Chapter Text
Beth stands in the aisle at CVS, stock-still and overwhelmed. The boxes are all more or less familiar but the context - suddenly entirely different. She picks up a box and studies it for a moment before feeling a change in the air, and suddenly freaking Rio slides into her space, speaking over her shoulder in her right ear.
“‘Magine meeting you here.”
She swallows down the yelp of surprise in her throat - barely. “I was about to go meet you for the drop in-” she glances at her watch, “twenty-three minutes.” She squares her shoulders and raises an eyebrow even though he can’t see her face. “Is something going on or did you just miss me?”
She can hear his smirk in the little exhale he lets out that flutters a strand of hair at her neck. He sidles around into her view and holds up deodorant and a bottle of mouthwash with a little shrug.
“What-chu doin’?” he asks, nodding toward the box in her hand. She waves it at him.
“Shopping. For my daughter. My nine and a half year old daughter, who got her period today.”
Rio grimaces a little, then nods, then shifts a little awkwardly, staring past her. Beth follows his gaze and sees he’s looking toward the family planning section of the aisle - lube, condoms, ovulation and pregnancy tests. She’s about to ask, vaguely humiliated, if he needs to get by for something over there when he steps in closer, the fingers of his free hand shuffling up her forearm.
“That all you need from this aisle?”
“. . . What?”
“I’m not loose like that usually, I’m careful. But with you-”
She sucks in a breath. Oh. He’s going there, now, in the afternoon at CVS.
“- I got caught up. I didn’t know if-”
His hand travels now, reaching past her open jacket and his fingers flush against her stomach, low below her belly button.
“What?” Beth whisper-croaks. “Oh. Oh, no. God, no. I, um.” She glances around at the empty aisle, up briefly at the eye-in-the-sky camera conspicuously placed above them. “I got my tubes tied. After . . . after Emma.”
Rio tilts his head, studying her, not stepping away, still touching her. “I can tell when you’re lying.”
Beth closes her eyes and breathes for a few seconds, looks down at the pink box in her hands, boasting ‘superior absorbancy.’
“I had a miscarriage, when Emma was two. Early on. I hadn’t told Dean yet, and-” she motions vaguely. “After that I just- I knew I needed to be done. So I was. I am.”
Rio, for his part, looks somewhat stricken. She pushes his hand away from her stomach and he lets her, shifts back slightly but somehow doesn’t let the web of intimacy strung around them drop with his distance.
“Closed for business then, huh?”
“Well.” She glances at him through her lashes. “Closed for occupancy.”
Rio grins, delighted.
“See you soon then.”
He’s off down the aisle, skipping the condoms and lube, sauntering toward the registers.
“What, we can’t just do it here?” she asks after him, raising her voice a little. It’s not like the CVS parking lot is that much better than the other parking lot they were both about to drive to.
“Elizabeth, ‘s that all you think of me?” he asks, faux scandalized and walking backwards a step to grin at her again.
She can’t fight her answering smile, so she doesn’t try.