Grime and dried-up white and black bird shit splatter the faded blue handicap parking sign. Daryl ties his horse to the pole and looks up. "Reminds me of that painting we saw in that office."

"It was a brilliant work of modern art."

"Pfft."

Burger wrappers and napkins drift in the spring breeze like leaves across the nearly abandoned parking lot. A pick-up truck sits with its tailgate open. In its bed, candy toppings that have melted and then refrozen season after season form a putrid dung-like lump inside clear boxes. Someone never finished his looting.

"Dumb Fries," Daryl mutters as Carol pours water in a pan and the horses dip their heads to drink. "What a dumb ass name for a town."

"I think it's pronounced dum–frees."

Daryl peers through the shattered front window of the Dairy Queen and sees no walkers. His thick black boots crunch over the glass on the sidewalk, and he bangs on the glass door with his fist to make sure there's nothing inside. He's about to lean back in a casual waiting position when a walker thuds against the glass door and thrashes its jaw. Daryl leaps in place, and Carol laughs.

He walks sideways away from the door. "Hell he come from?"

"Under one of the booths, I think."

They wait, and soon enough, there's a second one. Daryl loads his crossbow and whistles for the walkers to make their way to the busted-out window. When they do, he shoots them one by one straight in the forehead. He enjoys the target practice – these are the first walkers he's needed to shoot all day. The rest they just rode around.

Daryl swings his bow back on his shoulder. He's just put his hands down on the windowsill and is about to boost himself up to crawl through cut glass when Carol says, "Hey, Kemosabe, did you think to try the door?"

He backs away, turns, and sees her holding the unlocked door wide open. When they walk inside, he goes to recover his first arrow while Carol scoops up two handguns that have fallen to the floor. "Guess they were looting and one of them decided he wanted everything. Did they shoot each other?"

Daryl cranes his neck to peer down at the mangled face of one of the walkers. "Yeah. Maybe. 'N over a few pounds of candy." He roughly rips out his second arrow.

Carol has dropped the magazines from the guns and now she's popping out the bullets and counting them as she lines them up one by one on the dusty orange table top. "Fourteen total."

"Caliber?" Daryl asks.

".38. I call dibs."

"Ya want the guns, too?"

"No, I have more guns than I know what to do with in the Kingdom. They're kind of useless with so little ammunition."

Daryl picks up one of the guns from the table, double checks it's unloaded, slaps the now empty magazine back inside, and then drops it in his pack. "Hershey needs one to practice dry firin'."

"Hershel's barely five."

"Yeah. Late start."

Carol shakes her head, crouches down, and searches the walker's pockets. She finds another magazine loaded with seven bullets. "Then I suppose you can have this one."

The stench of long-spoiled milk is even greater than that of decaying walker flesh, so they make quick work of searching the kitchen, which yields nothing salvageable except three unopened, well-sealed ketchup bottles, two unopened canisters of salt, and a roll of paper towels, still in the plastic wrap. But these days, that's a jackpot find, especially the bullets, which are like gold.

They sit on the curb to eat a snack from their packs. They don't want to eat inside with that stench. Carol hands Daryl a bag of pork rinds made from the skin of the Kingdom's pigs, and he gives her a handful of raisins dried from the Hilltop's grapes.

"This really brings back memories," she says. "My first date was at a Dairy Queen."

"Hell kind of white trash piece of shit takes a girl on a first date to the DQ?"

Carol snorts.

"Hell," Daryl continues, "even Merle took his first dates to a proper sit-down place. Waffle House."

"I've never heard the Waffle House referred to as a proper sit-down place."

Daryl smirks. "They had waitresses."

"Well, my first date was only thirteen. So I think you should cut him some slack. Harold Harrison."

"Harold? Fuck kind of name is Harold?"

"Harold's a perfectly good name!" Carol protests. "It's a king's name."

"Pfft."

"Harold Harrison. He had his own paper route, so he had a little cash. He invited me to ride bikes with him after school up to the Dairy Queen. His treat, he said. I wasn't really thinking. I was so hungry. So I ordered the chicken finger basket and a Coke and the biggest ice cream sundae they had."

"Dick move."

"So I learned. He was counting out his quarters nervously on the countertop, and then he just ordered a cup of water for himself. I felt terrible."

"Should of felt terrible. Poor kid."

"Well I did share my sundae with him."

"The sundae he bought ya, ya mean?"

Carol shrugs.

"Hope ya at least gave 'em a blowjob after."

"We were thirteen!" Carol gasps.

Daryl flushes and stares down inside his canteen. Then he busies himself with a deep swig. When the neck of the canteen slurps out of his mouth, she's still looking suspiciously at him, so he asks, "How long y'all date? You 'n Harold Harrison?"

"Three years."

Daryl's eyes widen. "Ya shittin' me?" He expected her to say a week or two. The longest middle-school romance in his neck of Georgia lasted four weeks, but that was some kind of record.

"Eighth grade through tenth grade. I thought we'd end up married."

"What happened?"

"I wouldn't put out. I just wasn't ready. But Kimberly Jansen was."

"Skank."

Carol smiles lightly. "Harold broke my heart. But I learned my lesson. I put out right away with the next boyfriend." She sighs and twists the lid onto her canteen. "And with the next. And then with Ed. I thought I had to. But after I buried Ed, I decided – I'm not going to be that girl anymore. That's why I didn't have sex with Tobin."

"Are you shittin' me?" She lived in his house for a while. Shared his bed, Daryl assumed.

"No. I didn't let it go that far. I was enjoying being in control of that. And with Zeke…I suppose I wanted to see how serious he was. So I told him not until our wedding night."

"Now yer shittin' me." He knows they slept together before their wedding night. She told him Ezekiel snored. Did they really just sleep?

She shakes her head. "Nope. I drew that line. And he was patient and understanding, as Zeke always was." She pops her last raisin in her mouth, chews, and swallows. "I just wanted to do things differently. But in retrospect, maybe waiting wasn't the best idea."

The last thing Daryl wants to think about is Carol and Ezekiel having sex, but he can't help it - curiosity gets the better of him. "How so?"

"The sex was…" She shrugs and clips her canteen to the pack that sits on the curb beside her. "Mediocre. But by then we were married. I'd taken a vow. And it didn't seem right to break a vow made to a good and honest man who loved me. I liked the family we'd built with Henry. The partnership we'd crafted in leading the Kingdom. And, if I'm honest, I liked being wooed. Being treated like a queen. So I avoided the sex until it had been too long. He wouldn't say it had been too long, but I could tell by the way he would mope around the Kingdom."

Conflicting emotions slam against each other in Daryl's chest. There's that jealous part of him that's glad she never slept with Tobin and that gloats to learn that Ezekiel was far from a king in bed, but then there's that other part of him that longs for Carol to be happy and simply feels sad to think that when she finally had a non-abusive marriage, it wasn't everything she dreamed it would be. "Damn," he mutters. "That mean ya ain't never had sex you liked?"

"I never hated sex. Except sometimes with Ed." Daryl tenses instinctively. "With the two boyfriends I had sex with before Ed, and with Zeke...I just didn't enjoy it all that much. But maybe that's just what sex is like. Maybe people exaggerate about how good it is."

"Ain't no exaggeration."

"Well, you're a man."

"Maggie sure liked it."

Carol chuckles. "Remember that day she and Glenn wouldn't come down from the prison tower?"

Daryl ignores her question. "Did ya tell 'em?"

"That everyone could hear them? No! Why would I."

"No, did ya tell 'Zeke? That it weren't no good."

"Why would I have told him? That would just have hurt his feelings."

"'Cause then maybe he could of done somethin' 'bout it!"

"Done what?" she asks.

"Dunno. Somethin' else than whatever the hell he was doin'!" He's pretty damn sure Ezekiel would have tried to please the woman he loved, if she'd told him how. "Gotta tell a guy. He don't just know."

"Tell him what?"

"What ya like," Daryl growls in frustration. He's not even sure why he's so bothered by this. He just knows that if he was in Ezekiel's place, he'd hate to leave Carol disappointed and not even know it. "What ya don't. If ya want him to do somethin'. If ya don't want 'em to do somethin'. Touch here, not there. Harder. Slower…" Daryl suddenly realizes what he's saying and flushes, ending in a a mutter, "Whatever."

"But then he would just feel hurt and self-defensive, and the sex probably wouldn't get any better." She stands from the curb and slings her backpack over her shoulders. "Come on. We need to find decent shelter before the sun sets."

Daryl tries to process these words that have come out of Carol's mouth – the mouth of this bad ass woman who hasn't taken shit from anyone in years, this general in war, this queen who rules and defends an entire Kingdom but apparently still thinks she shouldn't tell a man what to do in bed. He just can't wrap his mind around it.

"Are you coming?" she asks as she unties the horses. She vaults herself up on hers.

Daryl murmurs something indecipherable, rises to his feet, and mounts his speckled mare. Carol's already spurred her mare into a trot. He clicks his tongue at Freckles, gives the horse a light kick of his heel, and soon catches up.