Carol crossed her legs where she sat on the bed opposite Daryl's. "What do you think of Michonne?"

"Time'll tell. But you best lock your door when you go to sleep tonight."

"You think she'd kill us in our sleep?"

"Probably not. But we don't know 'er yet. And who the hell carries a katana? And she killed three men, by herself? And went on that supply run alone? Woman's a force to be reckoned with."

"You're impressed," Carol said.

"Well…'s pretty damn impressive."

And Michonne was pretty damn pretty, too, Carol thought. All the men had noticed at dinner. Glenn had urged her to sit next to him. T-Dog had pulled out her chair. Rick had engaged her in conversation at every possible turn, much to Lori's chagrin. Shane had shot her appreciative looks, as if he didn't already have a girlfriend to the left of him and an ex-lover across the table from him. And Daryl…well, Daryl hadn't done anything, really, other than assess her.

Carol had to stop doing this to herself. Ed had told her for so long that no one else would want her, that she had begun to believe it. But it wasn't true. Daryl wanted her.

"Somethin' wrong?" he asked.

How could he read her like that? "For years," she told him, "my husband told me I was worthless and frumpy and unattractive and no one but him would ever want to be with me.I was just thinking of that, just now. I don't know why. Sometimes I do. It's hard to shake."

"C'mere." Daryl patted his mattress. "Get your gorgeous ass over here and I'll show you how goodman beautiful I think you are."

She smiled and came over to his bed. They kissed with Carol straddling him until he tugged at the tail of her flannel pajama shirt. "Unbutton it," he murmurred. It was the first time he'd asked for something she hadn't already directly volunteered. "Let me see just how damn beautiful."

She flushed. "It's not going to be beautiful," she warned him. "But I'll let you see." She undid the buttons one by one while he watched, and then she parted the lapels of the shirt, shifting her shoulders so they would fall open and reveal her bare breasts to his sight.

She flushed at his intense gaze on her torso as his eyes moved from her breasts up ever so slightly and then trailed form cigarette burn to cigarette burn. Three such burns scarred her in a horizontal row just above one breast, and three above the other – easily hidden from view by most shirts. She knew he hadn't felt them before, with his hands up her shirt, not with his touch so intent on her breasts instead of the skin just above them.

He reached out his hand slowly and touched one of the burns with a single fingertip, ever so gently. Then he trailed his fingers to each of the others. When he wrapped his arms around her waist to brace her and bent his head to bring his lips down, one by one, on each spot, she thought she might cry.

He pulled away and yanked off his own muscle shirt. The lashes she'd seen on his back that day he was bathing in the lake – there were only two on his front, but they looked like they had once been deep. They were faded to white, jagged lines. She traced each one with the tip of a single finger.

"You're beautiful," he murmured and kissed her mouth, and then the base of her neck, and the next thing she knew, his mouth was on her breasts.

There was no need to train him this time. He already knew she didn't want it rough. He suckled gently, one and then the other while he moaned against her bare flesh and she squirmed in pleasure and ground against his erection. When his tongue, hot and wet, flicked around her nipple, she gasped and pinched her thighs together.

She rocked on him, like a teenager on her first boyfriend, gasping and dry humping and kissing until she came from the sheer excitement of it all. Then he slipped his hand into her underwear and made her cum again.

When she was done shuddering from her second orgasm, he murmured, "Help, please." She slid off him so he could lower his pants and free his erection and she could take care of him, too.

Afterward, when he'd cleaned up with a hand towel and tossed it aside on the floor, he pulled his sweatpants back up to his waist.

"I'm a little cold," Carol said. "Do you mind if I put back on my pajama shirt?"

He groped for it on the bed and handed it to her. The truth was, she felt over-exposed now that all the action was over, despite his obvious enjoyment in her half-nakedness. She pulled the pajama shirt back on and buttoned it up as he watched her breasts disappear beneath it.

Except for asking to see her naked from the wasit up, and kissing and suckling her breasts, Daryl hadn't asked for anything more tonight than they'd already done. She wondered how long he planned to hold onto those condoms before suggesting they use them. She didn't want to say no – didn't want to put him off – but she was nowhere near ready to use them.

She was enjoying their cautious, youthful play, their gradual journey there. Sex had not been bad with Ed when they were courting. He'd bothered to make an effort back then. But not long after Sophia was born, he wanted right back at it, sooner than the six weeks they were supposed to wait. It had been uncomfortable, and he hadn't much cared, had told her it was her it wasn't his fault she'd suddenly stopped liking sex after they got married and she needed to psych herself up for it. It was never really enjoyable again after that, but at least it wasn't frequent. He'd often drink too much to be able to get it up, or she'd get him off with her hand quickly before he got in. But Carol still associated penetration with discomfort.

She didn't have to worry about that tonight, however. Daryl wasn't asking for that tonight. He slid down until his head was on the pillow and patted his bare chest.

Carol slid down, too, settled her head on his chest, and curled against his side, the way she'd curled up around him on the motorcycle. She liked it this way, where she was in charge of the grip and the weight. He let one arm fall around her, but that was okay, too, because he did it loosely. He just gave her a single squeeze, and then immediately relaxed. He was careful not to bind her too tightly to him, and she was comfortable there, for the moment, under the loose, affectionate warmth of his arm.

"You're going to have a lot of towels to do in the laundry this week," she told him.

"Pffft. I ain't doin' laundry. I got huntin' 'n butcherin' 'n perimeter check."

"You're not doing the camp's laundry, no, but you really should do your own towels. You can't inflict that on others. Use the bathroom sink if you're willing to risk the power to the pump and water heater. We've got some Woolite in the linen closet."

"Get 'round to it," he murmured.

"You better. Soon. Or this room's going to start smelling like the underside of a teenage boy's bed."

"Could just throw 'em out 'n get more," he said. "This park is like a goodman shopping mall. Got to be six hundred of 'em in the Kitchen Kingdom gift shop alone."

"Wash them," she insisted.

"Yes, ma'am."

Carol chuckled. "Baxter," she said. "Your middle name."

"Ain't Baxter."

"Bastard?" she ventured. It would be an odd – but embarrassing – middle name.

"I aint a bastard. Merle was, but not me."

"Your parents gave him Bastard as a middle name?"

"Nah. Mean he was a bastard," Daryl clarified. "My parents married after our mamma had him."

He traced circles lazily through her pajama shirt on her back, and she squirmed because it tickled. He stopped and took his arm off her and lay it straight down beside her, the inside of it just barely touching the curve of her.

"It just tickled," Carol explained. "You can put your arm back. I liked it like that."

He lays his arm around her again, lightly.

"How old was your mother when she got married?" she asked.

"Sixteen. Had to wait 'til she was legal to marry, 'cause her daddy wasn't signing off. That's how Merle tells it anyhow. Don't know. My grandpa was dead by the time I was born."

"That's young. You mean she got pregnant at fifteen?"

"Ain't like my daddy was thirty. Was sixteen himself."

"Sophia will be fifteen in three years!"

"Gonna have to beat Carl off 'er with a stick. Andre, too, I guess," he said.

"Andre won't even be seven," Carol told him.

"Mean later. Later, when she's 26, and Andre's 18. Hey." He gave her another squeeze with his arm. "You did it. Expanded her pool of potential future helpmates, just like ya wanted."

Carol groaned, and he chuckled.

"This is not funny," she insisted. "It's not at all funny."

"'S a little bit funny."

"At least now there's another woman in the house. That brings a little gender balance."

"Wonder what the fuck she was doin' with that guy. Asshole got high watchin' his kid in a goddamn apocalypse."

"Don't judge her."

"Hell not?" he asked.

Carol pulled away slightly and looked down at him. "I was with Ed."

"Oh." His eyes flitted down.

"And you know what, you're right. I should be judged for it."

"Didn't say that."

"I know you didn't." She sighed. "But it's true. I should have left him. But I'm also making changes to myself and to my life I should have made back then. I'm doing that now. Because we get to start over. Here, in this crazy, walker-infested world, we get to start over. So does Michonne. Give her a chance."

Daryl raised his eyes to hers again. "A'ight," he agreed.

She lowered her head to his chest again, and he toyed with the hair on her neck. It had crept down that far now. "Baker," she guessed.

"That's a last name."

"Well, I'm running out of first names that start with B."

She snuggled for a while longer with him and then kissed him goodnight. After she slipped from the bed to head back to her own room, he asked, "Better this time? The cuddlin' part?"

She smiled. "It was very nice. Goodnight, Daryl."

"Nite, Miss Murphy."

[*]

In the morning, when she rose, Carol found Daryl's door wide open and his room empty, as usual. His bed was, of course, unmade. She made it. She couldn't help herself. It was almost a compulsion, and it did make the room look so much better. It also gave her the sense of satisfaction that came every time she completed a task.

She noticed the hand towels were gone from the floor and were damp and hanging to dry on hangers in the open closet. He must have washed them in the bathroom sink before leaving. She smiled and glanced around his room. It was spartan. His rifle was leaned in the corner by the writing desk. His pack was on the closet floor, as was his rolled sleeping bag, and his clothes, she presumed, in the dresser drawers. There was an assortment of things on top of the writing desk where he had probably emptied his pockets this morning after putting on his pants – an allen wrench, a beer bottle cap, a spent brass shell casing, an empty pack of cigarettes, a golden leaf with lines of red like veins (she wondered about that one – had he actually collected it because he thought it was pretty?), and a smooth rock.

Downstairs, the coffee was already on and Rick was pushing seeds down into the soil in some starter trays on the kitchen counter. "Is it your morning to make breakfast?" she asked.

"No, T-Dog's, but I was up, so I got the coffee going."

"What are you starting there?"

"You know how we salvaged that one lemon that wasn't dead? Well, I removed the seeds and soaked them overnight, and now I'm planting them a half inch deep in this potting soil. I'll cover them with plastic wrap from the pantry and let them sit in a sunny spot on the windowsill for a few weeks. Hopefully, they'll start to grow and I can transplant them."

"You really do know about gardening," Carol said with surprise.

"I told you it was my relaxation time, in the old world. And uh…" He sighed. He glanced up at the balcony to the closed door of the room he shared with Lori. "Sometimes I really needed that." He looked down and pushed another seed into the soil. "Lori was the first girl I ever seriously dated. Senior year of high school I finally got the courage to ask her out. I thought for sure she'd shoot me down. I was a bench warmer on the football team. She was the head cheerleader."

"But she didn't shoot you down," Carol said.

"No. We were married six months after high school, when I got out of the police academy. Had Carl three years after that. I suppose you married Ed young, too?"

Rick must think she'd waited eight years to have Sophia, or that she was younger than she looked. "No. I was twenty-six, actually, when I got married. It's still possible to make mistakes after the teenage years."

"I didn't say it was a mistake!" Rick insisted. "I love Lori."

"I meant me. Marrying Ed."

"Oh."

Carol smiled warily, walked past him, and took down a mug from the cupboards to fill with steaming coffee.

[*]

Today, Daryl wrestled an alligator.

Well, he didn't really. He shot it with his crossbow bolt straight through the eye. But that was going to be his story for the kids – how he wrestled that gator into submission.

He'd been coming back from the woods around the train tracks – his little, inside-the-gate hunting grounds – where he'd had no luck today. On his walk back, he had crossed the bridge over the River Thames, and that's when he saw the gator. Just sitting there in the shallow water.

Gators weren't often in creeks that shallow, and he didn't know where it had been before. Had it come in through the tunnel from where the creek joined a larger freshwater river on the outside? Maybe. It wasn't too big. A little over six feet in length – a mature female, but a little one. But if it had crawled in through that tunnel, maybe a walker really could after all. Probably not though, on its stomach, with its head down in the water. A gator could hold its breath for an hour or more. A walker, not so much.

Or could it? They didn't drown to death after all.

Shit, maybe Carol was right and they ought to board that tunnel up, just in case – leave just a couple inches for the water to flow through. He better add that task to the chore list.

Daryl dragged that alligator down the asphalt pathway by its tail back toward the butcher's table he'd put outside the House of the Future. (It was a picnic table he hosed down nightly with the outside garden hose). He'd have to sharpen his gutting knife after dealing with this tough hide, but it would give them a good twenty-five pounds of meat by the time he was done.

As he was nearing the house, he came across Michonne and Sophia. Sophia had a little sword of some kind and Michonne was showing her moves with her katana, which Sophia was mimicking. Sophia sheathed the sword on her back and ran up to Daryl. "Cool! An alligator?"

Daryl dropped the creature's tail and tried not to look like he'd been struggling to drag the heavy thing. "Yep. Wrassled it into submission. Nearly rolled me, but I got the upper hand."

"It doesn't look big enough to roll you," Sophia said. "It's like…your height."

"It's a foot longer 'n me!"

"Six inches, maybe," Sophia said.

"Point is, I won."

"I'm gonna go tell Mom!" She ran past Michonne in the direction of house.

Daryl looked Michonne over as she sheathed her katana and strolled sleekly toward him.

"Where's your kid?" Daryl asked.

"Lori's watching him. She's teaching him his letters. She was a preschool teacher, I guess, before all this."

Daryl hadn't known that. He'd thought Lori just sat at home thinking up ways to irritate Rick. "Is that a real sword Sophia's got?" Daryl asked.

"Sophia asked me to teach her, just so you know."

"A'ight. And the sword?"

"It was on the wall of a gift shop in the Kingdom of Japan. It looked like an ornamental display piece, but just sharpen the blade – and it'll definitely cut. It's a wakizashi."

"And how you learn all this shit?" He waved at the handle of the sword peaking above her shoulder.

"I went to college on a fencing scholarship," she said. "I suppose that surprises you."

"Why? Don't know you."

"Most people think of it as a rich white man's sport. And then I dabbled in kenjutsu for a couple years in grad school.This katana?" She shrugged. "I grabbed it off a wall at the start of all this, when I found myself between a rock and a hard place. And I just decided I liked it. Your daughter's already starting to pick up the forms quickly. She seems clumsy just to look at her, but she's surprisingly graceful. I guess she did gymnastics in the old world?"

"My daughter?" Daryl asked.

"Sophia?"

"Uh…yeah, she ain't my kid. She's Carol's."

"Oh. I thought…I thought she was both of yours. She looks like you."

"Pfft. All white people look the same to you?"

Michonne chuckled. She looked about six hundred times less intimidating when she smiled, Daryl thought. "But you are with Carol, right?" Michonne asked. "I thought I heard Glenn say you two were together."

"Yeah. She's m'girl. But we ain't met 'fore all this."

"Ah. Well, I'm still learning the ins and outs of the group. Carl is Rick and Lori's son, though? And they're having a baby?"

"Yeah, Carl is Rick and Lori's kid," Daryl confirmed. The baby…well, that was another matter. He picked up the tail of the alligator and began dragging it again toward the butcher's table.

"Want some help with that?" Michonne asked. He knew she was talking about the alligator, but he couldn't hear that phrase without thinking of that night Carol walked into his bedroom and found him, cock in hand.

"Geez," Michonne said. "Just being friendly with my offer. Didn't mean to make you blush."

[*]

While Carol was on a step stool organizing the cabinets to create more shelf space, Daryl came into the kitchen carrying a milk crate full of alligator meat wrapped in brown paper from the King Sandwich Deli. He smelled of smoke and sweat and creek water as he set the crate down on the counter, strolled over, and slapped her on the ass.

Carol yelped in surprise and nearly fell off the stool but steadied herself by grabbing the top of the cabinet door. Meanwhile Daryl just strolled onto the fridge and opened it.

Lori looked up from the table in the kitchen nook where she was sitting with Andre, who was kneeling in a chair and playing with a big wooden letter puzzle from one of the gift shops. "Nice way to greet your girlfriend there, Daryl."

"She likes it," Daryl said as he put four pounds of paper-wrapped meat in the fridge and shut it.

"I actually don't particularly care for it," Carol informed him. She shut the cabinet door and stepped down from the stool.

"Nah? Don't put it out there then."

Carol suppressed her chuckle. The truth was, she did kind of like it, maybe. It was a little possessive, but not in a domineering sort of way – not an Ed sort of way – but in a playful, territory marking kind of way, a way that said, I like this woman and I don't care who knows it. Still, she couldn't have him just strolling in and slapping her ass anytime he liked. "Don't do it again," she warned him. "Do you hear me?"

"Ain't deaf." He dumped the crate out on the counter. "Wanna put the rest of this gator in the freezer? Got more out on the butcher's table. Be right back."

Well, at least he'd wrapped it this time, Carol thought.

[*]

After dinner, Sophia made a discovery. One of the heating vents on the faux fireplace was not a heating vent at all. It was a slot for sliding in a DVD, which would then play on the flat screen TV above the fireplace. There was an entire drawer full of DVDs in one of the living room end tables, most of them related to kingdom-type themes. Sophia selected "A Knight's Tale." She then declared that, from henceforth, there would be a weekly movie night, and Carl Grimes seconded the motion.

Shane and Rick brought in some padded folding chairs from one of the small theaters, since the living room only sat about six, and Glenn rolled in one of those large, red wheeled popcorn machines and plugged it in.

"Once a week," Carol said in response to Daryl's muttering about power drainage. "We're only going to do it once a week."

Everyone selected a bag or box of candy for the movie – Carol got her Dots, and Daryl his Necco Wafers. "I still don't know how you can stand those," she said. "It's like eating chalk."

"If chalk was delicious," he said.

Daryl's muttering about draining power for the popcorn machine ended when the scent of popcorn filled the entire living room, and he was soon challenging Carl to catch more popcorn in his mouth than he could. Pieces were getting strewn all over the floor and behind the edges of the long couch cushion, and Michonne was having to run herd on Andre to make sure he didn't shove a piece in his mouth and choke on it.

"You're vacuuming tomorrow," Carol told Daryl.

"Nah," he said. "Vacuum uses too much power. Need a dog."