Warm. That was the feeling he got when he held Beth Greene's hand, her slender fingers and soft palms such a stark contrast to his own world-weary hands. The way she would just reach for his fingers, not even looking at him as if their eyes meeting would make those moments all the more real and maybe it would be too intense for either of them to handle, made the skin over his torso feel like it was too tight all the sudden. His heart clenched every time she would rub her thumb over the back of his hand and he couldn't make sense of the jumbled words tossing about inside his head. Words like "friend" and "girl" just went right out the window and were replaced with scarier ones he couldn't even wrap his brain around. There was one that kept jumping out at him and it had become impossible to ignore lately. Love.

That's what he was starting to think this was. Daryl Dixon had never thought the world held any love for the likes of a dirty redneck like him. This life had not exactly been kind to him. When he thought of how warm his hand, their fingers intertwined together he couldn't help but remember how cold he used to be. Not just since the world went to shit, but way before that; back when him and Merle were kids.

More often than not, there were no lights in his house. Will Dixon was not the sort of man who paid his bills on time. Instead he was the kind that spent his Friday paycheck at the local bar, spending equal amounts of time shooting his mouth off as much as he would shoot pool. Summers weren't so bad if you could put up with the sticky Georgia air that permeated every room of their tiny two bedroom shack at the edge of town.

It was the winters that Daryl could call forth easily in his mind. The cold winter nights that never seemed to end, Daryl shivering alone in his bed and wishing he could crawl in bed with his Ma and let her chase the chill away with her big quilt and soft voice that would lull him back to sleep on the nights that she wasn't so blitzed from her buffet of booze and pills. But if his old man caught him, there was hell to pay and an endless stream of how he was good for nothing; nothin' but a pansy-assed Mama's boy. If he got riled enough, Will Dixon exchanged the sharp edge of his tongue for the dull end of a belt buckle but it cut just as deep.

So most nights, Daryl would lie awake, shivering in the cold and waiting for the sun to warm his face in the morning. As he stood there at that gravestone holding Beth's hand for the 9th time (yes, he'd counted), he felt a warmth creep into his heart and before he could question it, he squeezed her hand maybe to let her know somehow how much it meant to him that she wanted to hold his hand; that she did so freely and often. He kept his eyes trained ahead and so did she, but he felt it a second later, that tiny squeeze back that let him know she understood. She always did.