AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Neither Daryl nor Carol had believed T-Dog's pretend scolding through the door. Of course, it may have been because they could both detect his amusement, despite his best attempts to hide it. Daryl had been sure that they'd discuss things further in the morning. T-Dog would, without a doubt, have a few questions about when and how things had progressed that the simple "It's fucking. Goodnight T" that Daryl had offered him through the door, followed by Carol's "Goodnight, T. Sleep well" hadn't answered.
Of course, Daryl couldn't quite kick the churning feeling in his stomach that there were so many things that needed to be discussed. There were so many things that needed to be said. There were questions, rolling around in his head, that he wanted answered in the same desperate way that he might want water if he were dying of thirst.
Those questions and thoughts were what kept him from sleeping peacefully. They were what kept him from dreaming of nothing but beautiful things, wrapped in Carol's arms, when they'd gone to bed.
Carol slept, and Daryl kept a restless vigil over her. The little nightlight that Daryl had plugged in to light the way to the bathroom for Carol cast a dim glow over everything so that Daryl could make out her features while she slept.
She hadn't bothered with clothes. Maybe she'd felt they were unnecessary after the evening they'd already had. Daryl didn't mind. He appreciated her nudity and the opportunity to simply look at her—to drink her in, unashamed of this thirst that he couldn't quite quench.
Daryl didn't know what the time might be. He hadn't bothered with a watch since the world had slammed face first into its ending. Most of the timepieces had stopped working and, even those that did give off a time had been reset countless times by the failure of electricity—among other things. Time was a construct, for the most part, and they'd let marking the exact hours go by the wayside. What they needed to know about time, now, only had to do with the rising and setting sun.
Night still blanketed the world when Daryl's restlessness started to become more than he could handle.
The little nightlight gave off a glow and, from the window, there was a rather bright glow from the large moon that hung in a cloudless sky.
Daryl got up, paced quietly around the room to burn just a little of the excess energy that boiled around inside his body, and then he moved to the window. It was already cracked about two inches—as were most of the windows since they needed air to circulate through the house—and Daryl pushed the window open the rest of the way. He brought his cigarettes and lighter. He slipped out of the room, not caring about his own nudity, to snag a stool from the kitchen, and he brought it back in the room. Daryl had been careful to close the door quietly, to rest the stool on the floor quietly, and to take his seat delicately so that the stool barely creaked under his weight. He only meant to sit and smoke his cigarette in full view of the big moon outside the window and the beautiful woman in the bed—all at once—but he realized he'd failed when Carol stirred and sat up, pulling the blanket over her shoulder in an act that said she was cold more than she was seeking to protect her modesty.
"Daryl?" She asked, her voice heavy with the sound of sleep. She stretched and yawned.
"It's just me," Daryl said. "Go back to sleep." She sat up on her elbow. She wasn't going back to sleep. "Shit," Daryl hissed. "I didn't mean to wake you up. You were sleepin' good. Go back to sleep, please?"
Carol laughed to herself.
"I don't know if you woke me," she said. She sat all the way up, abandoned the blanket again, and stretched. Then she got up, her hand immediately going to her belly as she stood, and started toward the bathroom. Daryl watched her go. He was oddly pleased that she'd abandoned the blanket and that she hadn't bothered to cover herself in any way. It meant that he'd been right. Her instinctual reaching for the blanket was merely a sign of a chill in the air, and not some kind of sign that she was denying him the right to see her.
It wasn't a sign that she'd had some kind of change of heart while she slept.
Carol came back, with no great sense of urgency, once she'd attended to her business. She sat on the edge of the bed, facing Daryl, and she pulled the blankets free so that she could wrap them around her. She looked cozy and cocooned, there, with the blankets covering her.
"Cold?" Daryl asked.
"Little bit," Carol said. "The nights are starting to cool down."
"Want me to close the window?" Daryl asked.
"Feels good," Carol said. She yawned. "You OK? You don't usually wake up in the middle of the night just to have a cigarette. Do you?"
Daryl smiled to himself. They were starting to know each other's habits. That was a strange thing, when he thought about it, but it also felt like the most natural thing in the world.
"Not really," Daryl said. "Not usually. Not unless I got somethin' on my mind that—that just don't give me no peace."
"You have something on your mind, Daryl?" Carol asked.
He laughed to himself.
"Shit—I've got more on my mind right now than…I've had in a long time."
"What's on your mind?" Carol asked. Daryl's stomach tightened at the feeling that he was close to a line that he wasn't sure he dared to cross. If he never crossed it, though, then he'd spend the rest of his life standing on some kind of proverbial precipice with a stomach ache keeping him up at night—that much he knew to be true. Sometimes, to save yourself, you had to jump and accept that even dying might be better than staying in such an unsure place.
That's what he thought, inwardly. Outwardly, he lit another cigarette with the end of the one that he was smoking and snubbed out the butt after a final long draw brought the first to its end.
"You can tell me," Carol pressed. "Whatever it is."
Daryl laughed quietly to himself. She sounded so sincere. She sounded so sure that she wanted to hear everything that circled around in his head.
"I got some pretty big secrets," Daryl said.
"I'll hear your secrets," Carol offered.
"What if you don't like what I got to say?" Daryl asked.
Carol shifted a little in her spot and rearranged the blankets. She rubbed her cheek against one spot of the blanket that wrapped around her. Then she hummed.
"I would hear it anyway," Carol said. "Because if you needed to say it…it's better that you say it. And get it out. And if I didn't like it—I'd figure out what to do about that. How to handle it."
"What if I don't like how you choose to handle it?" Daryl asked, his stomach churning.
"Then we could talk about that, too, Daryl," Carol offered. "But—maybe you should just say it."
Daryl sat for a moment, his throat aching, and thought about. He thought about everything he wanted to say, but he didn't know how to say it all. He didn't know how to make the thoughts come out sounding the way he wanted them to sound.
But it had to be said.
"I don't wanna play pretend no more, Carol," Daryl said.
"I see," Carol said, after a moment of silence. It sounded like she was looking for something to say, and that was the best she'd found.
"I don't—wanna play pretend because you just know…the whole time you're pretendin' something…that it's gotta come to an end. Games don't last forever. Pretend—it doesn't last forever. And then one day it's just over and you're left rememberin' that you could get there at one time, but you can't get there again and…maybe you don't never get back."
"To the pretend?" Carol asked.
"It don't make sense outside my head," Daryl offered.
"It's OK," Carol said softly. "It doesn't matter if it makes sense, Daryl. It only matters that—you say what you need to say. You don't want to play pretend. Is there more you need to say, Daryl?"
Daryl hummed in the affirmative. He kept his eyes mostly staring at this one spot on the windowsill where the hardware reflected the light in a particularly bright manner given that it was moonlight and not terribly reflective. He tried to focus on that to keep his mind off his churning gut and the general uneasiness that he could practically smell in the bedroom air in the same way that he could smell arousal and sexual desire earlier.
He glanced at Carol out of the corner of his eye. She'd drawn the blankets up until she was little more than a face among them. He brought his eyes back to the particularly shiny piece of hardware.
"It's not that I don't wanna play pretend," Daryl said. "It's that—I don't just want to play pretend, Carol. Because I don't mean it."
"You don't mean—what we've been pretending?" Carol asked.
"I don't mean the pretend part," Daryl said. "I mean the rest of it—just not the pretend part."
Carol flung off the cover like she'd suddenly grown too hot to stand the confines of her blanket cocoon.
"You mean—what do you mean, Daryl?" Carol asked.
Daryl heard a distinct change in the quality of her voice. There was a shift there that was slightly noticeable. It made Daryl's gut worry all over again.
"I'm not pretending, Carol," Daryl said, determined to simply say it—for better or for worse. "I don't really know if I was ever pretending. I mean—I'm pretendin' we're married, 'cause I know we aren't married. And I'm pretendin' that's my kid, 'cause I know it ain't my kid. Don't—don't want you to think I'm fuckin' delusional. I'm not. But I'm not pretending a damn thing else. When I'm kissin' you? It's 'cause I wanna kiss you. I don't wanna stop kissin' you, neither. When we're—havin' sex together? That's what I want to be doing. I'm not doin' it for some pretend."
"It's because—you want to have sex," Carol said.
There was absolutely something different about her voice. It was choked. Shaky. Daryl didn't dare to look at her because he didn't know what he would see there, but he knew—he absolutely knew—that he wasn't ready to face it.
He laughed to himself, nervously. He didn't mean it at all. The laughter had to come, though, because he felt, at that moment, that his only other choices to express himself would either be to cry or to vomit, and he felt that neither of those were too becoming or too good for his dignity.
"I don't fuck you 'cause I'm horny," Daryl offered. He lit another cigarette for himself. Chain-smoking, he knew, wasn't a good idea, but it was the only thing that seemed to even somewhat calm the screaming in his mind right now. He needed the steady, dependable, repetitive action of smoking in the same way that he needed to focus, unnaturally, on the oddly reflective piece of windowsill hardware. "I've lived most my life without havin' to fuck 'cause I'm horny. Understood enough to know that—horny's a biological response. Just a hormonal occurrence, really. Comes in waves like allergies or somethin', and it ain't no real problem to cure it alone without all the complication and shit that comes from lookin' for the wrong damn person to do the equivalent of scratchin' an itch." He laughed to himself. That same nervous laugh that he was forcing in order to distract himself from the boiling in his gut that was making him feel nauseous. "I can scratch my own damn mosquito bites."
"Then, why?" Carol asked, her voice hardly more than air with a hint of sound.
It was the longest silence that Daryl had let himself have since he'd started talking—afraid he'd never finish if he let his words stop too long. Carol held the silence with him, waiting.
"Kept it a secret this damn long 'cause—I know you could do better," Daryl said. "Especially now that—I look around and I see all these fuckin' people here. Know there's more comin' if that fellow gets the radio working like he wants. I know you deserve better, but…truth is, Carol? I'm not pretendin' because every fuckin' thing I'm doing—I'm—I'm doin' that shit because…I love you. And I don't—I don't really know what to do with that. I don't know what to do about that…but…but I know—I know that it's there. And I know I'm not pretending. I just…love you."
Daryl stared harder at the reflective spot on the hardware than he'd stared at anything before. He ignored that it blurred, slightly, in his vision, and he blinked the blur away. He waited, in the silence, for what must be coming—for Carol's declaration that they needed to seek other arrangements where lines didn't blur like his vision had. Reluctantly, he crushed out the finished cigarette as the moments ticked past, and he forced himself not to light another to replace it. His breathing was already restricted enough by the tightness in his chest—though he really couldn't pretend that it was caused by the cigarettes.
He heard Carol's rustling of the blankets. He heard the creak of the bedframe and the floorboards. He imagined she might go to the bathroom, but he didn't look at her, again, until he felt her presence drawing near him.
When he glanced at her, she touched his face and pulled it so that he would look at her entirely. She smiled at him and, without saying anything, she drew his face against her breast. For a moment, he closed his eyes and ignored, entirely, the sexual implications of her naked breast against his cheek. He focused instead, on the softness of her breast, and the softness of her fingertips as she caressed his face, and the sound of her heartbeat racing slightly within her chest.
He smiled to himself, nearly every muscle in his body seeming to relax simultaneously, when she spoke—her voice barely above a whisper.
"I've got a secret too," she said. "I love you, too. And I have—for what seems like a very long time."