The First Step Is The One You Believe In
Chapter 1: Days Begin To End, But I'll Get By
Carol Peletier turned thirty with more of a fizzle than a bang.
She had expected more from the big three-oh, something memorable and palpable that she could carry with her for the rest of her life, something she could pull out on the bad days and run off with to make herself smile again. She had expected more, plain and simple.
But thirty was anything but more; in fact it was something she wished she had much less of.
It wasn't that she hated her age now, or thought she was growing old because she could no longer claim to be in her twenties. It wasn't that there were crows' feet and laugh lines framing her eyes and mouth when she looked in the mirror, because to tell the truth her skin looked as smooth as it had the day before, when she'd still been twenty-nine.
She was just unsatisfied with the way the past thirty years of her life had gone, that's all. Or rather the past eighteen years, considering her first twelve had pretty much been a cakewalk compared to what turning thirteen had done to her.
And what's more, her overly-protective mother who hemmed and hawed over her like there was no tomorrow kept dropping hints about when exactly was she going to tie down some nice, handsome man and get married for Christ's sake? Because until Carol had come along all the women in the Peletier family had been married before the age of thirty, even if they had to get married on their last day of being twenty-nine, as Carol's Aunt Amy had done so many years ago.
But Carol felt no particular urge to find a man and settle down. In fact, she didn't really care if she never saw another man again in her life, save from her very best friend in the world, Daryl Dixon.
Daryl Dixon, the wild redneck whose hair fell in his face and whose gorgeous blue eyes could melt your heart with just a glance. They'd known each other since high school, though he barely showed up and certainly hadn't graduated. Even so, they'd been best friends since the day they first laid eyes on each other.
Daryl's only other friend had been a sweet boy named Gabriel, and Gabriel had been Carol's friend since practically forever, and so it only seemed right that Gabriel try and pair the two of them together, in a purely non-romantic combination, of course.
And the rest, as they say, was history. They'd been inseparable ever since.
But now Daryl's family was starting to wonder why he never brought women around, even though he was so incredibly attractive. According to his father he ought to have a few illegitimate kids by now, if he were really a man as he claimed to be. And according to his brother, Merle, he was being a fucking pansy-ass by not shacking up with every damn woman who happened to look his way.
Carol was the only one who knew that Daryl was gay.
So Carol turned thirty with a rock of disappointment in her heart instead of on her hand, and she wasn't sure she would have preferred the latter at all.