#lunatic178

I suppose that depends on which business you think he was trying to get out of! I don’t think he was trying to leave crime overall, but I do think he was trying to flip his game, and I generally ascribe to @pynkhues theory about Rio’s business interests that she lays out here.

To summarize: it seems like Rio's counterfeiting operations were shut down in season 2, and that he pawned off money that had already been made in season 1 but which was likely useless to him as he was under too much scrutiny while his criminal case was open. He was moving into pill distribution, and when Beth delivered on a lucrative scheme that he could also use for getting his drugs into the country, he leaped on the opportunity, retaking control over the counterfeit cash but washing it exclusively through Boland Motors so that it was theoretically untraceable to himself. 

I think he would’ve eventually come exploding back onto the scene to collect regardless—we saw in 1.08 that he tends to think of all of his money as “his” regardless of whether it’s part of his employee’s payroll—but I agree with you that his plans changed when they slept together, and I think that sped up his timeline and changed the way the information was delivered (namely, he enjoyed making a scene in front of Dean). 

It’s pretty clear to me that his interest and obsession with Beth ratcheted up after the bathroom break, and I think Rio responded to personal cord tightening between them by trying to tighten the professional cord between them as well. 

Thank you!

Personally, I think Beth’s fear is talking the loudest in her interpretation of that moment, but she may subconsciously be picking up on the layered tension in that scene? Rio’s dismissal of her sounds more like a break-up than a firing (“What me and you had is done. Over.”) after all, and Beth reacted similarly to when she discovered Dean’s affair (crying on the couch). In addition to that, her plan was very much one where she made sure that Rio couldn’t easily dismiss and forget about her, which is something I think she wanted but couldn’t name, but I’m not sure that with her normal levels of repression, tunnel vision, and compartmentalization that Beth was ready to acknowledge that Rio had any feelings for her at this point. 

So while I think she may have picked up on the fact that the fight wasn’t purely business (and that Rio was already treating her differently than how he treated Eddy) I’m not sure that she was in any frame of mind to parse out that Rio looking at her funny might have meant—her mind seemed to skip right over into “crisis” because it probably felt a lot more rational than anything else (and because Rio made sure not to give away what his intentions were because although I think he knew that he wasn’t going to do anything to her, he didn’t want her to know that because he was playing things close to the vest). 

Hi! First of all, good luck on that journey!

I wish I could help, but I don’t know of anything like this. I’m still pretty new to writing generally and only have a limited scope of understanding how some things in the fic world operate. Anything beyond that is completely foreign to me!