AN: Another chapter and a some time with Carol.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Carol felt strange when she woke up. It was a disoriented feeling, almost like when a fever broke and she would wake up with the sensation of not being quite sure where she was or what time it was—or how many days had passed in a feverish state. But she hadn't had a fever and, therefore, none had broken during the night to render her out of touch with reality and caught up in such a state.
But, lying there naked in the hotel bed, only half covered by the blankets that she'd simply torn from the side of the bed, while she lie on top of them, to drape over her and keep off whatever cold the room had to offer, she knew that the night before had not been a dream. In her sleep, though, she'd almost tried to convince herself that it was.
She rolled slightly, but her bed partner for the night was gone. No doubt he'd had to return to his room. Judith would need him during the night.
And, beyond that, she was pretty sure that neither of them wanted to explain what had happened—at least, not right now. She wasn't even sure if he was clear on what had happened, because she wasn't.
Sure, she knew what had happened between them physically. Her body felt somewhat strange and foreign to her in the after effects of it, and there was enough evidence to be one hundred percent clear on the fact that she'd made none of it up. About the physical act, she was sure.
But she wasn't sure, on another plane entirely, what had happened between them emotionally, or if anything had happened at all that they could both mutually agree upon. And she was sure that, if Rick had any confusion on the matter, that would be where it lie as well. And if he didn't? Perhaps she could prompt him to explain things to her in some way.
Because only then would she be ready to try to explain it to anyone else who might be curious.
Carol tried, for the moment, to push all the competing thoughts out of her mind about it. She crawled out of the mess of covers that she'd slept in and made her way to the other side of the room. She took the wash cloth that she carried with her, hung over the back of the chair to dry from her "bath" the day before, and wet it with water from one of her water bottles, going to work to wash away the physical evidence of the night before. Then she gathered up her clothes, selected the cleanest items that she could find and dressed.
She had daydreamed about doing just what they'd done more than once. It wasn't entirely out of left field for her imagination. She had never really thought, though, until he'd kissed her two nights before, that he might have ever thought about the same thing.
She had always somewhat excused what he'd done in the time since she'd known him—at least all the "bad" things—by saying that he did them out of love. He did them out of love for his wife. He did them out of love for his son…and later his daughter. Even if they were wrong. And she wasn't under any blind impression, like some in the group may be, that Rick never did anything wrong. Right or wrong, though, he did what he did out of love.
Love wasn't always a valid excuse, and Carol knew that, but she'd used love to excuse a multitude of sins.
And, even if she knew that Ed's love probably hadn't always been as true as he said it was—as true as she wanted to convince herself it was to soothe over her own hurt—she wasn't going to say whether or not Rick's love for Lori was any more or less sincere.
After all, not everything he'd ever done "for Lori" really seemed to be all that perfect either.
But believing in that love—that deep, deep love—that Rick had for his wife? That had kept Carol forgiving him for the bad things he'd done along the way. It had kept her providing excuses, even if it was just to herself, for his actions.
And, maybe, in some strange way, she'd felt a little jealous of that love—even if it was a love that she'd constructed in her imagination.
After all, for all Ed's "declarations" of love, he never would have killed a man for her. He might have killed her, but he never would have killed for her.
She'd wondered what it was like to have a man like Rick Grimes love you as strongly as he seemed, or claimed, to love Lori.
At least, in the beginning that's what it had been. She'd wondered about what it was like to be loved with such a fierce intensity.
It wasn't until later that she'd begun to think about other things—and to almost hate herself for letting her mind drift there, where it surely didn't belong. Yet another case of right or wrong, she'd begun—somewhere along the way—to let her mind drift to what it would be like to be with a man like Rick. Was he as fiery and passionate in his lovemaking as he was in performing other acts for his love? Did that reflect in bed? Or was he gentle and soft and worshipping—some kind of gentle demonstration for the value he put on that which he loved?
Carol touched her lip. She could tell from brushing her fingertips over it that it was scabbed over, even if only slightly. She'd remembered tasting the blood from his first hungry bite of her lips. But she'd had no reason at all to reprimand him for it or even to request that he not repeat such an action. She'd learned the taste of her own blood quite well and she didn't mind tasting it again for a kiss that had made parts of her body feel alive when she'd begun to think that they were only there now for their most basic functions.
He'd shown her what they were there for—at least for that one time.
It was like nothing she'd ever experienced before. Even in the few times he'd, for the sheer novelty of it if nothing else, put forth any sort of gallant effort to make the sex between them—since she really cringed to think of it as anything more—something she might find, if not pleasant, at least tolerable, Ed had pretty much fell short of the mark.
After last night? She realized just how short of the mark he had fallen—in a lot of ways.
Last night. Last night was nothing like she'd really even imagined could be real, at least not for her. Maybe it was true for other women, but she wasn't like other women. She had never, as far as she could remember, reached climax with Ed before. He'd convinced her that there was something wrong with her because of this. She had, of course, failed to point out to him that she'd never had a problem getting herself there—he wouldn't have wanted to hear that.
And she kept her "secret activities" just as what they were, secret.
But last night? There'd been nothing wrong with her except that her body had gotten overwhelmed with sensation—had almost felt like it simply didn't want anymore—before she'd wanted it to.
And Rick had surprised her.
Because the way that he'd bitten her lip in the hallway? She had expected it to be hard and fast and rough. She'd expected, honestly, to not even have the time to enjoy it. She'd almost expected not to enjoy it at all, if not quite the opposite.
She'd been afraid that the fire that seemed so appealing in the realm of imagination, when put into practice, wouldn't be pleasant at all. She'd actually been afraid, when he'd thrown her onto the bed, that she was about to fully regret even letting herself get into such a situation. She'd braced herself for the worst.
So she hadn't expected that he would ask her for reassurance, and that he would do it often. She hadn't been expecting to be asked, more than once, if she was sure that she liked what was happening and if she wanted it to continue. She had never expected to really feel like, if at any moment she'd wanted him to, he would have stopped and let her be because it was her wish that they not go even one moment longer on the path that they were on.
She'd never expected to enjoy it the way that she had.
And now? She wasn't sure if she was to expect it to happen again, or if it had simply been one of those fluke things—those acts of passion that sprung up out of nowhere and disappeared back into it to be only part of memory—that they would both put behind them. After all, she didn't always consider Rick to be the most predictable man that she'd ever known—even if in some realm of her mind that had been, maybe, part of his attraction at times.
She would, however, leave the ball in Rick's court. There was nothing else to do but that.
He would let her know what he expected. If he regretted the night, or even if he wasn't interested in repeating it, it should be fairly obvious to her with a little study of his character for the day. And if he was interested in taking things farther? If he was interested, even, in another go at what they'd done? That should be fairly obvious too.
Rick could be a difficult man to read sometimes, but in the end? He was still a man. There were some things that were universal.
Sexual desire was typically one of those things.
Even if Carol had only ever actually been with Ed—subscribing to the whole antiquated idea, at which she now scoffed, that a good wife arrived to her husband's bed virginal and left it belonging only to him and in every sense of the word his—she hadn't been without her share of men who had, one way or another, made their interest known to her. And she had, on more than one occasion, paid for their interest where Ed was involved.
She assumed, then, that she'd be able to sense if Rick was interested in more or if he simply wasn't.
It was that sense, after all, that had led her to believe some time ago that things—things she might have thought once had a chance—would never happen with Daryl. She'd read, before, in him the possibility of something more. She had entertained, as surely as she had Rick, more than one fantasy about him and she'd certainly indulged herself with those fantasies. But, over time? She was coming to realize that there simply wasn't going to be anything that happened between them.
She felt the desire was there, at least sometimes, but she felt that Daryl didn't know what to do with it. And there was too much in this world—too much to wear her out and make her tired—for her to have the desire to teach a hypothetically grown man what to do with his desire.
It was the kind of thing that, with a man like Daryl, had just as much chance of going badly as it did of going well.
And Carol wasn't really very interested in pursuing something that she knew, from the very start, had such a great potential of blowing right up in her face.
But Rick?
He was clearly the kind of man that knew what to do with his desires, when they were present. With him it was only a case of finding out if his desires, the ones he'd expressed the night before, were temporary and driven by appetite or if they were of the more long lasting variety…at least as long lasting as this world allowed, all things being relative.
And, of course, if they were of the more long lasting variety, then Carol knew there were other hurdles to cross.
After all, she hadn't yet decided entirely to stay with the group for the long-term—something that she would have to consider with a different eye were he to be proposing something more than what already was. And, on top of that, she knew she was the kind of woman who could never, even if she'd eschewed so many of her beliefs from her past lives, knowingly consider anything long-term with a man, especially a man like Rick Grimes, without being honest with him. Completely honest.
And that? Well that was a whole other matter entirely.