Hi again.
The sun is hung low and tired in the sky - a physical representation of Beth's emotional state, she's sure. There's something about the set of her bones that feel weighted like the sun, when the sound of the man's voice startles her away from where her face is desperately counting down the minutes until she'll need to find a plug to keep her only lifeline to any real help from dying out on her. When she slowly lifts her head up out from where she's sniffling discreetly into the face of her phone and trying to hold herself together, the figure hovering above her is bathed in nothing but shadow - the sheen of soft light outlining the lines of his form. Through the dark of sun shining lowly behind him, all she sees is large solid width, wide shoulders, and looming height where one bare arm is lifted to the other, fingers scratching uncertainly at darkened skin.
In her surprise, it takes Beth a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the sight in front of her before any real features start taking form. When they do, she scans the man in front of her, quickly, and takes note of her situation.
"You always think the best of everyone, Bethy," her Daddy had hovered over her as she placed more folded shirts into the cardboard box on her bed, a week before he drove her out to New York. "And that's a good thing, in general. To not discriminate against others based on what the good Lord gave each of us. But, don't let your kindness take you for a fool, either. Not everyone you meet is looking to return that favor."
The man's hair is long - dark strands falling down into his face, where his eyes are looking sharply over her, settled and sure. The darkness of his skin, she sees, is actually just a fairly heavy tan. The sort she's familiar with from a lifetime lived on a farm surrounded by a lifetime of farmhands of all sorts; of a man who spends the majority of his being working outdoors whether he wants to be or not. The shape of his arms is much like those men, she knows, as well. Not the wily ones with slight arms just beginning the work, like Jimmy. But, the ones who spend the entire day out in the fields, out with the tools, who get given house rules to stay away from the Greene Girls.
Strong and sure.
Arms that could hurt her, if he's one of the men of which her Daddy warned her about that apparently roam the streets just looking to take advantage of her good nature. His mouth is set in a thin sort-of line, though, while his eyes are moving carefully around the area, surveying the gas station's parking lot with a somewhat intense focus, and he's leaned forward just so - close enough to get a read on her and far enough to not cause any more alarm than she's already in. He looks like a man Maggie would steer her away from, with her heavy arm secured protectively around Beth's shoulders and a unsure scowl on her face.
But, he looks...uncomfortable. He looks uncomfortable and unsure and, if she's correctly reading the small flash in his eyes, he looks a little angry.
"I'm sorry?" Beth asks and cringes as her throat quivers and her question stumbles out.
"You alright?" he repeats in the same rough voice, before leaning a little further back to give her room to breathe. "Someone hurt you?"
Her head shakes her answer before she speaks, "No...no one's hurt me." Beth looks beyond him, for a moment, to see the lot completely empty, apart from the pair of them - her craning her neck to look up and him hunching just so to look down - and three vehicles. There's one car parked off to the side of the building, that's been there since Beth first shuffled off of the bus, which she suspects belongs to the horrid man, inside. And, sat over by a pump, alone with no owner inside, is a tan and weathered pick up truck. It's dusty and obviously truly used - dried mud caking along the bottom and small spots of faded paint lining the door. It's a real truck, without all of the extra bells and whistles. The kind a man like Hershel Greene owns and not the kind that swivel past during long winded commercials with shiny letters weaving in and out of the scenic backdrop it's driving along, talking about the high definition televisions built into the backs of the seats. And settled down inside the bed is the third vehicle, a dark motorcycle secured carefully along the front and the rear with two thick black straps.
"You sure?" his accent is familiar. He sounds like the guys at the county fairs, back home, who sit around on their own motorcycles and do nothing but drink beer and talk to the crew that they came with and the leggy girls on their arms.
"I'm sure...I mean," Beth shuffles where she sits. Now that her mind isn't drifted away on her dwindling charge, the feel of the concrete is really starting to take notice. "The jerk inside made some stupid comments - called me "sweet-ums" which was real irritating, but...I'm fine...on that front."
She watches him look up through the glass of the gas station doors, back to her, where she's pushing on the flat of her palms to help herself off of the ground (she swears her knees crick, as they pull straight), and over the plains of her face, where the wind pinches at the salty lines where her tears have been falling.
"On that front, huh?" she listens to him mumble his words underneath his breath. "Listen, girl," his tone is still quiet, like he's sure she'll run even though she knows she has nowhere to run to, and his fingers twitch at his side.
Yes, Beth knows that one look at this man would have her sister mumbling, herself, about no good rednecks who aren't to be trusted or touched with a ten foot pole. But, Beth ain't so sure. He has stopped to check on her, after all, as she sat folded in on herself and crying on the curb in the parking lot of an empty gas station, while the sun slowly went to bed. Even if it looks like he'd rather be anywhere else in the world than standing anywhere near the blonde sop of a girl, she is at the moment, and even if his hands are clenching something fierce, he did lean over and ask if she's okay.
And that's a hell of a lot more than the skeezeball inside by the cash register can say when he goes to sleep tonight.
"-I don't wanna be leaving you here by yourself if someone...did something to you...Maybe...you should call your parents to come pick you up..."
"I swear, no one's done anything. And I've called my Daddy...he didn't answer. Neither did Maggie."
They stand there staring at each other for a moment and, in the silence, Beth sees that he's not quite the giant that he looks like from below. He's still large in the sense that she's not, though. She's slim in all areas - the very definition of petite and short. And he's not. But, he's a lot less alarming from her full height and, although his face is measurably blank, she feels like he's weighing something over in his mind. Perhaps why this lonely girl can't seem to stop sniffling. So, she lets him. She stays silent. She watches him gaze out towards the streets leading out of the lot, as if someone's about to come for her. She watches him look back to the backpack still strapped to her shoulders, and the trail of tears on her face, and the probable red of her nose, and the empty plastic cup, that she'd ripped the top off of, long earlier, to slowly eat away at the ice.
When she thinks he's about to speak, again, however, he doesn't. He nods. Once. Slightly. And moves around where she stands, careful not to touch any part of her, to push inside the building.
It's all very anti-climactic and Beth doesn't really know what she'd expected from this nameless stranger. Was he supposed to summon her Mama from thin air, to come and give her a hug? Was he supposed to magically make her Daddy's blue truck, beat and used and loved, like the tan one stood a few feet away from her, pull into the drive and beckon her to jump in? Was he supposed to telepathically communicate to Maggie to call her back, already?
No.
No, he wasn't.
He's done his civic duty by making sure she'd not been shoved out of a moving car or beaten in the back alley, by some deadbeat boyfriend, which is more so than many other's would'a done. And he moved on.
She turns slightly to watch him, inside, where he's got one hand settled on the counter and the other pointing to the wall of cigarettes. There's something tense in the way he stands and there's something heavy on his shoulders. He sorta looks tired, like she's sure she that she looks tired. She thinks on why, without any clue as to what that might be - something nagging in her mind.
Without thinking it through, Beth kicks one booted foot back against the curb, before starting forward towards the one occupied gas pump. She walks around the front of the man's truck and down the side where the motorcycle stands proud. It's just as dusty as the truck is and Beth takes a moment to wonder if the man wishes he had a tarp to cover it over. She keeps walking around until she reaches the back of the bed and drops her gaze.
The nagging in her mind pings in hope (or maybe it's simply the complete and utter desperation to not suddenly move to Wherever, Virginia for the rest of her life) and she pulls her focus surely back to the man inside, who's tugging a wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. The familiar and comforting orange of the peach on his plates has her mind running wild with the sudden possibilities. She knows her Daddy would scold her 'til the cows came home, if he knew the thought that's flying through her head. She can already picture the look on her Mama's face if she saw the outcome. If she saw her little girl dropping herself out of this tan-
"The hell you think you're doing!" he calls out, as he strides across the parking lot, towards her, far less the tone of the unsure and thinly veiled concerned man from before. Instead, he looks confused at her shuffling 'round his truck (as he should be, really) and, despite the wetness of her eyes, she looks hopeful and she's sure that's not a sight that he really wants to see.
"My name is Beth," she makes her proper introductions with a small smile on her face and a tiny step forward to extend her hand even though he's too far away to do anything with it. So, it's not a surprise when he promptly ignores more contact. She still feels sniffly and her nose still feels stuffed and there's a distinct sense of overall dread. But, this man has a Georgia license plate and this man has a Georgia accent, if from out of the Sticks. And both of those combined together is more of a plan of action than sobbing on the curb of an Exxon, has been.
"That's great. I don't give a shit."
It goes against everything her parents taught her when she moved out on her own, about not shoving herself in a place of danger, unnecessarily. It goes against everything Shawn had warned her of when he'd dragged her into a one armed hug and groaned seriously against the side of her head, before he strode out of her new apartment. It goes against everything Maggie had showed her not to do, growing up, with a small chuckle, as she made mistakes, herself - pre-preparing her little sister for the mean of the world. "I mean...you give a little shit, right?"
"No. The hell you think you're doing?"
Beth keeps envisioning the look on her sister's face, though, when she finally manages to get her on the phone and tells her what's happened - that, if she doesn't find a way to make it out of this, soon, she's going to be late. It's not a pleasant face. Not pleasant, at all. It's a horrible mixture of annoyance and hurt and Beth absolutely does not want to be responsible for putting that feeling into Maggie's features.
So, really, in the grand scheme of things, how crazy is it?
This thought she's having?
"So, you're from Georgia, yeah?" she nods her head down towards his plates and reaches her hands up to grip tightly at the straps of her backpack and pull them away, again, from where it's still digging through her sweater. "Are you...heading to or from?"
Beth can tell right away how smart this man is and she watches the understanding immediately shift over his face, before he settles it back into a simple stare. "No," he grumbles an answer to her not yet asked question and tugs his keys out of his front pocket.
"Wait! Wait, please," she reaches out to grab at the bed door. "Please, just hear me out for one second."
"Look, it ain't my business if you're runnin' away," his fingers swirl as he moves to pick out the key that he needs. "Smart thing to do's just to head on back, 'course. Let your Daddy tuck you in and read you a bed time story or whatever shit's normal at your house. But, I ain't taking you no where. So, you best go ahead and get that out of your head."
"I'm not running anywhere," Beth pulls herself around the back of the truck to stand on the side where the man in the vest does and stands a little taller. "What would make you think that, anyway?"
The key slides through the lock and he's twisting his door open, "You're a kid, sitting by yourself outside a gas station, with nothing but a backpack and a runny nose." She bites a remark back, before he continues. "I don't need to be gettin' sent to The Pen, because I took some teenage girl over state lines. Seen enough of a prison to last me a lifetime," he ends so quietly she almost misses it; she's supposed to miss it. There's something bitter in the way he speaks and the way his eyes twitch without his permission to the bike that he's got strapped away and back to the cab he's about to climb into.
But, he can't do that, because he's Beth's only chance to get back on track. "I'm nineteen," she breathes, a rush of panicked adrenaline fueling her forward. "I know I look kind-of young, but I'm not. So, no one would be arresting you for taking me anywhere. 'Sides, I'm trying to get home. That's the whole problem."
"Don't matter," he tosses his wallet across the bench and slides inside. "I don't wanna take you, anywhere, anyway."
"You said you didn't want to leave me here, by myself, if someone had done something to me," the man moves to pull shut the door, but Beth races forward and grabs it before it can close shut. She knows she's being pushy. She knows that begging isn't the way to get anything done or get anything accomplished. But, she stopped the door from closing and something tells her he could've pulled it shut on her, if he had bothered to really try. He certainly looks strong enough to over power the pull of her own muscle, she has no doubt about it. "No one hit me and no one touched me. But, I did get left behind."
The man's hand grips the door handle a little tighter and he stares straight forward, out of the front windshield, not saying a word.
"I - I don't have a lot of money, on me, if that's what would convince you. It's all in my suitcase on the bus, but," she steps closer into the open space between them. "But, you're from Georgia and if you just get me anywhere near Atlanta, I can figure the rest out on my own and pay you for the gas and the trouble when we get there."
The look from before settles over his face, again, quiet and unsure. So, Beth halts her plea and waits. She watches his eyes drift over the steering wheel and down to the open space next to him on the bench seat. "Atlanta hmm...You'll pay me when we get there?" he asks and turns to stare into her eyes. They're blue, she notes. Blue and pointed and shockingly bright, as they bore into her and search for her honesty.
"I'll pay you when we get there."
Beth feels like they hold there - in this Exxon in Wherever, Virginia - figuring each other out for an eternity, until he finally tugs roughly at the truck door - her hand falling naturally away - and slamming it shut. Her heart falls from her chest, as she watches through the open window, as he shoves the appropriate key in the ignition, brings the engine to life, and moves the control shift into drive. She takes a few steps back from the vehicle, so that he doesn't run her over when he drives away, in his haste to escape the stare of some desperate girl he doesn't know or want to know. She looks down to the count the cracks in the cement and attempts to smother away her disappointed.
What was this man supposed to do? Was he supposed to go out of his way to -
"Well, get in."
Beth snaps her head up to the man not looking at her. His hands have moved to grab at the wheel, one elbow lifted up to rest against the window sill. She doesn't take the time to take him him; unsure and expecting a change in mind, she races around the front of the truck. Her knees still crick, as she grasps the passenger door's handle, pulls her side open, and climbs inside.
She's hit suddenly by a strong, but faintly faded, smell of cigarette smoke. It's light in the air and seeped deep and formed into the dark fabric of the cushions, after what she knows is years and years of use. But, it's not overwhelming or off-putting, like Maggie's car had been after a house party she'd attended back in high school, when a bottle of vodka had spilled all over the back seat and a strange skunky smell had waded through the air. From what she knows of this man she's known all of ten minutes, total, this is familiar to him.
This smell.
This is something long embedded into his life.
Beth shuffles her shoulders, awkwardly, as she attempts to push the straps of her bag off of her back. She tries not to look over while the truck lurches out of it's settled position and begins easing away from the pump and out of the parking lot. She doesn't need or want to see if he's watching her flap around, like a baby bird first discovering it's wings.
She's just shoving her pack down onto the floor in the space between her feet, when she suddenly realizes what she's doing. The man's truck has pulled out onto the highway and is gaining speed to keep up with the traffic he's driven into, and Beth realizes what she's done. Her parents would more than frown on this. Her Daddy's voice might actually raise at her if he ever found out.
She's not afraid, though.
She's not.
The ride is steady and sure and she finds her mind spacing with every turn of the wheels. There's something about the uncertainty she's seen in his face and the initial flash of concern in his eyes from when he'd come up to her on the curb, that makes her believe she's put her stock in a good man. But, her belief in the stock of the good people in the world don't change the fact that it's not exactly normal to hitch a ride like this, anymore. It's not safe to stick your thumb out and climb into the truck of a man from the sticks.
Beth's seen more than enough stories flash dangerously on the news where this ends painfully for the girl with the backpack and the wetness in her eyes.
He's sat so far away from her, though, and there's not been a single lingering look, from what she's seen. Hell, he thought she was a runaway, only a little while ago. It's naive, she knows Shawn would tell her it was naive, but she really doesn't think that this trip will end with her dead in a ditch.
She's got faith in the man in the vest.
"Daryl," his voice speaks from her left and Beth twists her head away from where she's been watching the sun dip below the horizon and the cars pass by in her peripheral vision, for however long they've been on the road.
"Hmm?"
"My name's Daryl," he keeps driving - a large semi truck with a picture of a giant corn-dog painted along the side, falling behind them. "...Figured you should know."
"Daryl," Beth let's the name drip from her lips and grins brightly, in gratitude, at her new companion. She hadn't thought to ask his name - another detail of this story she plans to omit when she explains to her family how she managed to get home. He seems like a Daryl, though. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Daryl."
"Hmm."
For more than an hour, Daryl keeps his foot steady on the wheel - the motorcycle in the bed holding firm and quiet, in the back, and the wind whipping through his open window swirling the sent of a slight natural musk through the cab. The sun's all but gone, now, the orange tinge of it's last remains painting thin across the black sky. It's pretty; she's more able to appreciate the aesthetic nature of the encompassing night in this beat up old truck than she was on the bus - the truck's seats softer than the insistent scratching of the fabric from before and the ragged bumps of the contraption's wheels against the formed potholes. Her breathing evened out many miles back and her eyes dried, as well. She's comfortable in a situation she suspects she shouldn't be. But, Daryl is silent, as he pushes them forward, and Beth has a feeling that not speaking is his nurtured normal. The cab, itself, has no more sound than the whistling wind, while the fallen strands of her hair whips gently around her face.
After awhile, Beth feels a small pain in her stomach forming from her lack of a proper meal, today, begin to form. She'd had nothing for breakfast and only one granola bar on the bus. But, she doesn't want to disturb the night. When her stomach finally betrays her, however, and lets out a loud gurgling grumble of protest, she grimaces in her spot. But, a huff of breath from behind the driver's seat, that Beth's certain is something of a laugh, has her holding back an embarrassed grin, "Sorry 'bout that."
"Nah," Daryl shakes his head and continues to scan the road.
A small vibration shivers up Beth's leg, from where her backpack sits along the surface of the truck and she leans forward to pull the zipper open and dig around inside. When she comes up with her phone, she sees a text message from Maggie and hastens to click it open.
Im so sorry, Bethy! I didn't mean to miss u. Are u okay? We're gonna get you, I promise! What's the address?
"Looks like there's a diner off the next exit," Daryl leans back in his seat and flicks his turn signal on to head into the lane he needs to be in. He doesn't turn to her, as he never seems to do. "I could eat somethin'," Beth watches the line of his lips even out as he makes the turn off into a little town; that same concerned glimmer flashing once through his eyes.
Don't worry, Mags.
Beth types back into her phone.
I've figured it out.
Alrighty then, let's get this thing rolling. Thank you for readinggg. Please review?