do you think we will see rios new apartment in this season and maybe have a brio scene there?
ooh, my gut reaction is no? rio being at beth’s house has been so drastically scaled back and we’ve never seen rio be invited in except for (presumably) 1.03 and (explicitly) 2.09. i don’t foresee rio inviting beth into his own private, personal space at this point, especially because there’s not really an ulterior motive like there was with inviting her to meet his family? it’s possible beth will trail him and try to break in again to retrieve something from his house, but the only thing i can think of would be the gun, and if she didn’t consider it when lucy’s body was first discovered, i’m not sure why she would consider it now—particularly because i think she found that rio’s loft was pretty much devoid of helpful clues. beth’s never felt the need to pop in on rio and surprise him like rio so often does with her, likely because it would generally fail to intimidate him in the same way, haha, but also because she’s never had much trouble getting him to show up when she needs him.
I’m sure you’ve already gotten a bunch of asks since Manny’s Crime King interview! I’m just like confused about him saying he’s enamored by her world but honestly like how is his different (besides his obvious commitment to the game) he lives in a nice loft, takes his kid to baseball, drives a fancy car, and plays tennis at the club. It’s not like he’s living the life of a thug. I guess I’m not getting the exact contrast of their worlds.
(Rest of my ask) I’m probably missing some obvious point here which is why I’m asking you lol helllppp
I do think Rio’s enamoured with Beth’s world, yes! I think that really boils down to the fact that while on paper Beth and Rio aren’t living dissimilar lives in terms of their roles as parents, and while they obviously now share parts of the criminal world, I do think the show is actually pretty specific in how it represents those worlds, particularly in terms of the masculine / feminine, and how a part of the curiosity around each other is in viewing one another as a key that both compliments their own world, while also unlocking the other’s one for them.
The gendering of spaces in storytelling – but particularly films and TV is, hilariously, a topic that I’m incredibly passionate about and have both written it a lot in my original work, and written about it a lot for magazines, journals and media sites (I’m actually writing an essay at the moment for a literary journal about LGBTQI cinema and how lesbian romances are highly domesticised [i.e. Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, The Favourite, The Kids are Alright] while gay romances are usually very pointedly about keeping away from domestic spaces, moving and traveling [i.e. Brokeback Mountain, The Talented Mr Ripley, Moonlight, Midnight Cowboy, even Call Me By Your Name is heavily focused on being Americans abroad aka away from home] but that all feels like a different story, haha).
Luckily for me, Good Girls is actually about as obsessed with the gendering of spaces as I am. It’s a major, major throughline throughout the show for many of the characters, but particularly Beth and Rio, and their intrigue with the other’s spaces – her interest in his powerful, highly masculine one, and his with her deceptively innocent, strongly feminine one – is really central to their intrigue with each other more broadly.
So to talk about this, we probably need a little bit of context.
(Under a cut because this is literally 4,000 words)
Gendering Spaces in Cinema
It’s probably not a surprise to anyone here, but places and spaces in stories are about as gendered – if not more gendered – as they are in daily life. In particular, cinema’s visual and textual language has historically been very clear:
The inside is female. The outside is male.
This concept has really been around since the beginning of cinema but became very popularised through Westerns in the late 1920s onwards, and really underlined by war films particularly during propaganda cinema in WWII. Men are outside, battling the elements and other men, claiming land, building outwards, while women are at home – either literally or figuratively (if they’re actually out at war, like in the utterly fabulous So Proudly We Hail!, they’re at the ‘home base’ as nurses) – building inwards. Men protect the home while women create it.
Westerns feature these images very potently and very literally. Almost every single western dating back to the 1910s will have some combination of these two shots:
a) Woman at home, looking out into the wild:
b) Man leaving home, stepping out into the wild:
(These two stills are from John Ford’s The Searchers which is generally regarded as one of the greatest Westerns of all time. It’s………very racist and misogynistic, as many were and still are, but in terms of technicality and visual language, it’s a very well-made film, albeit not one I enjoyed).
The purpose at the time, of course, was steeped in historic sexism and invested in maintaining that culture, particularly westerns and war films which are heavily devoted to ‘macho’ narratives. Women were passive, men were active, but these images really set the stage for how the ideas of ‘space’ continues to exist in cinema. A fact that’s bolstered by broader social discourses that still exist today – schools, grocery stores, laundromats are inherently ‘female’ spaces because they are seen as an extension of the home, while police stations, car dealerships, warehouses, are inherently ‘male’ spaces because they’re about work, protecting and providing for a home, and being pointedly outside of that domestic space aka ‘the wild’. It’s not an accident that the girls are robbing grocery stores and day spas, but I’ll get back to that, haha.
These ideas of gendered spaces underpin everything we watch, no matter the genre.
Sure, these ideas can be subverted to varying degrees of effectiveness (often it’s steeped in my least favourite trope – the ‘not like other girls’ heroine), but you can’t subvert a trope without actually acknowledging it exists. Sometimes these subversions are done brilliantly too – like in Legally Blonde which was not just about Elle existing in a space that was quintessentially coded as male, but embracing her femininity and womanhood within that space; and often brutally too in films like Winter’s Bone, Room and The Nightingale which all brutalise women in ‘male spaces’ while simultaneously weaponizing female spaces against them – usually the home. The lead character of Winter’s Bone is going to lose her house unless her absent father shows up in court, the lead character of Room creates a home that is simultaneously a sanctuary and a mockery of a sanctuary to try and protect her son from reality and survive, the lead character of The Nightingale has her home invaded, her husband and baby murdered, and is horrifically raped within that home.
Hometown Horror: a divergence
This is a slight aside to where I’m going with this overall, but please indulge me, haha. I’m a big fan of horrors and thrillers, which explore this in a really stark way. In that, the invasion of a home or a domestic space – whether by ghost, demon or serial killer, is, generally speaking, synonymous with the invasion of a woman’s body and the violation of her as a person.
Films that focus on a female survivor or a ‘final girl’ are very generally focused on the invasion of her home as much as it’s focused on the invasion of her body. Think The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Scream, The Babadook, Hereditary, The Conjuring, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Panic Room. The violation of a woman’s home is the invasion of her, because cinema relies on over 100 years of movies telling us that a house and the woman who lives in it are symbolically the same thing.
Horror films that focus on men are very rarely centred in the home. It’s men travelling, or men visiting a woman’s home, or men who’ve been taken. Think of the first Saw movie which takes place in a mysterious basement, Hostel which is at a hostel, Dawn of the Dead at a shopping mall, An American Werewolf in London while two men are on holiday, The Evil Dead is in a cabin, Get Out is at his girlfriend’s family home.
There are exceptions, of course! Family home invasion films like The Purge, Funny Games and The Strangers are rooted in the violation of that home, but still. You’ll generally find that it manifests differently narratively speaking for men and women. Rear Window too takes place entirely in a man’s apartment – but it’s interesting to note that most of the ‘horror’ comes from him spying on somebody else’s home – notably a woman’s, The Descent too is very much about women and is set during cave diving. Still! These are all exceptions, not the rule.
Good Girls and Gendered Spaces
Every single space in Good Girls is gendered. It’s actually one of the things I seriously love about the show because it’s thoughtfully done, and it is deliberate. We know it is, because they tell us explicitly in the writing multiple times. I mean – hell, think of Ruby telling us (well, telling Rio, haha) way back at the end of 1.04 when they’re selling him on the idea of washing cash through Cloud 9 – “Nobody thinks twice about a woman buying her husband a TV or new tires for the minivan.” A store like that is gendered, and Ruby’s reinforcing it by saying it’s a place women go to build a home. It hasn’t been weaponized yet - - but our girls know how to weaponize it. They’re playing on the fact that people think women’s spaces are effectively impotent, and they’re telling Rio – and us as an audience – that they’re going to exploit it.
This is an idea the show revisits frequently. Women’s spaces are – both in life and in storytelling – spaces that are viewed as passive because they are representative of women, and what the show is – I believe – very invested in, is showing how those spaces are fundamentally active. If you want a house to represent a woman – well, okay. Then you get to see what’s under the rug, y’know?
I’m going to come back to the home thread – because I really do think it’s very important, and I think the way the show depicts people in those spaces (and invading those spaces) is significant – but it’s not just homes that are looked at in this way. The show is very specific about having feminine spaces and masculine spaces, with only a few in between (and usually those in-between spaces are very specifically for Stan and Ruby, showing just how in-sync they are with each other and how much they operate within a shared space). Beyond the women’s homes, there are the kids’ schools, Fine & Frugal (very important here to note that Annie emasculates Boomer in what is an associated female space and that he retaliates by attempting to rape her in her own home aka not only another female space, but a space that is symbolically Annie, something he repeats later with Mary Pat – a violation on essentially every character, narrative and symbolic level, again), the waxing salon, Nancy’s day spa, Jane’s dance recital (and actually the physical object of the dubby – being a highly feminine object lost in a very masculine space), and already what we know of s3, with Ruby being at a nail salon and Beth being at a paper / card store.
The show also has very masculinized places – I’d argue Boland Motors is one of the biggest ones – very much about ‘boys and their toys’, which is why Beth pointedly feminising it when she takes over is so significant and symbolically indicative of Beth’s claiming of that space; but also spaces like the police station, the drug dealer’s house in 2.07, the hotel suite Boomer briefly occupies, even to an extent the church. When the girls are in these spaces, there’s a distinct feeling of encroaching on territory that isn’t theirs, or being in spaces that they don’t belong in. This is often done as a two-hander too – the police station and the church Ruby doesn’t belong in anymore, not necessarily as a woman, but as a criminal.
Nothing though, from a technical standpoint, is more masculine than the spaces that are shown to be Rio’s. From the warehouse spaces to the bar to his loft to his car, Rio’s ‘places’ are distinctly masculine and generally placed in direct contrast with Beth’s femininity. But I’ll come back to that point too.
Home, Identity and Invasion
Almost every female character on this show has a very defined domestic space, from Beth, Ruby and Annie, to Mary Pat, Marion and Nancy. These spaces are representative of not just who they are, but who they are as women, and really comes to routinely represent the interior lives of these characters. This is probably the clearest in 2.09 when Beth is uncharacteristically messy following Dean taking their kids, and in 2.06, when Beth and Dean switch roles, and Dean is incapable of maintaining that domestic space because it’s not his. But let’s not start there.
Let’s start with Annie.
Annie’s apartment is fun, feminine (but not overly so), youthful, sweet, and generally a bit of organized chaos. It’s often underequipped – there are several mentions of the pantry being understocked – but it’ll always do in a pinch. More than anything though, Annie’s apartment comes to life when her son is in it. She’s happiest when he’s there, and when he’s not, her loneliness drives her to pulling people into the space with her, whether that’s the electronics guy, Greg, or Noah.
This is particularly significant when Annie’s forming bonds with people. The show has symbolically relied very heavily on Annie’s moments of vulnerability and connection being grounded in her apartment or an extension of it – usually her car. There was her reconnecting with Greg over YouTube videos in s1, there was Nancy and her talking about pregnancy in 2.02, and there was Noah settling in across season 2. These are all substantial moments in terms of Annie’s interior life that are represented through her home – she lets them all in. Which is why it’s significant what people do when they are in. Particularly the show marrying Noah getting to know Annie while simultaneously rifling through her belongings, trying to know specific things about her.
This is only reiterated by Noah’s scenes with Sadie later in the season – always at home, reiterating just how much Noah’s invaded Annie’s life, how much he’s inside her, how much he’s using everything and everyone who’s important to her, and how much he’s a threat to all of that too.
Ruby and Stan are a little different. Ruby’s house is the only one that’s genuinely shared with somebody, and the show represents this across the board – Ruby and Stan wear similar colours, the house feels like theirs, and the parts of their worlds that are separate are still frequently pretty defined by each other (even when Ruby’s acting away form Stan, the show makes it clear that Stan’s at the forefront of her mind, and vice versa). This indicates their partnership, but the house really still is symbolically tied to Ruby. This is particularly represented by the effect of having Turner in the house, but, more than that, it’s underlined symbolically by Turner arresting Stan at home. If the home symbolically carries the meaning of the woman, Turner arresting Stan there is starkly about Turner taking Stan away from Ruby. That image would not hold the same weight if he was arrested at, say, the park or the police station, because the locations don’t hold the same meaning.
It’s also why there’s significance in Stan and Turner’s showdown narratively speaking happening at the police station. It needs to, because symbolically it should occupy a masculine-coded space, because that showdown isn’t just about who they are as people, but who they are as men.
Beth and Beth’s house is very, very different to Annie and Ruby’s, and holds a more substantial narrative and symbolic function. From the very first episode, the potential of losing her house is key to her arc, and key to her identity as a character.
Beth is a lot of things, but a recurring image with her as a character is that she is invested in projecting a dated idea of ‘perfect womanhood’, and, within that, actually pretty perfectly creates parts of it for herself. For Beth – as somebody who was a housewife for roughly twenty years – her house really is her in every sense of the word. Every threat to that house, every disruption, every wrinkle, every intrusion, every theft, every invitation is personal. Dean might have at least two rooms in the Boland House, but that space is Beth’s on almost every symbolic level. When people pop into it, it’s a direct invasion of her.
This is something that the show has revisited time and time again, particularly when it comes to Beth’s bedroom. When people want to be close to Beth, that’s where they go. Annie slept there across season one when she was vulnerable and lonely, despite Beth telling her to go home, Jane broke into Beth’s closet there when she felt she was being neglected, Dean’s constantly trying to sidle into it (and – pointedly – only really in it when they’re fighting and Beth is revealing something / letting him in on something – that they’re out of money, that she has Rio’s money, that she knows about his affairs). When Beth has been at her most vulnerable, she lets Ruby and Annie into it. That said, the only character who’s been explicitly invited into it has been Rio – significantly both in fantasy, and in the show’s reality.
It’s not just about inviting people in though – when she kicks somebody out of it, the act is loaded.
She’s not just pushing somebody out of a space, she’s pushing them out of her.
It’s not just her bedroom of course (although I do think that’s the most significant space on perhaps the whole show). Rio and Turner between them have regularly invaded Beth’s living room, dining room, her kitchen, her yard. These are often distinctly tied with her doing something domestic and / or distinctly feminine. She’s bringing groceries home, she’s baking, she’s trying on jewellery, she’s mothering her children. Symbolically, this is often when Rio and Turner both are at their most masculine and their most threatening, which just serves to underline the invasion of Beth’s space.
It’s not just the girls though, as I said above. Female domestic spaces on this show are significantly coded as belonging to women, even if they share those spaces. Think about Nancy and Greg’s house – which is Nancy’s space, not Greg’s, and throughout season 1, Annie was pitted as the outsider to that. She’s a smear of hair oil on Nancy’s perfect couch. It’s made all the starker when Nancy kicks Greg out, and when Annie helps Nancy give birth in that house – a distinctly female, intimate act, that not only operates as a significant feminization of that space, but also about Annie fighting for Nancy to let her in again.
These spaces all keep secrets for the women they belong to too – Mary Pat’s husband’s dead body, Boomer’s very much alive one – because, again, symbolically, they are these women.
Rio’s loft is a really interesting one to look at in this context, because not only is it hyper masculine, but the show underlines that it does not hold the same significance that the girls’ places have for them. Beth does not learn Rio by being inside him – something made stark through their game of twenty questions. In fact, being in Rio’s loft, in his space, only serves to point out how much Beth doesn’t know him. Not only that, but Beth’s inability to lose her house (which is really central to her arc) is paralleled exactly with how easily Rio can separate from his.
The domestic space is not male.
Rio exists outside of it.
Beth x Rio and the Feminine x Masculine
Rio and Beth are basically at polar opposites of the masculine / feminine spectrum, and it’s something that this show often casts in a really stark light through dialogue, visual language, character coding and symbolism.
Beth epitomizes the old archetype of femininity and the female world in a way that I don’t think Annie and Ruby do (although I do think Ruby does in some respects). This is coded into almost every part of her character – from her long history of domestic servitude and marital submission (letting Dean control their finances, not working, keeping the house, etc.) to her fertility (four children!) to the way she dresses in floral, bakes, to certain traits, namely her nurturing tendencies, overt empathy and guilt (not being able to kill Boomer). Even in terms of the casting – Christina is somebody who has a very distinctly feminine body.
On the other hand, Rio, in many ways, epitomizes the old idea of masculinity and the masculine world. He’s coded that way almost as much as Beth is coded as feminine – he’s physically strong (beating up Dean, holding Beth up while they were having sex), assertive, dominant, capable and collected. That’s not even touching on the fact that the golden gun is incredibly phallic, haha.
The show loves to place Beth’s femininity in direct contrast with Rio’s masculinity in a way that it doesn’t do with the other girls or – in fact perhaps more notably – with Beth and Dean (if anything, Dean’s frequently emasculated around Beth, but that feels like a whole other thing, haha), and it does this frequently, and often even in the same shot.
Most notably, think of her pearls on the warehouse door handle:
Their cars parked side-by-side:
Her necklace, his gun:
Her light, his darkness:
Her floral, his solid colours:
Interestingly though, these things are very rarely in competition or combative (although occasionally they are – Rio trying to use her femaleness and his maleness / their sexuality to literally bend her over a table in 2.06 being the clearest example of that). Generally speaking, the show’s visual language though shows us how these things compliment each other. They occupy different gendered spaces, so they can ‘crime’ in different ways – Beth using the big box stores, the secret shoppers, robbing the day spa, are all things that are highly feminised, and give Rio by proxy access to a world he ordinarily wouldn’t (albeit it’s not always a world he’s interested in – like it wasn’t with the botox), and the reverse of that is that Rio gives Beth access to spaces that are highly masculinised and that she ordinarily wouldn’t have access to (again, not always a world she’s interested in either). It’s why when they’re working together, and acknowledging they have different departments, they actually become something really whole, comprehensive and effective.
It’s the exploration of this that I find really intriguing generally, and particularly a thread that I think is reiterated where Beth’s usually at her worst and her most ineffective when she’s trying to emulate Rio’s masculinity. We saw that at the end of 1.10 and the start of 2.01, and I think we saw it at the tail end of season 2 too. When Beth’s succeeding, she’s typically doing something that revels in the strength and power and the underestimation of femininity and female spaces, and turns places that are typically viewed as passive into active ones.
The Secret Shoppers (which worked briefly! And fell apart because she couldn’t handle Mary Pat. Notably almost every scene with them was inside Beth’s house):
The day spa heist:
The Boland Motors takeover / reclamation that focused on feminising the place:
Pretending to be somebody’s mum to get into the kids’ space (which would’ve worked if Beth and Ruby hadn’t started fighting):
Breaking into Rio’s loft:
Again, this is something that seems to be being teased out already in s3 with the paper store and the nail salon, and I’m sure we’ll see it coming up again and again beyond that.
But yes! Your question, haha. I think Rio is enamoured with the strong, feminine space and the untapped female world that Beth exists in, and the ways that she is actively capable of utilising her femininity and her womanness in a way that is completely impossible for him. She can manipulate these spaces – either those already female, or those she makes female aka Boland Motors – in ways that he can’t, and in a way that, at the end of the day, lines his pocket, in the same way that giving her access to his powerful, masculine world lines hers. It’s market development, y’know? But it’s also something that could be a true and successful partnership if they could stop, y’know, playing games and trying to kill each other, haha.
I think it’s worth noting here too that the show has shown us explicitly that Beth absolutely gets off on Rio being highly masculine, and while I think Rio absolutely gets off on Beth being a boss bitch too, it’s also important to note how he responds to her when she’s displaying vulnerability in a way often defined as very feminine – namely crying – and how that display of femininity not only affects him, but often makes him want to touch her (and more and more, follow through on touching her).
Basically I think they’re as obsessed with the contrast between the two of them as we are, haha.
I decided to do a layout of Rio’s house, which is more obvious in some senses (it’s a big open space!) and less obvious in others (where do those doors go???)
Beth enters Rio’s loft in 2x11 through the fire escape, which puts her in one of the corners of what I assume is mostly a large square loft. We can see that a white brick wall meets a red brick wall at the corner. There’s also a small chair which is part of a second living area which doesn’t get much camera time, though we do see it over her shoulder. We also get a peek of the mysterious double doors, which I’ve yet to figure out what might be behind them.
They are not the front door, as we see in 2x13 when she knocks on a singular front door. I think it is also unlikely that they lead to a bathroom, as double doors and glass (however thick/blurry) is an unusual choice for a bathroom.
This is her view of the loft as she stands in the corner by the fire escape. So we know the kitchen is in the opposite corner that she’s standing in, and that there’s a central living space. To the right of it is a dining room, and we know from later shots that there’s a large shelving unit just to the left of that green painting, where Beth sees the picture of Rio with Marcus on the steps and where we see the record player.
Marcus’s bedroom is easy to recognize, but was difficult to place. Is it close to Rio’s bedroom? Behind that shelving unit? The biggest clue is actually the toy octopus that sits on a table right outside of his bedroom.
It appears in two additional shots.
The top shot is when Beth starts making her way across the apartment to begin searching it. Behind her is the second living area and the same mysterious double doors. We also see a desk to the right of the doors and some more drawers.
The second is when Beth scans the apartment. The toy octopus tells us that Marcus’s bedroom looks out over the living room and dining room. It also appears in the left corner that there’s a bit of extra space that I think is the entrance nook.
I guess that the entrance nook is to the right of Marcus’s bedroom because the wooden post just in front of the shelving unit is the one that Rio leans against when he first appears in his loft and begins 20 questions.
Beth is standing in Rio’s bedroom, and he’s looking diagonally across the middle living room at her. This means his bedroom is directly across from the kitchen, which is to the right of that green painting.
We get a good shot of the entire apartment when it’s empty in 2x13. We can see Rio’s closet, and that the entrance doors are different than Marcus’s. Rio’s closet has a frame for a door, but Marcus’s bedroom doesn’t (just a curtain). We even see a shot from inside Marcus’s bedroom.
There’s a couple more mysteries. There’s a door off the kitchen, which I assume is a pantry or some sort because a bathroom off the kitchen is a bit strange. Maybe it could also be laundry.
What I assume is the entrance nook gets an okay shot in 2x13, when Turner is tied up on a post near Rio’s bedroom. We can see Marcus’s bedroom behind Beth (no frame like Rio’s closet) and some space. Part of it is lit up, possibly similarly to that window that appears above the apartment door of Rio’s neighbor in the earlier photo. But we also see a large dark shape, possibly another door. It might also be the front door.
But all of this pieced together leads to a sketch that looks roughly like this, only the entrance nook is left unpieced because I’m honestly just not sure.
Thanks a MILLION to @septiembur for linking me to this! The Good Girls set decorator, Peggy Casey, has her folio online which includes really good looks at Beth, Ruby. Annie and Rio’s places. Also fully confirms the layout of Rio’s loft which is amazing, haha - his bed is definitely just out in the open. Check it out here (pics 28 - 54)
I feel like the scene where Beth is in Rio’s abandoned apartment talking to him on the phone is soooo underrated!! I’m sure they were just playing one another, but it’s still so vulnerable. This is like one of the first times we’ve seen them openly flirting. Like when Rio mentions Turner’s hard-on for Beth and she says, “Not the good kind.” Then the whole “don’t cut your hair.” & their soft, flirty voices for the whole conversation until Beth sees the camera. The whole scene is just 👏🏻👏🏻
Ah, totally, anon. I feel like that scene often gets swallowed up by the sort of collective reaction to the last act of the episode unfortunately, which I totally get. I think it’s pretty hard to remember anything else sometimes too!
But man, it’s a great scene. I don’t know how they do it, but Christina and Manny’s chemistry crackles even when they’re not in the same room. It’s wild, haha. Plus the whole thing is just so loaded - from Rio’s husky drawl to talking about hard ons to him asking Beth not to cut her hair and then her touching her hair, just like he does. Ugh, amazing.
One of the things that’s so fun about Beth and Rio too, at least to me, is even when they are messing with each other, there’s always an element of truth to it? They can use their intimacy against each other because that intimacy exists in the first place. I mean, if it didn’t, we never would’ve gotten the bathroom break, or the dubby, or them in her bedroom in 2.09. They’re a mess and I love it, haha.
(I also highkey feel like that scene confirms that Rio would be excellent at phone sex).
#1 “How could you do this to me?” / #17 “I don’t need you.” / #22 “I don’t care if you live or die.”
The problem is, the second she sees the box, it’s impossible for her to unsee it.
“What’s that?” she asks a little breathlessly as Rio makes quick work of undoing the buttons on her blouse, his mouth on her neck as he crowds her back towards the open space in the heart of his loft. When his only reply is to nose the collar of her shirt aside and start to suck a hickey into the spot where her neck meets her shoulder, she keens, her toes curling against the hardwood floors, and tightens her hand on the back of his head only to push him off her.
She’s still catching her breath, her eyes back on that stupid box, when he blinks down at her, visibly confused until his own eyes lower to her open blouse, her chest flushing under the heat of his look. He grins, walking her back until she hits the arm of the couch, reaching to rid her of her shirt the rest of the way, his head dropping to mouth at her breast through her bra.
“Rio,” she groans, shivering before she can help herself – at the cool, midday air now at her bare back, or the warmth of his lips on her skin, she has no idea, doesn’t care, not really, not when his hands are coming down beneath her already bare legs (he’d gotten her jeans off almost the second she’d walked through the door. It was only fair though – she’d somehow gotten both his t-shirt and pants off even quicker), lifting her up onto the arm of the couch. She sucks in a breath, her eyes fluttering shut as he’s pushing her legs apart, kissing his way down her body, and then she’s gasping, clawing at his shoulders as he settles on the floor in front of her, only to open her eyes again and see that stupid box.
“Is that a cake mix?” she asks, her breathless words turning into a moan when Rio hums a sound of affirmation into the sensitive skin of her inner thigh.
“Marcus has a thing at school tomorrow,” he purrs there, his fingers finding the elastic leg of her panties, slipping underneath. “Normally his ma makes somethin’, but she’s outta town.”
He makes slow work of pulling down her panties, inching them off her hips, then slower, too slow, down her thighs, and his breath is hot on her, and Beth can feel herself clench in anticipation of his mouth, and she just - -
“You know they’re terrible, right? They’re full of preservatives and corn syrup. I could - -”
Before she even has the chance to continue, Rio’s hands stop, his chin jutting up. His eyes are still hooded, pupils dilated, but his mouth is set into a long, irritated line.
“No,” he tells her, and Beth blinks down at him, where he’s kneeling on the floor between her legs, and she sits up a little straighter on the arm of the chair, moving to press her legs together, but his hands come up to her knees, holding them apart.
“No what?” she replies, widening her (already wide) eyes, playing dumb as she goes through recipes in her head – carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, apple toffee crunch cake, lemon blueberry layer cake. There’s a Whole Foods barely three blocks away. It wouldn’t take much to pop down and get the ingredients, get back here, have the whole thing done before Rio even has to pick Marcus up from school, and - -
She feels her panties drag the rest of the way off her legs, sees them tossed aside as Rio curves his hands back around to the insides of her thighs, sliding up either one. The heat pools low in her again, curling tight between her legs, and she looks at him, and just - - that’s always a mistake, she thinks, especially when he holds his mouth like that.
“Does anyone in his class have any allergies?” she asks a little breathlessly, her hand coming up to curl behind his ear, but Rio clenches his eyes shut briefly in annoyance, shaking his head up at her.
“Nah, we ain’t doin’ that. I don’t need you to do that shit for me.”
And that’s enough to cool her down (a little, at least). She scoffs, because that is frankly ridiculous.
“You bought a boxed cake mix,” she says it so incredulously, gesturing wildly back to the kitchen island, that she must seem personally offended and just - - good, she thinks. She is. “I just - - god, Rio, how could you do this to me? It’s like - -”
She waves her arms around, because he knows this about her by now, surely, and it’s like - - She suddenly stiffens, her jaw setting as she squint down at him.
“Like you meant for me to see it.”
A look of surprise briefly crosses his face before he settles for something much more annoyed, his own jaw rocking as he exhales a long, rough breath.
“You think I’d rather be arguin’ with you about a cake you ain’t gonna be makin’, than fuckin’ you,” he says dryly, and Beth frowns down at him, swinging a leg over his head and clambering off the couch. She grabs her panties off the floor, slipping them back on, then his t-shirt, putting that on too, before beelining for the box on the kitchen island. A vanilla sponge, she rolls her eyes, turning the box over to read the ingredients.
Just like she thought.
Corn syrup.
“Well, you do like to insist we both have our own departments,” she replies, her voice low as she moves to turn on the oven to pre-heat. “And god knows yours is nowhere near a kitchen.”
She’s barely put the dial on the right setting before Rio’s turning it off again and plucking the box from her hands, walking it over to the pantry to put it on a shelf she can’t reach.
“You know I wasn’t going to make that one, right?” she says, laughing as she ducks beneath his arm for the pantry. She pulls out the flour, sugar, grins when she finds a tiny, unopened tub of baking powder.
“Elizabeth,” he practically growls behind her, and Beth ignores him, moving to put the items down on the kitchen island. She drops the baking powder and sugar first, and almost before they’ve touched the surface, he’s taking them and putting them on the top shelf of the pantry with the boxed mix. She glares at him, and when his hand reaches for the flour still in her arms, she spins away from him, clutching the packet to her chest.
Rio’s quick though, following her around like he was expecting her to do it, and Beth tries to get away from his grabbing hands, but he won’t let her.
“I ain’t playin’,” he tells her, reaching again for the flour, and Beth stares at him, gobsmacked.
“Neither am I!” she insists, her voice shrill, because she doesn’t bake to play, and certainly not when it’s one of her - - their - - his kids, and he reaches again, this time grabbing the top of the flour packet, and she yanks back at the same time he does and then - -
And then the packet’s exploding between them, erupting in a mushroom cloud of flour, dusting them with white. It’s so sudden Beth gasps, feeling it on her skin, caught in her hair, settling across her cheeks like make-up powder, and she blinks hard, looking up at Rio to see it caught up in his eyelashes, settled like snow on his broad shoulders, a little caught on his lower lip, and Beth just - -
She giggles. Quick as anything, short, sharp, but then louder, harder, as Rio’s look straddles something between fury and still-forming horror at the sudden explosion of mess in his otherwise spotless loft. He sucks in a breath, rubbing at his face, at his shoulders, trying to get it off, and just - - just suddenly he looks so sweet and so good, still half-hard in his underwear, a look on his face that could almost be a pout, and it runs warm through her veins, bursts like the flour box in her belly and just - - god, she’s in trouble, she knows that, but there’ll be time to worry about that later. Right now, Beth drops the newly empty packet to the kitchen island, darting forwards, toes slipping in the flour on the floor, as she surges up to kiss him.
“It’s your mess,” she says into his mouth, feeling his hands come down to the hem of her (well, his) t-shirt, yanking it off her. “You’ve got to clean it up.”
“Nuh,” he replies, but he’s still twitchy at the mess, his thumb brushing a line through the flour dusting her cheekbone, and she thinks maybe they’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.
What if in s3 we find out that Rio has been with rhea all this time and he cheated on her with Beth??? And also maybe she found out or he told her that he cheated and they broke up after 2.04... ???
Could be! I’d be surprised though? I think the way they showed us his loft in 2.11 was very pointedly telling us that it was only Rio (well, Christopher) and Marcus who lived there, and showing us a very well adjusted routine via Beth’s stalking which to me implies more than a few months of being separated (which we know it was because of the four-month time stamp on the flashback in 2.12 with Mary Pat running over Boomer).
Of course, we don’t know for sure, but I’d hope they wouldn’t have had Rio cheat with Beth. They’ve put so much effort into showing us that Rio’s the polar opposite of Dean, and so to go there with him would feel like both a retread and - - I don’t know. Disappointing, maybe?
Also it’d be nice if they could - y’know - not introduce any new cheating storylines. At the moment, the only major relationship in this show that hasn’t had adultery involved on some level is Stan and Ruby’s, and while I’m not adverse to the show continuing to explore the ramifications of cheating with existing storylines i.e. Beth and Dean, and Annie, Nancy and Greg, I don’t think any new adultery storylines would give us anything new story-wise.
was beth turned on by rio's meticulousness when she went into the closet?
Bahahaha, she definitely was. I need the parallel gifset of Beth being so upset about what a disaster Dean is / the mess he leaves when left with the kids vs how gentle and observant she was with Rio’s perfect organisation in all facets of his life.
God, the messiest Rio is in his entire life is when it comes to her apparently.
