it moved enough to make the jacket slide down.

They built each other up slowly, impossibly so, as slowly as it takes a solitary snowflake to become a deluge. Neither was ready or willing to push the other too close to the edge too soon.

But Rio steadily began to increase the pressure, to fuck Agatha a little harder after minutes of teasing, of edging, of aching bliss.

Agatha came with her mouth on Rio’s, her moans swallowed eagerly by the woman whose fingers curled inside her and kept her orgasm going until Agatha had to whine to get her to stop.

Rio removed her hand as Agatha continued to fuck her slowly and she raised her own up to her lips and sucked Agatha off of them, making Agatha moan for the sight and increase the ferocity of her thrusts.

With her hand free now, Rio slipped it beneath Agatha’s shirt and curled it around her breast, kneading it as slowly and forcefully as she’d just fucked her. Rio’s hips began to move and her whining became more desperate.

It became clear that Rio was close soon after and she clutched at Agatha, her fingers leaving their marks on her skin, their faces pressed together and lips a breath apart.

“Say my name.”

“Rio.”

“A-again.”

“Rio.”

Rio came with a jerk of her hips and a half-contained shout that sent her tumbling backwards and falling almost entirely off the seat.

Agatha’s hand had been painfully ripped from where it had been between her thighs but she’d laughed for the mortification of Rio who now was blushing and scrambling back up.

“That good, huh?” Agatha flexed her fingers, feeling the ache of minutes spent slowly fucking making themselves known. She wasn’t used to it.

“Something like that,” Rio huffed, a smile making its way to her face again as she kissed the back of Agatha’s raised hand and then dutifully sucked her own taste off her fingers.

Despite the sight, despite the way it made her stomach flip, Agatha couldn’t help but feel she’d been denied something as Rio slowly pulled her fingers from her swollen lips.

“Here,” she offered, already wiping Agatha’s hand on her own soiled t-shirt grabbed from the side.

“You didn’t need to,” Agatha said quickly, avoiding eye contact as Rio looked at her and raised her brows.

Thankfully for Agatha she said nothing and instead began to shuffle away from the pair of seats and Agatha took it for what it was: not a rejection, just Rio’s need to put her clothes on again.

It was a chance to see Rio standing again, almost totally naked. She didn’t spot Rio checking the aisle as she stood there and reached for her shirt first.

And Agatha got one last look at her pierced tits and soft abs before they were covered by the thin black t-shirt.

Agatha swallowed. She gulped down the regret of their meeting, of having a tryst on a train. If they’d met in a bar, on the subway, in the street, Rio wouldn’t need to cover up. She’d instead lay back down and Agatha could feel her skin against her own, and place her hand where she could feel her heartbeat.

She moved when Rio’s t-shirt rested above the waistband of her underwear and she could only see a slither of tanned skin. Barely an inch, but she felt the desire to kiss her there, to feel the warmth of her one last time.

Restraining herself from anything so blatantly mortifying, she sat back up in the middle of the seats and watched as Rio stooped to pull her pants back up. With her knees pulled to her chest, she made herself small on the seat so Rio, now fully clothed, could slide between her and the table and sit to recline against the window, making sure Agatha’s scarf was there again as a pillow.

“Come here.”

Agatha hesitated, her rational mind winning out over her desperate body.

“I just need the bathroom.”

She slipped from the seat and only when she was at the end of the car and heaving the door open did she look back. Rio was watching her above the seats.

She turned away again and slipped out into the vestibule between cars then into the small bathroom she’d earlier established was not up to standard for “Premier Class”.

Inside, after locking the door, she shook as she hovered over the toilet to use it. Her thighs ached when she stood by the sink to wash her hands and she looked up into the murky mirror to see her reflection again.

Her hair was as wild as ever. Her cheeks perma-flushed. Her lips prettily swollen.

Agatha wondered if Rio liked what she had done to her. She turned from herself and the hopes that she did and stepped back outside.

“What the fuck?”

“You okay there, sweetheart?” Rio, leaning back against the near wall, grinning her cocky grin.

“Stalking me now?”

Rio laughed, “I wanted to make sure the fucker from before wasn’t trying his luck again.”

It made Agatha feel irrationally angry. So much so she growled, grit her teeth, and then reached out to grab Rio by the collar and haul her with her into the tiny space Amtrak called a bathroom.

Rio had the forethought to pull the door closed behind her so Agatha could shove her back into it. She grinned as Agatha scowled and twisted the fabric of her shirt.

“You.” She emphasised with a prod of Rio’s stomach. Rio clicked the lock by her side. “Are.” Another prod. “Pathetic.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Rio raised her brows and scanned over Agatha’s face for a second as Agatha kept her finger pressed against her and her hold on her collar tight.

Agatha’s brain was rapidly losing the fight it had won not minutes ago but it didn’t matter because Rio was winning the war.

She’d bent her knees down and grabbed Agatha by the back of her thighs to hoist her up onto the edge of the tiny sink and held her in place with a firm grip.

“Pathetic?” Rio asked curiously, and Agatha’s scowl deepened as her blush did because she’d squealed when Rio had lifted her.

With Rio now standing between her thighs, Agatha twisted her fingers around her chain again and tugged that instead of the fabric t-shirt.

“Pathetic,” she confirmed.

Rio’s grin shrank to an amused smile as her hands slid down to the backs of Agatha’s knees and she encouraged her legs to wrap around her waist.

Agatha huffed. “I’m too sensitive. Don’t even think about it.”

“I wasn’t,” Rio whispered, keeping hold of Agatha’s leg with one hand whilst her other brushed some hair from Agatha’s face.

Agatha’s scowl lessened. But only slightly.

“It’s a line, isn’t it?”

“Is that a pun?”

“What?”

“Line,” Rio said, “Train line…”

Agatha rolled her eyes but her scowl disappeared.

“No. Your line. The line about the psychic, the tattoo, one true love.”

Rio’s brow arched up and she tilted her head as her fingers tickled down the side of Agatha’s throat.

“Do you want it to be?”

Agatha’s lips, though she hadn’t meant them to be, were parted, and her breathing a little more laboured than before as Rio’s fingers danced over to the hollow at the base of her throat.

“Don’t try to distract me. It won’t work.”

“No?”

“No.”

Rio’s soft smile hardened at the edges, smug now, in a way that suggested to Agatha she could see right through her.

“Would the lady be opposed to a hickey?”

Rio’s eyes shot up from where they’d been following the journey of her fingers and Agatha’s breath hitched as she met her dark, heated gaze.

“What are you?” She managed to choke out, “A teenager?”

Rio chuckled and shrugged as her hand slid down Agatha’s chest to toy with the hem of her sweater.

“That a no?”

Rio asked the question as she pushed Agatha’s sweater up to reveal the soft, pale skin of her stomach.

Agatha made a noncommittal noise and Rio continued to reveal more of Agatha’s torso until she was holding her sweater up over her sternum and Agatha was finding it hard to breathe normally.

Rio’s smile had faded entirely and instead she had that slightly glazed look in her eyes that told Agatha she was transfixed. But as she moved down to press a kiss to the space between her breasts with her sweater now up to her throat, Agatha forgot even her own name.

The hand that had been warm and solid against her thigh was now curving to cup beneath her right breast, and Agatha gasped for the feel of it.

Rio’s mouth, hot and wet, moved to her left breast and Agatha gasped, her hand flying to the back of Rio’s head.

“Fuck,” Agatha whispered as Rio’s tongue swirled her nipple before she sucked where she’d teased.

Agatha was panting now, and Rio was no longer being gentle. She made her mark against Agatha’s skin when Agatha’s pants had become moans. Above the place Agatha carried the universe’s whisper, Rio made herself known.

And when she was done, she smiled against her creation and whispered the words: “You’re softer than you seem.”

“Because I bruise easy?” Agatha huffed, absently scratching her nails against Rio’s scalp.

“No, because you’re worried it is a line.”

Agatha, far from scoffing or huffing, said nothing but felt the fresh blush appear across her face as Rio looked back up to her and pressed a soft kiss to the underside of her breast.

“Let me down.”

Rio did, stepping back enough to let Agatha slide from the sink and not even enjoy the warm hands below her skirt and on her ass before she was pulling away. At the door, with Rio’s hands no longer on her, she paused.

“Don’t be long,” she said, “I’m cold and won’t be able to sleep without-.”

“Me?”

Agatha scoffed by way of answer and caught Rio's quick grin as she turned to leave. Outside of Rio’s hold was nothing but cold and a tinge of something that felt like regret. But Agatha pushed through it until she was back in their seats. In the quiet she looked outside again and watched the soft fall of snow.

Even as Rio came back and moved past her to sit behind her, Agatha kept her gaze on the quiet outside. The view was spectre-grey, and far from the brilliant white it had once been. But it brought with it still the peace of time stood still that allowed Agatha to dissolve back into Rio’s waiting hold.

They were soon both covered by their respective jackets, and Agatha held by Rio’s hands as her legs framed her body. The snow continued to fall and Agatha, unknowingly, with it.

“Comfortable?”

“Stop asking that.”

“I’m just making sure.”

Agatha hummed quietly, finding it hard not to trace lines up and down Rio’s arm as it settled comfortably around her.

Behind her, Rio was surveying the mess of the table. And Agatha soon looked to it too, feeling Rio’s interest even as she said nothing.

“You had your laptop out earlier,” Rio whispered, “Were you working?”

“Trying to.”

“What do you do?”

Agatha shrugged and turned to look directly ahead and out the window again. It made her shiver and Rio tighten her hold because of it.

“Nothing interesting.” Not a lie.

“I’m a scientist,” Rio said as Agatha traced the same few inches of warm skin along her forearm.

“They let people with tattoos and nose piercings be scientists?”

“Shocking, isn’t it?”

Agatha smiled but only because Rio couldn’t see it.

“What kind of scientist?”

“A meteorologist.”

Agatha hadn’t been expecting that.

“A weather girl.”

Rio laughed behind her and Agatha’s secret smile grew on her face.

“Something like that. But more… I study the atmosphere, the weather systems it controls, the way that-.”

“But still you got on a train during a snow storm?”

“It’s technically a polar vortex. It happens when there’s rapid cooling and something called the coriolis effect-...”

But Rio trailed off as Agatha scoffed and turned her head to the side and found as she did that Rio dropped hers down so they were close again. She’d become obsessed with feeling her skin, with keeping it against her own, enjoying how soft and warm it was.

“So you’re basically just a big nerd.”

Rio shrugged and Agatha found herself melting like the insistent snow at the half-shy, half-proud expression on Rio’s face.

“I enjoy what I do.”

“Tell me why.”

“Well,” Rio said slowly, her left hand moving casually to rest on Agatha’s bare hip where she’d tugged her sweater up a little. “There’s an art to what I do, as well as a science.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a certain finesse to things that only the universe understands.”

Agatha, a little distracted by warm fingers and feeling the pull of sleep set in with how comfortable she was being held this way, fought a yawn as she whispered: “Like what?”

“Like this, for instance. This polar vortex landing in the north east just as I was coming back from a work trip, leading me to you.”

Agatha froze and felt Rio’s arms flex around her middle as if emphasising the “you” in question.

Agatha turned to look out the far window again and bit her lip.

“Another line?”

But something inside her, the small part of the outside blizzard, felt like Rio’s words were speaking to a truth she already implicitly understood.

Rio hummed quietly and neither said anything for a while. The silence allowed Agatha’s heart rate to return to normal, though it had been forever altered by the very finesse of the universe Rio had just described.

There was another crackle overhead. The noise aggravated the whisper of fate deep in Agatha’s chest and, as if knowing this, Rio reached a hand out from its warm enclosure to turn on Agatha’s discarded Walkman.

She turned the volume up until the tinny sounds of Toni Braxton’s ‘You Mean The World To Me’ began to play through the headphones in the silent train car.

Rio hummed a low response to the sound, her voice soft and reassuring below Toni’s familiar one and Agatha turned more into her again to feel closer to it.

It happened without either one of them thinking about it, as it had been happening all night; a sudden creation of a new form of intimacy between them. Rio, holding Agatha against her chest, and Agatha holding Rio right back, her hands tracing the lines of Rio’s inked desire for devotion.

Had she been thinking at all, Agatha would have barked a laugh at the suggestion that she could be so tender with a total stranger. But her mind was absent where her heart unknowingly took over.

“It’s late. It’s cold,” Rio whispered, the song still playing softly, “Try and get some sleep.”

Agatha opened her mouth to say something, to perhaps mention time, or what little they had of it, as another crackle overhead warned of it running out.

But Rio, again, anticipated it and pressed a kiss to Agatha’s temple as she held her more securely.

“We have time,” she reassured.

Agatha said nothing in response but allowed herself to be held.

Soon Agatha was too soothed by Rio’s hold to think on time. And she slid down and raised her knees more to rest against the back of the seats.

She settled so she was as cosy and as relaxed as she could be and held the position for a while. Rio’s hands moved of their own accord, slipping one after the other beneath her sweater to ghost over her skin.

Agatha hummed a long, low note of contentment as Rio’s right hand curled just beneath her breast, above the mark she’d made over her heart. She thought of the vines creeping from her arm, weaving around her and making flowers bloom in their wake.

It was then that she moved again. Despite the warmth, despite the comforting hold, Agatha broke it. She broke it to guide Rio’s arm up from below her jacket, and her hand from under her sweater, to place a kiss upon the smallest flower in her most sensitive spot.

She heard Rio gasp quietly when she did it but neither said anything as Agatha pulled Rio’s arm back down and wrapped it more securely around her.

Rio found her heart again.

It had just felt necessary. To kiss where Rio was softest. To give her some softness back when the words would never have made it past Agatha’s lips.

So they settled once more, until both were as comfortable as they could be with the sounds of Toni’s voice their gentle soundtrack. It wasn’t how Agatha wanted it to be, that was for sure. She wanted to be sprawled out in her bed with her best sheets and cosy down comforter.

She wanted Rio there with her. Perhaps in rocketship pyjamas. Perhaps in nothing at all.

But right now was all she had. So she lay still, her body as relaxed as it could be despite the cold that still surrounded them and the limited space they had together.

Rio’s was holding her as if scared she might melt away and Agatha had never enjoyed a touch more.

“Sleep,” Rio whispered into her hair, so softly and so tenderly that Agatha almost asked her to say it again. Just so she could enjoy it one more time.

Instead she remained silent, she slid her hand further up the vines on Rio’s arm. She brushed her thumb over the sensitive spot at the crook of Rio’s elbow where she had just kissed her.

She thought of the bed they could share together. Of the blankets and pillows they could have together. She thought of a house, in an unknown suburb of Philadelphia, with vines that matched Rio’s own.

Her mind relaxed as her body did. So soon the woman who’d saved her on the platform, who held her now, was all she thought about as she drifted off. Just midnight starry eyes and inky vines.

Above the two wrapped together in the leather seats of Premier Class, one sleeping and one providing comfort enough so that the other could sleep, the electricity crackled and then stuttered back to life.

It woke Agatha, two hours after she’d fallen asleep. In the haze between sleeping and waking she grunted softly, reluctant to come back to herself.

A gentle squeeze about her middle eased her into her right mind and Agatha woke properly with a smile on her face as these words were breathed into her hair: “The heat’s back on, sweetheart.”

Agatha hummed, deep and low from her chest. She felt Rio press in just above her ear, nuzzling into her in a move too precious to comment on.

“Did you sleep?” She asked instead, lazily turning her head towards Rio and smiling when she felt the warmth of her face much closer to her own.

“No. Was more focused on holding you.”

She couldn’t help it when she said: “Pathetic.”

“Maybe,” Rio agreed, making Agatha laugh and Rio press her smile against her cheek.

For a little while, as the air around them warmed, and they remained bundled together like that, nuzzling, holding, squeezing. The world felt still and easy; halted just for them.

But it couldn’t last forever. A great mechanical gurgling could be heard. Not from somewhere, but from everywhere.

And Agatha sat up as the speaker crackled after hours of silence.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your driver speaking. I’m pleased to announce that the snow has been cleared off the tracks, our engines are firing, and we’ll be arriving into Philadelphia in a matter of minutes. We appreciate your understanding.”

The speakers crackled again and then were suddenly silent. Agatha was staring straight ahead, watching the blurry shapes of the landscape as they plowed through it.

She felt a hand against her back but she shrank from it, moving so Rio knew she no longer wanted to be touched.

“You get off at Philadelphia?” Agatha asked quietly, turning just enough to indicate she was talking to Rio. Not that there was anyone else around.

“Yeah.”

Agatha ran a hand through her hair and cleared her throat. This was fine. Normal, even. Expected.

A one night stand that had lasted the length of a snow storm, that was all it was. But as she stared straight ahead, as she willed the snow to swirl again, she found herself unable to shake the sudden, immense feeling of loss.

“Agatha?”

Agatha turned properly, and in doing so saw everything she felt etched into Rio’s features. The woman she’d first met grinning now looked like a kicked puppy; all wide-eyed and floppy tailed.

“Would I be crazy if-?”

“Don’t,” Agatha said quickly, feeling a jolt of something that felt a lot like fear. Besides, she was already turning away. “Grab your things. We’ll be there soon.”

With that, she shuffled to the edge of the seats and stood from them. Only she couldn’t help it as she glanced around and she saw the damage her words had done to the woman who remained seated.

Rio’s brows were tugged tightly together in the centre of her forehead. Her eyes were as large as ever but now so full of hurt. And her lips were parted, held apart not for desire anymore but for pain.

Agatha made a vague, lame gesture with her hand, and Rio slowly followed her up to her feet. Rio, even out of her boots, was a little taller. And Agatha, though she’d just been so dismissive, found it impossible not to step closer, to experience what it felt like to stand and be held by this woman again.

She made the first move, and used Rio’s hanging carabiner to tug her the few inches she needed to stumble so they could be stood together. From there Rio took the lead.

Her hands, warm and now familiar, held Agatha’s cheeks and slid to bury her fingers in her hair. Their hips were flush, and Agatha closed her eyes as Rio’s lips traced from the bridge to the tip of her nose and then settled in a hesitant kiss to her lips.

“You know that purple’s my favourite colour?” Agatha asked quietly, tugging at the carabiner in Rio’s beltloop.

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Rio murmured back, choosing now to kiss Agatha again, but with more alacrity than before. When she pulled away Rio’s hand had slipped down to hold Agatha’s as it still held her carabiner.

“You want it?” She asked quietly, a question that gave Agatha the power when really it should have been: “will you take it?”

Agatha raised her brows, aware now of the train beginning to slow and their bodies swaying ever so slightly with the motion of it. But she had no fear of falling, because Rio was here.

“Your dirty old carabiner?”

Rio said nothing as she took it from Agatha’s hand and pressed the arm to attach it to Agatha’s skirt. They were tied now, the metallic jangle of Rio’s keys sounding the connection like a bell tolls to signal someone’s arrival. Or someone's departure.

Agatha looked down at the connection and traced her finger along the metal clip as they swayed some more, their bodies aligned and moving as one.

“You need to grab your things. Put your boots on. We’re almost out of time.”

Without looking up at Rio’s face to see her reaction to her words she unclipped herself and stepped back from Rio. But she fell with a sudden directional change of the train, only to be caught last minute by Rio for the third time that day.

If she’d known this would be the last time Rio held her, she might have let her hold on forever. But Rio was a person who knew when to let go. So she did. She made sure Agatha was safely leaning against the seats beside her, kissed her cheek, and then turned before Agatha could say anything else and gathered up her things.

As Rio shrugged her jacket back on, and bent to put on her boots, Agatha sat back in her seat. It felt cold and empty now she was alone in it and she stared down at the grey speckle of the table before her. Something in her body made her fingers twitch in her lap and she twisted them into the hoop of her skirt that had enabled her to be, even briefly, tied to the stranger from the platform.

In swallowing she felt the tightness that often came before tears and she sniffed to ward them off.

“You look sad.”

Agatha scoffed and turned her head but something about the acknowledgement of it made her already stinging eyes fill up suddenly. They were so full by the time she’d run her hand through her hair in what she hoped was a casual gesture that a singular tear drop gathered at her water line.

A sign of Agatha’s first thaw.

A finger grazed to catch it as it fell.

Not Agatha’s.

Rio’s.

Agatha turned to her then and looked at her more plainly and openly than she’d ever looked at anyone in her life.

Rio’s gaze was down on the droplet that balanced on her finger and Agatha watched as she brought it to her lips and kissed it as if it were some precious thing.

The evaporated snow that had settled first in Agatha’s hair, then her skin, then inside the chambers of her guarded heart, touched Rio for the first time.

Rio whose heart was so open it was inked into a sleeve. Rio who was destined for one person. Rio who was destined for devotion; Rio who was destined for Agatha.

The molecule of snow, far from its first form, was now in its final form and seeking its final resting place. It swam through the body of Rio Vidal and settled where it was always meant to be; in her unguarded, devoted heart where it could whisper to her the secret longings of Agatha’s.

Dark eyes raised back up as Rio’s hand came back down again and Agatha was the one transfixed as she stared across at the stranger she’d met in the middle of a storm.

Rio’s brow quirked, a silent, questioning gesture that brought Agatha back to life.

“I’m not sad.”

Rio grinned.

“I says as I sees.”

Agatha’s scoff this time was coupled with a laugh. The exhalation had good intentions to deride or even to chastise, but really it enticed. It made Rio lean in to capture it against her lips.

She kissed Agatha slowly, an old habit from the time spent together in the dark; a habit formed to stop the train still tunnelling towards its destination.

Her lips enveloped Agatha’s lower one and Agatha felt a jolt in her stomach.

How could you miss someone who was right there with you.

A movement of the train, a sudden shuddering of the wet brakes against the wet track, meant they broke apart.

Agatha’s lips remained parted, her face still open and searching. And Rio? Rio was no longer looking. She was instead gathering her things to go.

“I-.” Agatha shifted in her seat as Rio straightened and she briefly feared Rio would leave without saying goodbye. But Rio, the grungy stranger from the platform, looked up and smiled her smile.

She shouldered her bag and leant in, holding Agatha’s face as she kissed her one last time.

Agatha’s hands flew to the collar of the jacket that had kept her warm all night and she twisted her fingers in the supple leather. As she did, she realised she’d been wrong about something. It wasn’t cheap plastic. It was real, lived-in leather.

And as she kissed Rio back, trying to memorise how her lips felt against her own, she realised that the tattoo and the story behind it were just as real as the leather in her hands.

As real as the pain in her chest as the kiss ended.

So Agatha hid from it. Agatha kept her eyes closed as Rio pulled away. She’d squeezed them tightly shut, unwilling to see what was about to happen for fear she’d cry again.

So she missed the tears that bloomed in dark eyes and the sorrow on the lips of the woman who’d kept her warm all night.

She missed Rio’s insistent, continual turning as she walked to the end of the car with silent hope that Agatha might ask her to stay. She missed the silent tear that drifted down a warm cheek as Rio stepped into the vestibule to take her to the door.

She missed Rio’s shaking breath as she stepped out onto the platform.

And when she was finally able to see again, Rio was no longer there.

So Agatha turned to look out the window and gasped at what she saw.

On the cold, white platform Rio looked up at her. And then, slowly, she raised a hand in farewell. Agatha watched as her mouth formed a grin that soon transformed her whole face. She could see the gap in her teeth, just make out the crinkle about her eyes and the tears that fell from them.

Her fingers twitched and the raised hand began to wave.

It felt like some strange game of chicken. Who would melt first? Who would say “enough” and call the other’s bluff by marching in or out and into the other’s arms.

And Agatha smiled with Rio, at Rio, for Rio, because she didn’t lose. She felt, in the time spent enjoying the grin that was just for her, like she’d won.

But a noise somewhere behind her told her the train had shut its doors. And suddenly there was no winning.

Rio knew it too. Though she'd thought they'd have more time. She thought there would be enough of it to make Agatha change her mind; for her to wave her back in and demand she keep her warm the rest of the way home, warm for the rest of her life. Rio, who now knew Agatha like a snowflake knows when it's time to melt, had given her too much time when they'd had none at all. They'd both lost a game they could have won if Agatha had asked and Rio had stayed.

Agatha watched, trapped on the train, as Rio’s eyes darted to where Agatha knew the doors to be. Her bag fell from her shoulders, abandoned by her heavy boots.

She felt her heart leap to her throat as Rio looked back at her. Her cock-sure grin was gone from her face. Agatha could no longer see the gap in her teeth.

Then three things moved at once.

The train began its slow progress along the tracks. Agatha stood from her seat. Rio began to move with them.

Rio was shouting and Agatha couldn’t quite hear what she was saying but it looked like her mouth formed the words: “Wait! Stop! AGATHA!”

Agatha couldn’t breathe suddenly. Her legs moved her forward one window to keep Rio in her sights and Rio ran along the platform as the train picked up speed.

Pounding in her chest, blocking her throat, Agatha’s heart felt like it was trying to tell her something that her brain simply couldn’t comprehend. You've lost, you've lost, you've lost her. She moved up another window.

Rio looked desperate now. She was no longer simply staring at Agatha and shouting those incomprehensible words. She was instead checking how much runway she had left. Agatha counted in her head with each pounding of Rio’s feet on the platform.

Ten feet. Eight feet. Six.

Rio's face, so open, so desperate, so pathetic. Agatha's heart, so thunderous, so pained, so changed.

They ran out of platform.

Rio skidded on the snowy ground so violently she almost hit the deck. Righting herself, her eyes were wide as she looked up at where Agatha now stood at the last possible window.

Coward, Agatha thought as their eyes met. But not about Rio. Instead, the word settled heavily in her chest, belonging to only her.

In the time it takes a single snowflake to melt upon warm skin, Rio was gone.

Notes:

The joke about the "line" being a reference to the train tracks is credited fully to Rose. Cheers, pal.

Everybody say thank you, Eva

And cheers to the angel oomfs who read this whilst I was panicking about it 💕