AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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This time, when Daryl practically wrapped himself around her to readjust her grip on the bow, Carol couldn't help but feel that he was more interested in being as close to her as nature actually allowed than he was in simply making sure that her form was correct and not "lazy" as he sometimes accused her form of being when she was too tired or simply tried to shoot too quickly.
She could feel his body behind hers, pressing against her, and it felt like they were connected from shoulder to knee, practically.
Her body buzzed in response and she felt a warm rush in her veins. For a second, she felt oddly bonded to Daryl. Connected. She felt like she was in the safest, warmest, most wonderful place and position that she had ever been in before.
And yet she was standing in the woods with Daryl half wrapped around her while she held her bow, ready to release a bolt in the direction of a fake target on the ground that Daryl had made with a circle of broken sticks.
Against everything that went with learning to aim properly and to make her mark, Carol closed her eyes for a fraction of a second and simply drank in the comfort of the moment. The baby in her belly must have benefitted, in some way, from the rush of feeling that ran through Carol's body. She felt her move dramatically, readjusting herself in the small confines of her womb.
"Oh…" Carol said, the sound escaping her lips before she realized she was going to verbalize it.
"What?" Daryl asked. His voice was saturated with concern. He asked the question in such a way that Carol could practically imagine that he expected the answer to be something along the lines of her admission that she'd just been bitten by a poisonous snake and had only seconds to live.
The concern made Carol feel even better. It made the back of her throat ache, but in a good way. It made her a little less concerned that Daryl was going to change his mind about the whole thing, declare it far too overwhelming, and just run away. It might still prove to be too much for him, but at least, for a moment, he was trying to hold onto whatever it was that they had between them.
Without responding to him, Carol pulled back on the bowstring the last little fraction of an inch that she meant to move it. She focused on her target, exhaled her breath and stilled it, and released the arrow. It sailed beautifully—perfectly—through the air and landed smoothly, sticking itself into the ground, just at the outside part of her target.
She laughed to herself and lowered her bow. She ran her hand over her belly. The baby was kicking or stretching—whatever her movement, it was dramatic.
Carol turned around to face Daryl. She felt light and warm and happy for the moment, but Daryl's brow was furrowed and he looked like he was drowning in worry.
"Always on the outside of where I'm aiming," Carol said. "I try to correct it and I just seem to overcorrect it and go in a different direction."
"It don't matter," Daryl said. "You'll keep tryin'. Keep gettin' a feel for it. Learnin' what's enough an' what's too much, but…are you OK?"
Carol remembered that she never comforted him over the sound that had escaped her lips. Rather than simply tell him that her daughter was doing summersaults in her womb, Carol took Daryl's hand and pressed it over a spot where she was sure he'd feel some of the movement. He pulled his hand back almost immediately after she placed it, but then he returned his hand—and then he added his other hand.
"That hurts," he said. He was clearly neither dedicated to making it a question for Carol to answer nor a statement of his assessment of what it might be like to be carrying the baby.
Carol hummed at him.
"It's a little uncomfortable, especially if she—moves a certain way. But more than that, it's wonderful because I know she's moving so she's…"
"OK," Daryl supplied, in the same tone as before, allowing it to be neither fully question nor statement.
"Alive, at least," Carol breathed out.
"What's she doin'?" Daryl asked after a moment.
"Moving," Carol said. The truth was that she had no real insight into what the baby might actually be doing. Daryl seemed to want something more concrete, though, as he moved his hands around her belly searching out the movements that he could detect. Carol didn't ask him to stop. In fact, she enjoyed the feeling of his palms travelling around her stomach.
Ed had never had any real interest in Sophia when Carol had been carrying her; not beyond the occasional spurt of strange fatherly interest that seemed to hit him when he'd had a few drinks but hadn't yet crossed over into being drunk. When he acted that way, though, rather than relishing the tenderness of the moment, Carol usually felt practically swallowed up in anxiety as she worried that the interest in the baby might later mean an interest in harming it in some way.
When Daryl touched her, though, she didn't feel anxiety. And the realization that she could be touched without immediately feeling an icy rush of concern only made her stomach flutter with an unusual sensation that only made her daughter's movements increase.
Daryl's hands were every bit as strong and hard as Ed's, but under them she felt protected. She wasn't afraid.
The only thing she feared, perhaps, was that he would withdraw his hands, one day, and never return them to her body because he'd changed his mind. He'd found something better. Daryl was new to relationships. He was new to all of this. There was no reason to believe that he wouldn't realize, eventually, that there were far better women and situations to be had, even within the community. Maybe he might even realize that he simply didn't want this at all.
She pushed the twinge of discomfort such a thought brought to her out of her mind. She must have done it just in time, too, because Daryl's brow furrowed at her. He dropped his hands in a slightly jerky motion. He brought one up to trouble the cuticle with his front teeth.
"You OK?" He asked around the finger he was harassing.
Carol knew, very well, that the answer to his question couldn't be that she was afraid that he was going to change his mind—that maybe he was already changing his mind. It could very well be that the reality of everything hadn't sunk in for him yet, but it would soon enough. She was carrying a baby. If she was lucky, and her daughter managed to live despite the unfortunate fates of the other babies born there, from what she'd heard—all having been miscarriages, stillbirths, or babies that died within hours of being born because of poor health—she would have a baby in just a few months.
A baby was too much, even, for some fathers. A baby was too much when it was their own flesh and blood.
It was too much to ask a man like Daryl to even somewhat shoulder that responsibility. It was too overwhelming. Carol was certain that he hadn't even realized the full impact of her pregnancy yet, and he certainly didn't realize what life would be like once her daughter was in the world, but she didn't really want to tell him. Not yet.
She would let him go when he realized how much work and responsibility came with a baby. She'd let him go when he realized that wasn't what he wanted at all. But she wasn't ready to let him go just yet.
"She just—moves a lot," Carol said. She felt a slight rush of relief when she realized that what she was about to say wasn't entirely a lie. The concern she was about to express to Daryl wasn't the immediate and gnawing concern that was really overtaking her at the moment, but it was a concern nonetheless. It had crossed her mind more than a few times lately, even though she hadn't given it voice. "She's been moving a lot—but a lot—since we got here. Way more than out there. More than—I don't really remember—but I think more than Sophia ever did."
Daryl's brows had started to unknit themselves and now they dived back down to practically tangle into each other again.
"That bad?" Daryl asked.
"I don't know," Carol admitted. She shrugged her shoulders. "I didn't have the greatest prenatal care with Sophia. I went to the doctor but—I skipped a lot of appointments. I did whatever I could not to…" She stopped a moment as the words "draw attention to the baby" pinballed in her mind. Her gut slowly reminded her that she was trying to do that now. She was trying to do it again. This time it was for an entirely different reason. This time it was for a good reason. It was borne from fear, again, but it was a different fear, and so she told herself it was a noble fear that Daryl didn't need to know about. Still, if she were trying not to draw attention, she was failing at that. Daryl, though, didn't seem to fear her pregnancy. He didn't seem too repulsed by it like Ed had been sometimes. She needed only to keep Daryl from realizing how much truly came with having a baby—the pregnancy he seemed able to handle for the time being.
"Not to?" Daryl asked. Carol realized she'd stopped short and, in all her stewing, she'd just left her words hanging there. "You OK? She OK?"
Carol couldn't help but smile to herself.
"I tried not to go," Carol said. "Not to be—annoying or…anything. So that…"
"Ed," Daryl said, as though the name could finish the entire conversation. Actually, Carol realized it did finish most of it. She nodded her head. "Is it bad she's movin'? Dangerous?"
"She could be rolling or stretching or…I don't know," Carol said.
"Or you're thinkin' it could be somethin' bad?" Daryl asked.
"I doubt it, but…I just don't know and it's different," Carol admitted. She hadn't even realized she was the slightest bit concerned, but now that she was saying it, she was realizing it was true.
Daryl nodded his head. He seemed to genuinely consider what she'd said.
"Fine—I'ma grab them bolts an' we gonna go talk to that Alice woman," Daryl said.
"I don't want to bother her with something that's—that I'm sure is nothing," Carol said.
"But you gonna rest better when you know it's nothin'," Daryl said. "Me too. So, we gonna go."
"I don't want to bother her with something ridiculous," Carol protested.
"Merle says the doctors earn their keep by workin' when somebody needs it. Blessed fuckin' existence. Don't do shit else an' live like royalty. Don't fight; don't go out; protected all the time. Deal is, they on call every hour an' there ain't no thorn too small for 'em to deal with."
"I wanted to practice," Carol said. Daryl was already gathering up her arrows and kicking around the little targets he'd made to blend them back into the landscape as nothing more than scattered bits of sticks and rocks.
"You got the whole day tomorrow to practice if you want to," Daryl said. "Today—you done your work at the greenhouse this morning. I got that deer. Let's just—take her to see Alice and then…I ain't even told you about what Merle told me. We can go back to our house. I can tell you about—about what Merle told me."
Carol smiled at him when he straightened up and, wiping her arrows off on his shirt, reached for the quiver to replace them.
"What?" He asked, noticing her smiling.
"Are you asking me to spend the afternoon—the evening—with you?" Carol asked.
Daryl shrugged.
"If you ain't got other plans," he said.
Carol smiled even a little more sincerely because a hint of a smile made the corners of his mouth jump.
"You want to spend a quiet evening—at home—with me?" Carol asked. Her heart thundered. Her daughter gave her a good, hard kick in the ribs for her teasing. It took Carol's breath for half a second and she laughed to herself and held the hand up in Daryl's direction that she wasn't using to cover the spot near where the kick had landed. "I'm fine—I think she's taking up for you. For me giving you a hard time."
Daryl smiled like that truly amused him.
"I never spent a lot of evenings at home if I could avoid it," Daryl said. "And most the ones I did spend weren't too damn quiet. Weren't too good, either."
Carol stepped closer to him and offered him a kiss. He seemed to hesitate, almost like he feared she would admit she was psyching him out and move away when he went in for it, but then he kissed her. She didn't psych him out at all. She didn't even pull away to stop the kiss. She let him handle it, from start to finish. She smiled at him, though, when he broke the kiss and smiled at her.
She was pulled as tightly against him as she could possibly be and his hands were holding her hard with his fingers digging into her hips like she might escape.
"She's kickin' me," Daryl offered.
"I know," Carol said, laughing to herself.
"You think she likes it or…you think she's like signaling for help?" Daryl asked.
"I hope she likes it," Carol said.
"Come on," Daryl said, shouldering her quiver himself and taking her bow. He dropped his free hand around her shoulder to urge her to walk with him and keep something close to his pace. "Let's go. Whether or not you wanna bother nobody, I don't have a problem askin' the doc to earn her portion of that deer I shot."