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Rio prepared for their anniversary like it was a matter of national security. There were no margins for error, no room for chance; love, in her mind, demanded strategy. If she failed, it would not be because she hadn’t considered every possible outcome. She had maps. Actual maps. Flowcharts taped to the inside of her desk drawer, diagrams folded into the back pocket of her jeans, color-coded branches scribbled in notebooks. Romance led one way, flowers, chocolates, wine. Sentimentality split into another, handwritten letters, a framed photo, a small book of pressed flowers carefully labeled in her neat handwriting. Humor branched off into novelty socks patterned with Tetris blocks and a ridiculous mug that read World’s Okayest Girlfriend. And then the practical route, the one Agatha would roll her eyes at but secretly appreciate: a new wireless keyboard to replace the one that had started skipping letters, a gift card to her favorite bookstore. Each arrow pointed to another arrow, each box branching into sub-branches until the whole thing resembled less a celebration and more a military op board.
She had a stockpile to match the planning. Her closet had turned into something between an armory and a bunker. Two boxes of flowers from different florists, because what if one delivered wilted lilies, what if the roses felt too cliché? Chocolates lined up like sealed rations, each box representing a different flavor profile. Three bottles of wine: one sweet, one dry, one caught in the indecisive middle, because Agatha’s preference seemed to change depending on mood, and Rio had never trusted her own ability to predict it. There were books stacked neatly in tissue paper, poetry and essays and even a novel Agatha had mentioned once—only once—six months ago, and never again. Rio remembered anyway. She always remembered.
The rehearsals were relentless. She practiced in her head as she walked to the train, as she brushed her teeth, as she made coffee at four in the morning because sleep refused to settle. She heard Agatha’s voice in her mind, that half-smirk curling on her lips. “You bought me socks? Really?” And she would answer in kind: “They’re practical. Warm. Necessary. You’ll think of me every time you wear them.” Then she’d hear the imagined scoff, the roll of Agatha’s eyes: “Flowers? How original.” Rio’s counterargument was airtight: “They’re statistically proven to be effective in romantic contexts.” If Agatha laughed at a keyboard, called it unromantic, Rio had the line ready: “You cursed your old one three times in a single week. Efficiency is romantic.”
It never sounded right. Too stiff. Too brittle. The words in her mouth felt like plastic, like she was forcing a script into a play that didn’t need one. But she couldn’t stop. The idea of standing in front of Agatha, empty-handed, unprepared, without something to offer, it made her chest ache with a heat that was indistinguishable from fear.
That was what it came down to: fear. Not of rejection, exactly, Agatha wasn’t cruel, and Rio knew on some rational level that she wouldn’t punish her for a gift that fell flat. But what if Agatha wanted something Rio couldn’t give? Gifts were easy. Tangible. Replaceable. What if Agatha wanted spontaneity, that golden fluidity other people seemed to summon so naturally? Rio’s brain craved maps, not leaps. What if Agatha wanted poetry, real poetry, not the precise, sharp-edged words Rio always defaulted to? What if Agatha wanted to feel adored without effort, and all Rio knew how to do was try, and try too hard?
She hated herself for it, sometimes, the way her mind couldn’t let love just be. Couldn’t let it breathe. For her, love had to be a strategy, a chart, a series of steps rehearsed until they were as ingrained as muscle memory. She knew, if she forced herself to stand still and think about it, that Agatha wasn’t keeping score. She knew her girlfriend wasn’t tallying up flowers and chocolates against some invisible rubric. But knowing was not the same as believing, and Rio believed only in her diagrams, her stockpiles, her frantic rehearsals.
Three nights before the anniversary, she stayed up until dawn reorganizing the backup gifts, shuffling them in their boxes until the order made some kind of sense, though it never felt like enough. Two nights before, she paced the length of her apartment rehearsing responses, her reflection in the darkened window nodding and scowling back at her in turn. The night before, she lay awake, eyes pinned open, staring at the ceiling as though the plaster might spell out the answer in cracks she could trace with her finger.
By the time the day itself arrived, she was running on two hours of sleep, four cups of coffee, and the jagged hum of adrenaline. Her apartment was lined with contingency plans disguised as gift bags and carefully folded wrapping paper. Agatha didn’t know it yet, but Rio had prepared for every possibility.
Every possibility but one: that maybe—just maybe—Agatha didn’t need any of it.
The problem with plans, Rio realized, was that they only worked in theory. They looked beautiful on paper, symmetrical and clean, each arrow leading logically to the next outcome. But when faced with reality—the actual, unpredictable presence of Agatha Harkness in her kitchen—they buckled immediately.
Agatha had arrived with that casual, self-assured grace that always made Rio’s chest tighten, like she had walked straight out of some smoky magazine spread instead of simply stepping through the front door. Black coat shrugged off, hair curled in loose waves that caught the lamplight, she leaned against the counter as though she owned it. As though she owned everything. Rio’s apartment felt smaller when she was in it. Not cramped, just… filled. Occupied in a way that made the air vibrate with static, made it impossible to forget that she was here.
Rio’s carefully laid plans began unraveling the moment Agatha spotted the bottle of wine on the table. Not one of the three she’d spent an embarrassing hour choosing between earlier in the day, but the one she had opened last week and forgotten to put away. The plan had been to offer choices. Red or white, sweet or dry. Demonstrate foresight. Thoughtfulness. Control. Instead, Agatha picked up the half-full bottle, squinted at the label, and smirked.
“Starting without me?”
Her tone was teasing, but Rio’s stomach dropped like she’d been caught in some terrible act. She opened her mouth to explain, that no, this wasn’t part of the plan, that it wasn’t meant to be this bottle, but her throat seized. The words jammed somewhere behind her teeth. She only managed a stiff shake of the head, and Agatha, either merciful or oblivious, poured herself a glass without pressing further.
It was only a glass of wine. It shouldn’t have mattered. But already Rio felt her carefully plotted sequence of events splintering like glass dropped on tile.
She tried to recover by offering the flowers next. That had been step one in most of her flowcharts, the safe opening move. But her hand hovered too long over the two identical bouquets she had hidden behind the couch—roses or lilies, roses or lilies—and Agatha caught her hesitation. Her eyebrow arched in that way that meant she was about to say something sharp, and Rio, panicking, shoved the lilies forward like a soldier hurling a shield.
Agatha took them, tilted her head, and said, “You know I’m going to have to get another vase, right?”
Rio blinked. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Was that good? Was that bad? Was “another vase” code for too many flowers already? Or was it just Agatha being Agatha, practical and teasing all at once? She couldn’t tell, and the uncertainty made her chest constrict.
Dinner was worse. She had planned meticulously for three possible meals, each with contingencies. She had prepped pasta, a stir fry, even a backup salad in case Agatha wasn’t hungry. But Agatha glanced at the oven, wrinkled her nose at the steam fogging the glass, and asked, “You didn’t order Thai this time?”
Order Thai. Order Thai.
Rio’s brain short-circuited. She hadn’t even considered takeout. She had considered every angle and still managed to miss the one most obvious to Agatha.
“No,” she said, too quickly, too flatly, and Agatha just shrugged and sat down like it didn’t matter. Like it wasn’t a catastrophic misstep in the war room of Rio’s mind.
By the time they reached the gift portion of the evening, Rio’s nerves were frayed thin. Her meticulously wrapped boxes looked ridiculous now, stacked on the counter like a shrine to overcompensation. She reached for the smallest, the socks—her “humor branch” safety option—but her fingers trembled. Agatha saw. Of course she saw. She always did.
“What’s this?” she asked, amused, as Rio slid the little box across the table like contraband.
“A gift.”
“Well, obviously.” Agatha pulled at the wrapping paper with theatrical slowness, making Rio want to claw at the table. “For me?”
Rio nodded, unable to say more. Her mouth was dry.
When the socks emerged, bright and ridiculous, patterned with falling Tetris blocks, Agatha burst out laughing. Really laughing, loud, unrestrained, head tilted back. And for a split second, Rio thought she’d done it, thought she’d hit the right note at last. But then panic flooded in again, because what if the laugh wasn’t good? What if it was mocking, indulgent, the way one humors a child who tried but missed the mark?
She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t breathe.
Agatha set the socks down on the table and reached for her wine again, still smiling, still relaxed, while Rio sat rigid, heart hammering in her chest like she’d just narrowly survived a disaster. Her mind was a static blur of flowcharts tearing themselves apart. Every line she’d rehearsed felt suddenly useless. Every contingency had collapsed.
This was the part she had never prepared for: the living, breathing presence of Agatha. The unpredictability of her laughter, the tilt of her smile, the warmth in her eyes that no diagram could account for.
Rio was drowning in real time, and all she could do was sit there, too aware of how little her meticulous planning meant now that Agatha was actually here.
It should have been over. Socks exchanged, wine poured, laughter—ambiguous though it was—still echoing faintly in the kitchen air. Rio was tense but surviving, teeth gritted through every unpredictable curveball, every unscripted line. She could make it to the end of the evening if she just held her ground, if she just didn’t make another mistake.
And then Agatha, with that infuriating nonchalance, reached into her bag and slid a small envelope across the table.
No fanfare. No teasing buildup. Just a plain white envelope, sealed, the weight of it almost nothing at all.
Rio froze. She hadn’t anticipated this. She had anticipated gifts, Agatha had a way of buying things she thought Rio “needed,” half-practical, half-indulgent, but she hadn’t accounted for something so quiet, so bare. There was no line for “envelope” in her flowcharts. No contingency plan for this.
“Go on,” Agatha said, gesturing lazily with one hand, as if she hadn’t just detonated a grenade in the middle of Rio’s battlefield.
Rio’s fingers trembled as she picked it up. The paper was smooth, unremarkable. The kind of envelope anyone might use. That almost made it worse. If it had been fancy, sealed with wax, embossed, she could have prepared for that. Categorized it. Labeled it Sentimental: High Impact. But this was plain. Bare. And it terrified her.
She slid a thumb under the flap and opened it with painstaking care, as though rushing might shatter something irreversible. Inside: a single card, folded once. She pulled it free, her breath caught somewhere sharp in her chest.
She opened it.
Two words.
You’re enough.
That was it. No flourish. No poem, no elaborate inscription, no inside joke. Just those two words, written in Agatha’s quick, looping hand, as if it had taken her all of five seconds to scrawl and seal.
And Rio’s entire system short-circuited.
Her brain, which had been running at the speed of light all evening, mapping contingencies and rehearsing counterarguments, slammed to a halt. Static roared in her ears. Her vision tunneled, narrowing until the whole kitchen blurred except for those words, those impossible, unbearable words staring back at her.
You’re enough.
The phrase hit her like an alien language she’d never studied, like a code she couldn’t decrypt no matter how many times she ran it through the machine. She was not enough, that was the whole point. That had been the point her entire life, hadn’t it? Why else would she have spent weeks calculating the perfect outcome? Why else would she have stayed up until dawn reorganizing backup gifts, rehearsing scripted answers like an actor on the edge of stage fright? Why else would she hoard options like a survivalist preparing for famine?
Enough had never been a word she applied to herself. Not in competition, where winning was never winning enough. Not in her own work, where precision meant she could always see the cracks no one else did. Not in love, where the stakes were so high she couldn’t even breathe without second-guessing whether she was doing it right.
But Agatha had written it like it was the most obvious truth in the world. As if it required no explanation, no elaboration.
Rio’s hands shook. She blinked at the words, blinked again, but they didn’t change. Her heart battered against her ribs, desperate and confused. She wanted to argue, to tell Agatha she was wrong, to lay out the evidence, the thousands of tiny ways Rio had fallen short, but her tongue was heavy, useless.
“Do you hate it?” Agatha’s voice cut through the silence, sharp but not unkind, curious more than anything else. She was watching Rio closely, and that made it worse, because Agatha always saw.
Rio shook her head. Too fast, too hard. “No.” The word came out rough, like gravel in her throat.
“Good,” Agatha said simply, leaning back in her chair, utterly at ease. She reached for her wine again, as though she hadn’t just lobbed a word like a weapon into Rio’s chest.
Rio stared down at the card, unable to look away. Her breath came shallow, uneven. She felt like her entire body had been unplugged from the frantic current she’d been riding for weeks, and yet she couldn’t find her footing in the quiet that replaced it.
You’re enough.
The words replayed, echoing louder each time, burrowing past her defenses. She tried to imagine all the ways Agatha might have meant them, was it reassurance, a joke, a deflection? But the handwriting was steady, unflinching. Honest.
It wasn’t flowery. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even particularly “romantic” in the conventional sense. But it stripped her clean. It left her raw.
For a terrifying moment, she thought she might cry. And Rio Vidal did not cry, especially not in front of Agatha. Once had been enough, more than enough. Her throat burned with the threat of it, and her eyes felt too hot, too heavy. She pressed her palm flat against the table, grounding herself, clinging to the sharp edge of the wood.
Agatha didn’t press. She didn’t ask for an explanation or force Rio to speak. She just sat there, sipping her wine, letting the silence stretch. And somehow, that silence made the words louder.
Rio felt dismantled, undone by something so absurdly simple. All her plans, her diagrams, her backup gifts, useless in the face of two words written in ink.
She had prepared for everything. Everything except this.
The card sat on the table between them like a live wire, humming silently while Rio tried to keep herself together. She was still staring at it, still caught in the impossible loop of those two words, when Agatha finally broke the quiet.
“You’re very tense,” she observed, as if Rio weren’t already acutely aware of every muscle in her body strung tight as piano wire.
Rio blinked at her. The words refused to form into a response. Agatha set down her wineglass, stood up, and—without announcement, without ceremony—held out her hand.
“Come on.”
Rio frowned. “Come on?” Her voice cracked.
“Dance with me.”
Her first instinct was to laugh, because dance? It wasn’t in the plan. Not in any of her flowcharts, not in any of her carefully prepared contingencies. Dancing required spontaneity, rhythm, ease. Three things Rio didn’t have. Her brain scrabbled for a response, a reason to decline, some kind of graceful exit, but nothing came. Agatha was still standing there, hand outstretched, eyebrow lifted in challenge.
And god help her, Rio couldn’t say no to that.
She rose stiffly, heart hammering, and let Agatha tug her away from the table. The kitchen felt suddenly too small, too bright, too intimate. No music played. The hum of the refrigerator filled the silence, the soft buzz of the overhead light.
Agatha slid her hand into Rio’s like it was the most natural thing in the world. Her other hand found Rio’s shoulder, warm and steady. Rio’s own free hand hovered awkwardly before it landed, tentative, against Agatha’s waist.
“This is ridiculous,” Rio muttered, more to herself than to Agatha.
“Maybe,” Agatha said lightly, already swaying, pulling Rio into movement. “But that’s half the fun.”
The first step nearly killed her. Rio’s foot came down too heavily on Agatha’s bare toes, and she winced, mortified. “Sorry.”
Agatha laughed. “Relax. You’re not leading a parade.”
“I don’t— I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.” Agatha’s voice was calm, firm, the way she spoke when she wanted something settled. “Stop thinking.”
Stop thinking. As if that were possible. Rio’s whole existence was thinking, planning, analyzing every angle. And yet… Agatha’s hand was warm against her back, coaxing her closer, her grip steady and certain. The rhythm wasn’t precise, there was no rhythm, really, but Agatha’s steps guided hers, slow and easy, like drifting.
Rio let herself sway, her chest tight, her breath uneven. Agatha’s perfume lingered in the air, subtle and sharp, mixing with the faint scent of lilies on the counter. Their bodies brushed with every movement, heat sparking at every point of contact.
It wasn’t choreography. It wasn’t mapped. It wasn’t anything Rio could prepare for. And yet it was happening, real, unfolding second by second in a way that made her dizzy.
Agatha tilted her head, eyes catching Rio’s. The smirk was gone, replaced by something softer, something that made Rio’s throat close up.
“You’re terrible at this,” Agatha murmured.
Rio flushed. “I told you—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Agatha’s voice dropped, warm and steady. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
You’re enough. Again. The words hit Rio’s chest like a hammer, echoing the card still sitting on the table. Her grip on Agatha tightened before she could stop herself, her pulse ricocheting through every inch of her body.
The steps blurred. She wasn’t sure if they were even moving anymore, or just standing close, rocking slightly in the middle of her kitchen. Agatha’s hair brushed her cheek. Rio caught herself cataloging every detail, the weight of Agatha’s hand on her shoulder, the shape of her smile in the dim light, the way her body fit against Rio’s in a way no diagram could have predicted.
Rio didn’t know how long they stood there. Minutes, maybe. Hours. The concept of time dissolved into the steady hum of the refrigerator, the warmth of skin against skin, the sound of Agatha’s breathing close to her ear.
Her mind, usually so loud, so cluttered, went strangely still. There were no charts here, no backup plans. Just this, improvised, chaotic, terrifying, perfect.
When Agatha finally leaned back, the spell didn’t break so much as shift. She was smiling, that soft, dangerous smile that always threatened to undo Rio completely.
“See?” she said. “Not so hard.”
Rio opened her mouth, but no words came. She just stood there, trembling, caught in the unbearable realization that she hadn’t prepared for this, and somehow, it was better than anything she could have planned.
Agatha squeezed her hand once before letting go, turning back toward the table with casual ease, as if she hadn’t just dismantled Rio’s entire system with a single unplanned dance.
Rio stayed rooted in place, heart still racing, knees weak, trying to process the unthinkable:
For once, not knowing what came next hadn’t destroyed her. It had made her feel… alive.
The kitchen was still humming when the dance ended, though Rio could no longer tell if it was the fridge or her own pulse filling the silence. Agatha had gone back to the table as if nothing had happened, sipping her wine with that lazy elegance that always made Rio feel like she was standing on uneven ground. The card still lay there, stark and small, two words shining like a flare in the wreckage of Rio’s plans.
She sat down slowly, every nerve raw. Her body felt like she had just come out of a match, the kind that left her buzzing with adrenaline, except this wasn’t competition, it was something far more dangerous. At least in competition she knew the rules, the possible moves, the conditions for winning. Here, in the soft chaos of Agatha’s presence, there were no rules, no win conditions. And still she found herself wanting to stay in the game.
Agatha didn’t push. She never did when Rio was like this—quiet, brittle, searching for words. Instead she toyed with the edge of her glass, humming faintly, content in the silence. That was the thing about her: she could fill a room just by existing, and still leave space for Rio to breathe, to come undone at her own pace.
Rio tried to think it through the way she always did, to categorize what had just happened. Improvised dance: outcome positive. Emotional resonance: high. Risk factor: negligible compared to reward. She almost laughed at herself. Even now, part of her wanted to reduce it to bullet points. But another part—the louder part, the part Agatha seemed to coax out of her without even trying—wasn’t interested in analysis. It wanted to sit in the warmth of what had just happened and let it exist without dissection.
And that was terrifying. Because if she didn’t analyze it, if she didn’t chart it, then she had to feel it. Raw, unfiltered, uncontainable.
She glanced at the card again, her throat tightening. You’re enough. The words echoed like a bell, vibrating through every corner of her mind. She had spent weeks preparing to avoid this exact possibility, the exposure, the unbearable intimacy of being seen. She had surrounded herself with backup gifts and contingency plans because she couldn’t imagine herself being the gift, couldn’t imagine herself being enough.
And yet Agatha had written it like it was the simplest truth in the world. Not a consolation prize. Not a kindness to soften the edges. A fact.
Rio pressed her palms together under the table, as if holding herself in place. She wanted to argue, to tell Agatha she was wrong, to pull out the list of all the ways she had failed, all the ways she fell short. But the list felt useless now, flimsy in the face of the way Agatha had looked at her during that ridiculous, improvised dance, eyes soft, hands steady, like Rio’s fumbling had never been a liability but something endearing, something worth staying close for.
The realization hit with a force she hadn’t prepared for: she didn’t need to prove anything. Not tonight. Not ever.
She had been operating as though love were a test, as though every moment were an opportunity to pass or fail, to measure up or fall short. But Agatha wasn’t holding a scorecard. She wasn’t tallying roses against chocolates, socks against wine. She was just… here. And all she wanted, all she had asked, was for Rio to be here too.
That was the part that undid her most. The simplicity of it. The unbearable generosity of it.
Her mind flickered through images of the past weeks, her sleepless nights, her frantic rehearsals, the stacks of backup gifts hidden like contraband in her closet, and she almost laughed. It was absurd. She had turned their anniversary into a campaign, mapped it like a war she had to win. And Agatha, with her envelope and her two impossible words, had ended the whole thing with a single stroke. No battle. No strategy. Just truth.
Across the table, Agatha caught her staring and arched an eyebrow. “What?”
Rio swallowed hard. Her voice felt fragile, but she forced it out anyway. “Nothing.”
Agatha smirked, satisfied with that answer, and leaned back in her chair, utterly at ease. Rio wanted to reach across the table, to take her hand, to anchor herself in the warmth she had just been wrapped in during their dance. But she didn’t. Not yet. Instead she sat there, trembling quietly under the weight of what she had finally admitted to herself.
She didn’t need to plan for Agatha. She didn’t need to strategize her way into being worthy. She already was.
Later, after the wine had dwindled and the flowers were in a vase and Agatha had curled herself onto the couch like she belonged there, Rio found herself watching her from across the room. The card was still in her hand, the edges softening from how tightly she had held it all night.
She knew, with the clarity of someone stepping out of fog into open air, that she would keep it forever. Not because it was pretty, it wasn’t. Not because it was clever, it wasn’t that either. But because it had dismantled her. Because it had given her something she hadn’t even realized she’d been starving for: permission.
Permission to stop proving.
Permission to stop planning.
Permission to just be.
Agatha shifted on the couch, her gaze flicking up to catch Rio’s again, and her lips curved into the faintest, most devastating smile.
Rio smiled back, tentative but real. And for once, she didn’t try to analyze it. She just let it be.