AN: Here we go, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"I looked in her room," Carol said, in the middle of eating the quick meal of pasta and a salad that Daryl had thrown together. "I hope you don't mind."
Daryl swallowed down some of his food and shook his head.
"Ain't no harm in lookin' at nothing," Daryl said.
"She's got a very...simple room," Carol said.
Daryl stared at her. He wasn't sure what that meant. He wasn't sure if it was a compliment of some sort or an insult of some sort. He didn't even know where to begin with a comment like that, so he began by asking her to explain herself.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Daryl asked.
Carol shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know," she said. "I guess...I didn't know what her room would look like. I didn't know if she'd be...messy or clean. I didn't know if she'd prefer a lot of—things. Or if she'd like just a few things."
"We just moved," Daryl said. "She's got a couple boxes out in the shed out back. She's not—she don't like a lot of things. I mean...things ain't that important to her. She'd just as soon as have a new comic book as she would a toy." He shrugged his shoulders. "She just don't ask for a lotta things. But—I don't get her everything she wants. Don't deny her neither, though. She ain't wantin' for nothing."
Carol looked at her pasta like simple noodles and sauce required a good deal of contemplation.
"Now I feel like I offended you," she said. "And that wasn't my intention."
She looked like she was having some difficulty breathing. Daryl didn't know if she was that upset over the perceived offense or if she was, perhaps, a little afraid of him because of her experiences with the man who had left his handiwork so clearly displayed on her face.
"You didn't offend me," Daryl said. "I don't know that I've hardly ever been offended in my life. I just don't want you thinking that Sophia's going wanting for anything that she needs. She just don't care that much about stuff. I could prob'ly go in there and pick out enough stuff to fill a box and as long as she had that? She'd be content to just up and leave the rest behind."
"That's not an entirely bad thing," Carol said. "She likes to read?"
Daryl laughed to himself.
"Don't think like even comes close to covering it," Daryl said. "She's reading way above her grade level. I can't keep her in books. Hardest thing I got is figurin' out what she's old enough to read an' what's too much for her. She can read it all. Just about anything you put in front of her. But if I let her get ahold of somethin' that's just too much? I'll be answering questions in the middle of the night for a week. She wanted a novel one time. One of them big ole fat ones." He held his fingers apart to demonstrate for Carol the size of the novel that Sophia had requested. She wanted the big book because, in Sophia's words, it looked like it would never end. It would eliminate the odd sadness that the girl seemed to feel whenever one of her books ended and there was nothing left to do but read it again. "So I got her one. Looked like it was OK. I mean I flipped through it and asked the person at the bookstore about it. Didn't tell 'em it was for a lil' bitty kid, but asked...ya know...if it had anything that was like rated R in it. Well, it had some stuff in there that they didn't tell me about or didn't remember to tell me about. Had me tap dancing all over the place trying to handle things with Sophia without—you know, really handling them."
Carol smiled and raised her eyebrows at Daryl.
"Something she shouldn't know about?" Carol asked.
Daryl felt his cheeks burn warm.
"Sex," Daryl said. "Hell, I mean she's gonna know about it sometime, but I was hopin' she'd get outta second grade first. She didn't understand it, though, pretty early on and drawed my attention to it. I just—kinda flipped through them pages and told her it was just someone being too damn wordy about loving their girlfriend."
Carol snorted.
"Why not just give her children's books?" Carol asked.
"She's got them," Daryl said. "Read 'em all like a million times. She wants big books, though. Long books. She wants to know the people she's readin' about like they're...well, people. That's why she likes the comic books so much. They go on forever. She don't just...meet 'em and then they're gone."
"She makes friends with the characters," Carol said.
Daryl watched her face. She sucked in a breath, but it wasn't labored like it had been before. She was half-smiling when she let it out. Her shoulders relaxed. The statement was just that—a statement. It wasn't a question, even though it had come in a line of questions.
"Yeah," Daryl said, nodding his head gently at Carol. "Yeah. I guess she does."
"I do too," Carol said. "I always have. The best books, to me? Aren't the ones where I can't wait to see what's going to be behind door number three. The best ones? Are the ones where I feel what the characters feel. The ones where I feel like I've got...I don't know. Some kind of connection with them."
Daryl felt the words he was considering saying stick in his throat, but he forced them out.
"I'ma say that she gets that from you," Daryl said. "Because I've never really cared much for books. Especially not long ones. Take too long to get where they're going."
Carol smiled at him and returned to eating her food. Daryl watched her a moment and ate a little more of his own pasta even though his hunger was gone. He waited a few moments before he spoke again, giving her time to say something more and seeing that she wasn't going to say anything.
"If you'da told me you was pregnant and what was happening with him? I'da helped you," Daryl said. "I wouldn't have been pissed if you'd just shown up outside my door."
"You didn't even know me," Carol said. "I didn't feel like...I could show up as a stranger and bring you all my problems."
Daryl considered what she was saying for a moment and tried to imagine how he might have truly felt if she'd shown up, pregnant and without any visible means of supporting herself, telling him that she was trapped in a marriage that she couldn't escape and possibly couldn't survive.
"Hell—I knew you as good as I've known most people," Daryl said. "Maybe better. I don't—I don't really get to know too many people. But I got to know you."
"You had sex with me," Carol said. "And, honestly? I didn't even know what that would have made you think of me."
"Would'a made me think you had sex with me, the same as I had sex with you," Daryl said. "We were both involved, if I remember it correctly."
"I was married," Carol said.
"I sure didn't see him nowhere," Daryl said. "And I come back. That was me. It was me that come back and—it was me that asked you to let me in the room again. Me that asked you to—sit down and talk with me. I remember that, even if you don't. I don't ask people to talk to me real regular."
Carol smiled to herself, her cheeks taking on a visible redness, and nodded her head.
"I remember that," Carol said. "It was a nice night."
"Nicer, to me, than even the one we spent before it," Daryl said. He cleared his throat. "It just isn't very often that I sit down to talk to someone. Not someone that don't have a reason to know me already. Not someone that I'm just—choosing to sit down and talk to."
"You said you wanted a calm life," Carol said. "You said you wanted...everything that you'd ever seen on television. The wife. The kids."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"The two car garage and the pipe," Daryl teased. "The whole damn Ward Cleaver enchilada. Point is? That kinda life? To me it's a fairy tale. I don't even like a pipe. And I ain't never seen nobody that lived like that. Closest I've come to seeing it is my brother and his wife. And I'd say they're a lot more like...like the damn Addam's family...or maybe the Clampetts...or some shit, than they are the Cleavers."
Carol laughed to herself and shook her head.
"If I'd've come to your door? I wouldn't have been bringing that kind of life," Carol said. "There's nothing calm about—someone else's wife showing up on your doorstep and telling you that she's carrying your child and...that he might come to try and get her back."
Daryl shrugged his shoulders.
"He could'a come," Daryl said. "But he wouldn't get shit back. Not if you didn't want him." Daryl swallowed. "That's still true. Even though—you ain't here for me? Even though this ain't nine years ago and it ain't that kinda situation?" Daryl shook his head. "You don't go back unless that's what you got a mind to do. If he was that fond of you, he shoulda never put his hands on you like he did."
"It's easier said than done," Carol said with a sigh. She pushed her plate out of her way and put her elbow on the table. She rested her face on her hand. "I don't have anything, Daryl. And you don't know me. Maybe—you know me. But you don't owe me. I can run but..." She let that trail off. Daryl sat and waited her out. When she picked her thread back up, she picked it up somewhere down the line from where she'd been before. "I don't even know how to get away from him. And I don't know what to do once I do get away. I don't know anything anymore."
Daryl considered it. He chewed over her words more carefully than he'd chewed over anything he'd recently swallowed down to digest.
Daryl didn't believe in love at first sight. He believed, strongly, in lust at first sight. He believed in falling in love, hard and fast, with the idea of someone and what you might want them to be, but he didn't believe in love at first sight. When he'd gone back to the motel with Carol the first night? It had been lust. It had been instant attraction. But there was something more. It hadn't been love, though. It had been the feeling of simply connecting with her. It had been an easy feeling that Daryl wasn't accustomed to feeling with too many people. She was easy to talk to. She was easy to be around. What had attracted Daryl most about Carol was that she made it feel easy to be himself. She'd eased the nerves that usually took over when he was in the presence of people. The sex had been good, the best that he'd ever had—not that he really had a great deal to compare it with—but that wasn't why he'd gone back. He'd gone back the second time because he was craving that easiness far more than he was craving her body.
Merle had always crassly declared that good pussy was addictive. That was, as he so crudely explained it, the reason that a man would fight every bit as hard for one that he liked as he would for any vice that held onto him at a chemical level. Whether or not his brother had ever shared this theory with his sister-in-law, Daryl wasn't sure, but he'd shared it with most anybody else that was willing to entertain him, especially when drinks were involved.
Daryl didn't know if that was true, but he'd certainly found something about Carol to be at least a little bit addictive. He'd never gone back to a woman before. And he'd even gone back for her a second time. He could pretend, and he usually did, that it hadn't really mattered to him, but he'd been haunted by the woman ever since.
In fact, he'd been so haunted by her that there were a couple of times, while she'd been showering and he'd been cooking, that he'd asked himself if she was even real. Had Merle really seen her? Was she really in the shower? Or had Daryl gone so far over the deep end that he was caught up in some truly incredible hallucination.
He could, perhaps, convince himself now that she wasn't even real. The woman sitting across the table from him, consuming food and beverages like any human would, could very well be an elaborate phantom.
Except she wasn't. She was flesh and blood—and some of that blood was fresh, unbeknownst to her, where her lip had cracked slightly at the edge of the old scab.
"You don't gotta know nothin' right now," Daryl offered. He sucked in a breath and let it out. "The only thing you gotta know—the only thing you gotta answer for me? Is if you wanna get out. Do you really wanna be done with him? Once and for all?"
Carol looked at him, a little wide-eyed, and her mouth fell open like she was surprised or confused. She stammered something out, but it wasn't a discernable answer.
"I can help you," Daryl said. "I can figure out how to help you. I'll do that. But—I ain't gonna do it if you're just going back to him. I ain't gonna put the time in or the...whatever effort I gotta put into it. Not if you're gonna go running back to him." He shook his head at her. "People get like addictions. Good and bad ones. If you ain't ready to break it? I can't help you and I won't."
"I..." Carol stammered, but Daryl interrupted her again before she could finish any part of that thought.
"I'm not sayin' you owe me anything," Daryl said. "I'm not sayin' you gotta—stay with me or be with me or anything else. This ain't about that. It's about getting you away from him. Just—just gotta make that clear."
"It's clear," Carol said quickly.
"Do you wanna get away from him or not?" Daryl asked. "Once and for all. Because—I'm not helping if you ain't sure about what you want."
"I don't have anything," Carol said.
"That ain't what I asked," Daryl pointed out.
"I want to be away from him," Carol said.
"For good?" Daryl asked.
Carol laughed to herself.
"Every time he doesn't come home when he's supposed to?" Carol offered. "Most women worry that something's happened. They worry that they're going to get some kind of horrible phone call. I've laid in bed and dreamed that cops would show up at my door and tell me that—he wasn't ever coming home. I was free."
Daryl nodded his head.
"Then get some sleep," Daryl said. "And we'll figure something out. I don't know, for sure, what yet, but we'll figure something out. You don't wanna go back? You ain't. Simple as that."