Daryl was sipping his morning coffee slowly.
It made no practical sense, but it tasted so different from any other cups of joe you could have after that one, he had made a habit of savoring that very first one.
He didn't turn on the TV or the radio, standing in the living room/kitchen of the two bedroom apartment he shared with his brother. He enjoyed the silence. Lord knew when Merle would be up, this would be a thing from the past. Even when he kept his mouth shut, which only happened once in a blue moon, Merle managed to make a room loud. Daryl supposed it was who his brother was, what he was made of. They were not cut from the same cloth when it came to that trait, Daryl thought, before taking another slow yet delicious sip of his precious coffee.
He felt calm, and tried not to think about what the day would be like. He did odd jobs, here and there, but he hadn't managed to find a place where he wanted to try and overstay his welcome. Instead, he was always one foot out the door even in good places. He didn't know what was wrong with him, but Merle sure asked him about it in various ways whenever he could.
What could he say? Daryl was, he guessed, an odd one. He did not run away from commitment, even though many thought so, but he needed a little something extra, as far as everything was concerned. He would move out to his own place when he would deem it time for example. It was not something he could explain, but he felt like life was made of big steps, big gestures, big moments, and unless he felt like it was time to do that big whatever, he wouldn't even give it a try. He had had chicks in his bed, had even gone out on some dates, but it had never felt like it was anything more than two people playing a game of grown-up. Or maybe it had only felt like that to him, and the chicks he had taken out, or even dated for a short while, had thought they were going forward towards something, whatever it would have been.
Daryl felt a sigh escape his lips and he wished he was just not like… that. He felt no pity for the women who had come and gone in his life, he didn't belittle them in his thoughts when realizing that they may have thought something was being built, he only felt sadness, and resignation: people didn't know him, not really, not ever. People looked at him, like he had chosen to be this way, like he was loving this life of his, this feeling he sometimes got like he was going nowhere, like he had missed a crossroad somewhere and that had resulted in him being forty and living with his older brother. People, except perhaps Merle, more often than not, didn't see what it really meant, to live this life, this odd life, where he drifted from one place to another. He was never home. He was never safe. He was always alone. And lonely. He remembered being younger, learning the difference between the two words, and realizing instinctively why it was so important.
Maybe he had always been odd. Merle had just been too loud for people to realize it until Daryl had grown up and had grown some chin hair that didn't make him look like an underage pimp. The few people he had known most of his life had assumed for a very long time that he was the way he was because his dad had been a mean drunk and his mom an even meaner addict. Some had started to realize a few years back that while he was the product of his education, nurture versus nature and all that, there was something else in him, something he couldn't pinpoint, something that made all the difference.
He tried to stop this train of thought with another sip of that first cup of coffee which was going tepid with the time he took to drink it. He was who he was. That was it.
He heard steps in the corridor, and he didn't need to turn his head to know it was Andrea, tiptoeing out of his brother's bedroom, doing the walk of shame as she would say.
Though was it really a walk of shame when you walked that walked at least three times a week and you had your own cup for coffee in the cupboard?
As Andrea nodded at him before pouring herself a short cup of coffee, Daryl wondered how this situation had come to happen, and what future it had.
"Have you seen my shoes?" She asked him in lieu of greeting.
"You left them next to the couch," he said.
He had seen them there.
Andrea, who was a quite successful lawyer in Atlanta, had been shacking up with his brother for… three years now? Maybe four? They never made it public, and it seemed that even themselves, they were not aware that they were a thing. Merle hadn't brought home a chick ever since that first night he had brought Andrea, and Daryl didn't need to ask to know that Andrea was not seeing another man. Yet, whenever she spent the night, she would "do the walk of shame", except without the shame part.
If it worked for them, Daryl had nothing more to say about it. Still, he knew that some of his and Merle's buddies thought there was more to say. Daryl thought briefly that perhaps he was odd in a more obvious fashion, but his brother was no different, and he had found a woman who had long stopped pretending this would be the last time she would fall in bed with him, and who just discreetly runs out in the morning to go back to her place. They didn't need to be lovey dovey in public. Hell, to people who met them for the first time, they were not even on friendly terms, but year after year, they had built something that worked for the both of them. Daryl had heard some of his buddies complain about their girlfriend's taking over their place, but with Andrea and Merle, it was not that. It was just them. Their way. Their odd way.
Daryl held his tongue as he found himself almost asking the blonde how she would do when his brother and her would become parents… He supposed they'd cross that bridge when they come to it, and that was it. What you saw on TV, was not necessarily what you were supposed to have, and even if society wanted you to have it, it didn't mean it would fill your every dream and desire and leave you desperately happy.
"Looking for a job?" Andrea said as she finished her coffee.
He didn't say anything but looked at her, which was all she needed.
"We're moving offices. I got a partner, and she comes with baggage the heavy kind. Therefore, we are moving offices to some place bigger. I won't move my office on my own, not while wearing Prada. I need some muscles for the day…"
"What about Merle? He's got some of those…"
"Walk of shame, remember?" She said, and they both knew she didn't mean it.
She liked the idea of doing the walk of shame, but when drunk or pushed to the limit, she would become extremely possessive of her man. They just enjoyed themselves with those theatrics.
"Lots of boxes?" He asked.
"Quite a few, yes. But once you've dismantled my furniture and put it in the truck, we should only need one trip to the new office to bring everything."
"I don't come cheap…" He said.
"I'll buy you dinner. And beers."
"You've got yourself a deal," he told Andrea, who smiled at him before putting on her expensive shoes.
She told him to join her at her office in an hour, and he prepared the tools he would need.
+.+
It didn't take them too long a time really, a couple of hours tops. Andrea was very neat, and once she had stacked her paper files and books in boxes, Daryl dismantled her office and her chair. He took care of the desk she used to receive clients, and only a few quick trips to the truck where he let Andrea watch over the furniture he was carrying were needed for them to be done with the place.
Andrea didn't look nostalgic at all, and he would even have said she looked enthusiastic, impatient to be on her way.
"How did the partner thing happen?" He asked once they got stuck in traffic.
He was not one to pry, but he could see in the way she was fidgeting she was dying to tell the story.
"There's a lawyer, she is as good as I am. We have kicked each other's ass in court for the past few months, and I felt… I knew we could do good together. Turns out she thought the same. We had drinks, and talked it through. It was fast… Michonne, by the way, that's her name. Michonne Sterling, though she could become Michonne Grimes any day now."
Daryl nodded along and gave Andrea an impressed look when she mentioned who the partner was or could be. The Grimes were known, sheriffs and all that. They had a good reputation, and having a partner in this family would certainly be good for Andrea's business. He didn't doubt that this Michonne was a great lawyer either, but just her name was already speaking volumes, even to a heathen like him.
"Michonne and I decided we would work on a big case together, things went from there… When I offered a formal partnership, she said she had a few conditions, which were not that much. She wanted to keep her paralegal, and her intern. And for some convoluted reason, she wanted the new offices to be located in an area served by a certain pizza parlor. That was all she wanted that and the promise to take on a few pro bono cases from an abuse shelter. It was all good to me. Her paralegal… She could have been a lawyer too, she's fierce. I could tell you about a bunch of cases where she whispered something into Michonne' s ear and suddenly I didn't have a case anymore… Carol… You'd like her," Andrea said, and it was so unexpected, Daryl almost forgot to put on the brakes when the car in front of them stopped.
"Is this a trap?" He asked, suspiciously, feeling like all had been smooth, so smooth… Too smooth. Things didn't come that easy to him.
"Nope."
"Did you ask me to help you so I could see this chick?"
"Yep".
"Then it's a trap."
"Nope."
He glared at Andrea.
"You're not a rabbit, this is not a trap."
"You know what I mean…"
"And you know I'm smart. So smart indeed I would never imagine I could introduce you to a girl and get away with it. What I'm doing is getting you to do the hard work for this move, and if you meet Carol, then it is what it is and you can leave when you're done."
"You say tomato…" He started, feeling a bit jumpy at the thought that he was being taken some place a woman was so they could be introduced.
"I do not say tomato. I speak lawyerish, it's different."
"You say lawyerish, I say…" He started again, and Andrea laughed.
One glance at a girl, and a quick hello exchanged, he thought. Surely that would not kill him.
+.+.+
And indeed, it didn't.
They got to the new office before Michonne's people, and they set up Andrea's office. As he was putting back together the desk, he heard the sound of the rest of the people arriving. It seemed Michonne and her crew had decided to do the move on their own.
He was the only man in the office, he thought. What was the opposite of a sausage fest?
He was under the desk, working on a screw, and sweating like a pig as the tiny device had decided to show him hell when there was a knock on the open door.
He bumped his head into the hard wood before he managed to look above the desk.
He was met by… Kismet?
He scolded himself and wondered for the umpteenth time why he had decided to start those night classes again to finally finish high school. The words he used… Merle would have hurled a bottle at him.
"Hope it didn't hurt too bad," the woman said with a smile, which seemed to hold back a smile.
She was his age he supposed, grey-hair, blue eyes, and something magnetic about her he couldn't explain.
"We Dixons have hard heads," he said lamely, and he wanted to kick himself in the ass.
"Ah! The Dixons. I know that Andrea has a predilection for the Dixons," the woman said before entering the room a couple of steps more.
This prompted him to wonder where Andrea was, but from the noise he supposed she went to help Michonne or someone else.
"For Merle. My brother," he felt compelled to add, worried for a minute this creature could think he was the one who was Andrea's.
"So that makes you…" She asked with a squint in her eye, which made him want to leap and kiss the corner of those perfect eyes.
"Daryl. Of The Dixon family." Where was this coming from?
"Carol, of the Peletier dynasty," she replied with a chuckle and he found himself laughing with her at the silliness he had expressed.
"What can I do for you, or your dynasty?" He asked.
"I do not want to put my desk together again. If Maggie hadn't helped me, I think I would have left it at the old office and that I would work from the floor from this day forward… Anyway, I don't want to do my desk. So I thought I'd make a coffee run. Do you want some coffee?"
"Is that a trick so that I will build your desk for you?" He said with a squinty eye.
Who was he kidding? He was so putting that desk together for her the moment he was done with this one and this stupid screw…
"Nope. It's just that if I want my coffee run to be believable, and even though 'Chonne will probably know I'm running away from my desk situation, I figured it would help the charade if I actually went and got everyone coffee."
"Seems clever."
"And admissible in a court of law," she said. "If I am bringing several people coffee then I can say in front of the court that I went for a coffee run."
"Sneaky. I like it."
"Thanks."
He stared at her, and she stared back.
After a while, he gave her an order for coffee, and he felt his heart sunk to his stomach when she left the room to fulfill her run. He consoled himself in remembering the glimpse he had caught of her backside as she left.
He got down with Andrea's desk, as he heard Carol get everyone's order.
When she came back, he was listening to the intern, Maggie, who was attempting to help him put back together Carol's desk by telling him what it had looked like. Spoiler alert, it had looked like a desk. Yet he didn't have the heart to tell Maggie that she was not as helpful as she hoped to be.
Carol gave him his coffee, and their fingers brushed lightly.
They spent the rest of the afternoon putting her desk back together, at a lazy pace as he would drink in her every word, feeling like a new man.
Oh, he was still odd, mind you. But tonight, when he'd come home, he'd start looking for a place of his own, and he would ask for more work hours at the bike shop he was moonlighting at.
He knew for a fact he hadn't missed a crossroad before, it had just taken its sweet time in arriving, but he was okay with that as it had given him the time and perspective to spot right away this crossroad. He knew he would go the right way, with Carol.