AN: Here we are, another chapter here.

There's some allusion to domestic abuse here, and I'll let you know that this is a mostly stream-of-consciousness chapter as both our characters are dealing with what has happened.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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Carol planned to avoid Daryl until she could get her wits about her, and it was pretty clear that he was planning to avoid her as well. By the time she made it back to the camp, he was already gone. Andrea was back with Shane and she told Carol that, even though she and Shane hadn't seen any signs of Sophia's whereabouts, Daryl had said that he was going to use the rest of the day to look for her and he'd gone off, on foot, toward the woods.

Carol kept herself busy. She focused on washing clothes by hand and hanging them out to dry on the clothesline she'd strung up. She washed dishes and she cleaned the RV from top to bottom. She straightened up tents and she offered to help tend the chickens in the nearby coops.

Carol did everything she could to keep her mind busy. She wanted to keep from thinking about the fact that Sophia was still out there. And, now, she wanted to keep from thinking about the fact that she'd kissed Daryl—a man who was absolutely not her wedded husband—and that she'd enjoyed it.

She'd enjoyed it much more than she had any right enjoying such a kiss.

Carol didn't know what was bothering her worse, honestly, the guilt over the kiss even happening, or the fact that she'd enjoyed it so much that she wasn't sure that part of her wasn't hoping that it would happen again.

She was a married woman.

And it was harder than it had ever been before to look at her husband when he returned with Rick and his small search party, all of them empty-handed, and grumbled something about wasting the whole morning chasing shadows and ghosts.

Carol didn't love him. She couldn't recall the last time she'd felt the tug of love for Ed in her chest that had first been there when she'd met him. She couldn't remember what it felt like to care for him. That feeling had left her when she'd realized that he didn't care for her, that he possibly never had, and that he surely never would again.

He had, literally, beaten the feeling out of her. It was gone from her now. It was as lost to her as anything ever had been.

If Carol had ever doubted that she had no feelings—or at least no good feelings—left for her husband, she didn't doubt it now. Not when she could still feel, coursing through her veins, the feeling of desire that she'd thought, honestly, was simply long-dead inside of her. She'd assumed that, with time, maybe that feeling died for everyone. She'd assumed that, with the passing of years, maybe everyone began to see being with their husbands as something that simply had to be done to appease them and their occasional appetites. She'd laid to rest the part of her that had once felt desirable and craved touch, and she'd accepted that it was just something, now, that she would tolerate and, that most times, she'd simply hope that it could be at least somewhat pleasurable.

Ed had accused her of wanting every man she'd seen for years. He'd been jealous, though she'd never given him any reason to be before. His paranoia, Carol had always believed, had been at least partially driven and fed by his own guilt. Carol knew that Ed had had at least two affairs—although short-lived—during their marriage. She'd seen both the women with her own eyes, though never in the act. She'd heard other people whisper about them, knowing full well that Ed had cheated on her. She'd always assumed that Ed's guilt had driven him to fear that she'd treat him just the way he'd treated her and she'd break the vows that they'd exchanged.

And, maybe more than simply being cheated on, Ed feared that Carol would leave him. She didn't believe that he loved her, not anymore, but he didn't want to lose her. Ed had a possessive streak in him that was stronger than most any other emotion he seemed to feel. What was his was simply his—he wanted to keep it, and it extended even to junk that he didn't want anymore. For that reason, he'd had a garage full of stuff that was no longer useful and he'd refused to clean it out because, junk or not, it was his. He didn't want it, but he didn't want to part with it. He didn't want someone else to have it.

Carol had often felt that she was just another piece of junk that Ed had held onto for years because, though he didn't want her, he didn't like the idea of anyone else having her when she'd once belonged to him and, maybe, had even been something he'd somewhat been fond of before.

Whatever feelings caused his paranoia, though, Ed had fallen into the practice of believing that Carol was cheating on him at every turn. Every time he went away, even for an hour or two, she was cheating on him. Every time his back was turned, Carol picked up another man to invite to Ed's bed. He'd wildly thought that she'd had affairs with everyone from the boy who bagged the groceries at the Food Lion to the man who handed out packages off the back of his truck. If a man came into Carol's presence, Ed could find a reason to believe that she was having an affair with him. And if she wasn't having an affair with him, then she was at least thinking about it and plotting how she could get away with making Ed into some kind of asshole that half the town regarded as the fool whose wife was running around with every pair of pants around.

Carol had never once earned his suspicions. She'd never even come close to earning them, but she'd paid for them ten-fold. Since she'd married Ed, she'd barely even been in the same room with another man. A few doctors were the only men besides her husband that had seen her naked and actually put their hands on her. She'd even learned to restrict her thoughts so that she didn't actually ever desire any man she saw.

Until now.

Now her mind was loose from her control and it was running wild. She could do her best to ignore it, but she wasn't sure if she could actually get it back under her control again.

And what was worse was that she was worried about Sophia and she didn't feel right to suddenly have these other thoughts invading her mind, yet there they were and they weren't listening to reason.

When Ed returned to camp, a wave of nausea washed over Carol. She couldn't hear his grumbling over the sound of the voice in her head telling her that he was going to figure her out. Somehow he was going to read her mind. He was going to know what had happened. He'd know that she'd gone with Daryl to see the flowers. He'd know that Daryl had kissed her and he'd know that she'd enjoyed it.

Somehow, Ed was going to know that Carol's body felt like it was yearning all afternoon long to get back where it had been—back close to Daryl. Ed was going to, somehow, be able to read Carol's thoughts. And then he'd know that even if he hadn't ever been right before, he was right now.

Carol didn't love him any longer and she was thinking about another man.

She was so wrapped up in thinking about him, in fact, that it felt like a fever that was threatening her sanity. And the more she tried to will it away, the hotter it burned.

Carol stayed close to Ed for the remainder of the afternoon. She made him a special lunch and she poured him drinks into a glass she found in the RV from the provisions he hid in the back of their car. Throughout the afternoon, Carol treated Ed like a king as though she might, somehow, keep him from reading her mind.

And even Carol knew how crazy her thoughts were because Ed was none the wiser about the kiss. For all his previous paranoia about her unfaithfulness, Ed proved quite unable to sense anything that had actually happened anywhere outside the realm of his imagination.

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Daryl had never kissed a woman like Carol before.

He'd kissed women before, of course, but never women like Carol. The women he'd kissed were usually rougher around the edges. They weren't as interested in him as they'd been interested in the fact that he was Merle's younger brother. Some of them had even been cast-offs of his brother and they'd thought it was amusing to fuck around with Daryl because they saw him as somehow softer and more innocent than his brother.

It was Merle's fucking fault—always calling Daryl the sweet one.

Maybe Daryl was the sweet one. Maybe he was a great deal different than his brother. Because he'd kissed a couple of those women, but he'd never really wanted them. He'd never really wanted what they had to offer him and he'd never really wanted to offer them anything.

He'd never thought about something more with them—nothing substantial.

Yet here he was, knee high in stinking creek mud, and he was thinking about a woman that he'd been thinking about for longer than he cared to admit. He was thinking about her tears—how much they tore at his chest every time he saw them trickling down her cheeks. He was thinking about her smile—and how he wished he could do the one damn thing that would guarantee that it stayed on her lips for longer than the split second it seemed to take reality to knock it back off every time he'd seen it before.

He was thinking about her lips—warm and soft beneath his.

He wanted her lips back on his, but he didn't dare to think about it too much because if he did? He'd start thinking about her lips—really thinking about them—and then he might not stop.

What the hell was he thinking anyway?

Merle might've been wrong. Or, rather, the phantom of his brother might've been wrong. Carol might not think of him as pure redneck white trash. She might, even, think rather highly of him—after all she'd delicately pressed her lips to his forehead the other night and those lips hadn't exactly been running away from him when she'd parted them to let him taste her mouth by the rosebush.

But she was married. She was married and her husband was right there in the very same camp with Daryl. She was spending every night in the man's tent. She was sleeping with him and waking up with him in the morning. She'd said vows to the man.

Vows that he hadn't respected very much. Vows that Daryl could only consider broken by him on more than one occasion since Daryl had known his sorry ass.

Ed Peletier didn't deserve the woman that had married him, but she was married to him.

Unless, like Daryl thought was right, marriage didn't really count if both parties didn't live up to their end of the deal.

He was no better than Shane.

Slogging his way through creek mud, the strain of his movements tugging at his muscles and at the injury that Hershel had sewn up for him, Daryl called out desperately for Sophia. Again and again he yelled out her name, but the girl didn't come. Even if she heard him, she wasn't coming out. And he kept desperately calling her name out because it was the only word that he could say for the time being.

He feared, if he tried to say anything else, he might just hear himself calling out Carol's name. He might simply test her name out on his tongue to see what it tasted like when he called it out. And he might end up liking the taste of it so much that it drove him fucking mad.

Daryl was no better than Shane, and he was starting to wonder if he understood, now, where Shane was coming from. Maybe, if Shane felt like Daryl felt at that moment, Daryl couldn't fault him for what he'd done. The sensation inside of him felt like it might drive him insane or kill him—or both. It was like something was burning inside him—like she was burning inside him—and there was nothing and no way to douse the fire.

But Daryl didn't dare to put a name to the feeling.

And he wasn't going to force Carol's hand.

Ed didn't deserve her, and she certainly didn't deserve anything that Ed did to her, but Daryl wasn't going to force her hand. He wasn't going to say anything or do anything that would get her hurt. He wasn't going to let on to anyone about how he felt inside when she was around him.

He wasn't going to be the one that made Ed hurt her.

He'd rather burn up, until there was nothing left of him, than be the one that caused her that kind of pain.

The only thing that managed to draw Daryl's attention away from his suffering, even the slightest little bit, was when he saw something that he didn't expect to see. Slipping up the far side of the bank, just down the creek from where he was wading and praying for some kind of miracle, Daryl saw a series of small tracks in the mud. He made his way over to the tracks and studied them. He touched the mud. It was drying in the sun, hardening around the edges, and the slow trickle of water had washed away the lower tracks, but others remained.

Daryl stared at them.

Small feet had made the prints. Small feet and fingers. The tracks were too precise to be made by a Walker since they were creatures that grabbed and groped and blindly yanked at things. A Walker would've gotten stuck, unable to pick their feet up in quite the right manner to get through the mud—they'd have dragged their feet until they were just stuck. Good and stuck. But the small person who'd scrambled up the bank, all hands and feet, had known how to not get stuck. The small person who had made the prints, probably not even hours before, was used to navigating the creek by now.

Daryl called her name once more, but he got an odd sensation that she wasn't coming out—though he'd never felt she was as close as he did at that moment.