Carol takes Daryl's filthy boots outside to clean them while he's gone. Then she changes the comforter on his bed because he's gotten it dirty by tossing his bow there. She also sweeps up the floor of his room and cleans her handgun. She watches Sophia practice dry firing with it, and then they go to see the piglets. Carina's there, and Carol leaves the two girls chatting to return home and start cooking super.
On the way back, she comes across Nadia gleaning walnuts form the ground again. Carol wonders if the woman secretly shakes the tree, ahead of harvest, when no one is looking, for an excuse to collect more. Nadia invites her inside for coffee, and to Carol's surprise, she doesn't pour any whiskey in her own.
"I'm cutting back," Nadia says. "DeShawn said something to me the other day, implied that maybe I was letting it get a little out of hand. And besides…liquor is like gold in this camp. I can trade it for all sorts of services."
"Ryan makes trades for foot rubs," Carol tells her. "If you're interested."
She laughs. "I'd rather use it to pay someone to do our laundry. I'm glad Jefe allows the sponsees to keep whatever they entered the camp with."
"All I had," Carol tells her, "was a car running on fumes and my handgun."
"I have a handgun, too, but I don't have any ammo for it. And I don't really know how to use it well."
"You could learn."
"Why?" Nadia asks. "I have walls now and a protector."
Carol doesn't press her on the matter, but she doesn't think it's such a good idea to become complacent. Walls crumble. Protectors get killed.
They chat about the kids some, and then Nadia says, "I'm thinking of telling Ivan about me and DeShawn."
"Oh? I thought you didn't want him to know."
"That was when I thought we had a different kind of arrangement." Nadia smiles. "I didn't know DeShawn actually liked me."
"I thought DeShawn had made that clear."
"I mean for anything more than sex," she clarifies. "But he wants us to be a couple. A real couple. Out in the open."
"And do you?"
Nadia shrugs. "I wouldn't say I love him. I still miss my husband something awful. But DeShawn is competent. I admire his skills. He's good-looking, and the sex is enjoyable, especially now that I know I can turn him down as the mood strikes me, and it won't be an issue. I did say no the other night when he told me he wanted me to cut back the drinking. I was irritated. After I thought about it, though, I realized he was right. I haven't been coping well with what happened in my old camp. And it's not fair to Ivan, for me to check out like I've been doing. DeShawn's been more involved with Ivan these past few weeks than I have. And a boy needs a father figure."
So does a girl, Carol thinks, and feels a pang of guilt that she only gave Sophia a terrible one. Sophia has begun to thrive here, outside of the shadow of Ed. It makes Carol feel sad and guilty to think of it, but Sophia has found more stability in Copper Creek Pastures, in the midst of an apocalypse, than she did under her own roof with her own father.
"Well, it sounds like you've made up your mind," she tells Nadia. "To tell Ivan."
"I suppose I have. But it's nice to bounce my thoughts off of someone."
Carol finishes her coffee and excuses herself.
Daryl must have returned from his meeting with Jefe while Carol was at Nadia's, because when she gets into the cottage, he's sitting in the gaudy grandmother armchair with his sock-clad feet up on the coffee table and a book in his hands. Her book. The trashy romance novel she picked up from the library: Denim Dreams.
He tilts the book down and away from his face as she walks in. "See ya did some one-handed reading while I's gone."
The red rushes to Carol's cheeks. "Where'd you get that?" It wasn't as if she left that book lying on the coffee table last night. She put it away in her nightstand drawer.
"How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?" he asks. "And have someone rifling through your shit?"
She walks closer to the fireplace and comes to stand opposite him between the loveseat and coffee table. "Please give me my book back."
He raises the book in front of his face again. "Who's she end up with?"
"Just give it back," Carol demands and reaches out for the book.
He doesn't. He flips through a few pages and says, "See you earmarked this page good. Should I read it?"
Her cheeks flush hotter. She knows exactly what's on that page. "Stop!" She leans over the coffee table, reaching for the book, but he snatches it aside and chuckles.
"All that quality denim," he says. "Denim jackets and denim jeans, and that shit all just ends up on the dirty bathroom floor, ruined by all that damn water splashing out the tub."
He read it. He read the earmarked section, the bathtub sex scene. And he's sitting there smirking at her for enjoying it, because he doesn't know what it's like to be the good Catholic girl who tries to 'save herself for marriage', who looks forward to that moment for years, with heightened anticipation, from the age of sixteen to twenty-three, only to end up in tears on her wedding night, and then spend the next fifteen years with a man who doesn't care about her needs. Daryl can sit there smugly simpering, because he probably has no idea what it's like to never enjoy sex outside of a fantasy.
"Give it back, you jerk!" she yells, and lunges forward, and rips the book violently from his hands. In that yell there's a breaking somewhere inside, and before she can cry in front of him, she rushes to her bedroom, slams the door, rips open the nightstand drawer, throws the book inside, and slams the drawer shut.
Then she sits down hard on the bed and she does cry. It comes out like a cauldron bubbling up and rocking off its lid, and she doesn't understand why it does, when she's kept that lid on so tight for so long. It takes her a few minutes, but she gets control of it, swallows down the bubbling cries, regulates herself with breathing, and achieves a kind of calm.
She wipes away the tears from her eyes. And then she sits there, breathing in and out, in and out, until she can feel the anger and sorrow and pain untangling from her nerves.
She puts her hands down on either side of herself on the bed and her fingers curl around the edge. She better get a grip, she thinks. She better get a grip and go out there and apologize to her sponsor for yelling at him and calling him a jerk. She's been here less than two weeks now. And in another six, he has to decide whether to renew his sponsorship. Yelling at him and calling him a jerk is probably not the kind of thing that's going to make him want to renew. And from his perspective, her explosion had to seem like a crazy overreaction.
Carol exhales one last time, slowly. She runs her fingers beneath her eyes to make sure there are no tears. Then she stands, smooths her shirt, and walks as confidently as she can manage toward the door.
When she opens it, startled, she steps back. Daryl's standing right there. Before she can stammer out her apology, he says, "Sorry. Sorry. I's just teasing. Didn't mean…didn't mean to…I don't even know…what the fuck just happened out there? I don't even know."
Carol swallows. Leaving the door open, she backs up away from him and sits down slowly on the bed again. "I'm sorry I yelled at you," she said. "It didn't have anything to do with you."
He takes a hesitant step inside. "I's just teasing," he repeats.
"I know. I just…it brought up some things. Some painful memories. Of my husband."
"Oh."
"Of the way things were…and weren't…between us."
"Oh." He comes the rest of the way inside and sits down beside her on the bed, leaving a good foot between himself and her. He rests his hands on his knees. "Listen I uh…I won't touch your shit again."
"I'm sorry I called you a jerk. You're not a jerk. I didn't mean that."
"Guess we both gotta stop saying shit we don't mean."
She lets out a single-breath laugh. "Yeah, I guess so."
He smiles and ducks his head.
Trying to lighten the mood with a little teasing of her own, and to show she's not a prude even if she did overreact to his ribbing, she says, "I'm surprised you're critical of my reading choices given how quickly you swept those cards out of Sophia's hands. Not to mention the Playboys from the bedsheets when we first moved in."
Now he's the one to blush. "Told you! Cards weren't mine! Neither were the magazines. That was all Merle."
"And so what if they were yours?" she asks, a little surprised at his defensiveness.
"I ain't dirty."
"I…no one suggested you were."
"Just forget about it," he mutters as he begins picking at a hangnail.
"Okay," she says softly. She can only imagine his defensiveness has something to do with the abuse he suffered, though Merle apparently had no such sexual hang-ups. Maybe Daryl's father caught him once with a dirty magazine when he was a boy, and that's where one of those deep lashes came from. "Just so you know, though, I'm not judging you."
He peers at her. Then he looks back at his hands as he works the hang nail loose. "I like the haircut you gave me."
It's a dodge, and one she's grateful for, to help shepherd them out of this awkward moment. She smiles. "No you don't."
"Like the way it feels, anyhow. Lighter." He shakes his head, as if to show his hair weighs less. Then he peers toward the doorway, one eye half closed. "And I can see better now. No hair to look through."
"I think it looks really good on you, frankly."
"That's what Jefe said."
"Did she?"
"Said, 'Carol sure has cleaned you up real nice.' Or maybe it was - 'You've cleaned up real nice for Carol.' Something like that."
Carol wonders what Jefe's tone was when she said that. "What was your meeting about?"
He sighs. "She uh…she said it wasn't really fair, me having this cottage all to m'self. It was fine when Merle was here, 'cause we were both outer circle, but one outer circle man getting a whole damn cottage, it don't look good. People will grumble."
"Oh." Carol's heart sinks. Are they going to have to move from this warm little house? This cottage she's cleaned and tidied and dusted and fashioned a new shower curtain for? This cottage Sophia already calls home? "But DeShawn has a cottage to himself."
"He's inner circle. Been here as long as Jefe has. Hell, he's Jefe's right-hand man."
"So…" Carol tries not to sound as disappointed as she feels. "We're being moved?" And will he still want to renew his sponsorship if that's the case? If they have to live in a one-bedroom trailer like Garrison or Cody, will Daryl want to give up that much of his space to two other people?
He shakes his head. "Nah. I'm keeping the cottage."
Relief floods through her.
"But I got to do more community work in exchange. She upped my wild game quota a bit, and now I got some guard shifts, too. In the evening."
"But you have your – " she almost says counseling sessions – "martial arts lessons in the evening. You need those."
"Can still do that. Ain't like I have guard duty every night, and I wasn't doing lessons every night anyhow. I mean, I was, for a bit, but I was just catching up, 'cause I'd been gone so much."
Carol wonders if Jefe gave him evening guard shifts so he wouldn't be home at night. She probably knows he has meetings with Dr. Eastman some nights. Now, on the other nights, he'll have something to preoccupy his time other than quiet evenings at home with Carol. And he probably won't have time for a private supply run to get furniture now. Is Jefe jealous of her? "Were people grumbling about you having this cottage?" Carol does recall Ryan mentioning his surprise that Daryl got to keep the cottage after Merle died, but he wasn't precisely grumbling about it.
Daryl shrugs. "Must of been. And I don't blame 'em. I got a pretty sweet deal here." He looks around the bedroom and then his eyes fall on her.
The front door opens, and Sophia calls, "Mom?"
"In the bedroom," Carol answers as Daryl abruptly stands and moves far away from the bed. Carol heads out the door, asking, "Why don't you help me fix supper?"
"Sure," Sophia tells her, and then turns back curiously when Daryl quietly exits the bedroom.
"Daryl was just returning a book to me," Carol explains.
Sophia's expression suggests she's not fully buying that story, but she gets busy helping Carol with the cooking.