AN: Here we go, another little chapter.
Just a quick reminder in case anyone needs it, this story is going to have some resemblance to the show, but I'm working with my own interpretations of the characters coming from slightly different places in their lives. So it's not going to be like the show in a lot of ways.
I hope you enjoy the chapter! Let me know what you think!
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
Daryl went back to the office space that he was sharing with his brother and Alice while his head was still reeling from what happened in the bathroom.
He still wasn't even sure what had happened entirely. He could almost be convinced that he'd had enough to drink to have passed out somewhere and dreamed the whole thing because that's what it almost felt like. It felt like a dream or a hallucination.
Daryl already thought Carol was a pretty woman, but he had found her absolutely beautiful when he'd been given the opportunity to examine her more closely and actually really look at her without the distraction of so much else happening around them.
And he'd been as surprised as he could have possibly been to run into her in the hallway, naked as the day she was born.
And she'd been so flustered and so wound up about it. She'd seemed so overwhelmed by something so simple…it had amused Daryl. The women that he'd seen naked before hadn't been embarrassed by their nudity at all. It was clear that they were used to showing their bodies off to anyone who would look. It was clear that many people had probably seen them in that state of undress. But with Carol it was different.
She had been embarrassed by her nudity, apparently so much so that she hadn't wanted him to tell anyone that she'd been caught without clothes on. Apparently it was embarrassing to her to be seen without them when she was showering.
And if her nudity had been surprising to him, the fact that she'd kissed him was even more so. The fact that they'd gone from the kiss to sex was unexpected. Daryl almost hadn't believed that she was suggesting such a thing. He was no stranger to women who went from zero to a hundred in a matter of minutes, but he hadn't thought that she'd be that kind of person.
For the rush of it, though, it had still seemed different to him.
He'd never really cared about the women that he was with before. They were, mostly, Merle's cast offs and it was something that neither he nor they wanted beyond the moment, if they even really wanted it in the moment.
But Daryl had come to think of Carol, and her daughter too, as something he was somehow responsible for and maybe that extended past keeping them from getting beat on by assholes or chewed up by animated corpses.
Maybe his responsibility, imagined or real, extended to just simply keeping them from getting hurt. Maybe it was giving them what they needed.
Carol had seemed to need what they'd done, and Daryl couldn't say that he hadn't enjoyed it. He'd enjoyed it more than he'd ever enjoyed it before, actually.
And he hoped, somehow, that it might not be the only time that he got to touch her like that. If it was, though, he'd understand that too. He might be pretty decent at protecting her, but he didn't really have a whole lot else to offer someone like that, even in a world gone to hell.
When Daryl got back in the little room and found his bed, bumping around in the darkness, he pulled his shirt over his head.
He didn't like people seeing his scars regularly. He cared more about it than Merle did. Merle figured that anyone who wanted to look at them could look and he wasn't going to give a shit. Daryl didn't like the way that they made people treat him though.
People who wouldn't treat you with an ounce of respect when they didn't know about them would treat you differently when they did. The problem was that the way they treated you wasn't genuine at all. It didn't have a single damn thing to do with you. It had to do with them making themselves feel better. And, for that, Daryl kept the things hidden the best he could.
He hadn't imagined, whether it was wrong or right, that Carol would've gone the same way though. Instead, he figured that if she saw them she might get too wrapped up in them. She might get too wrapped up in trying to make him feel better about them…because she would understand where they came from…but that hadn't been what he'd wanted. He'd wanted to give her what it was that she seemed to need…he wasn't feeling like he needed a hell of a lot at the moment.
In fact, he was feeling like he had a lot more than he'd had before, and it was a pretty good damn feeling if he'd ever had one.
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
Carol was almost horrified at herself.
She made it back into the room she was sharing with Sophia, two couches pulled together to make a bed where she could sleep wrapped up tight with her baby girl, and she sat on the floor for a few moments to get her mind under control before she tried to lie down next to the sleeping child and dream.
She didn't even know what had come over her. It wasn't her. She had been a woman who had sex so little with her own husband that she could almost convince herself that her child had been born out of some kind of miracle. Ed hadn't really ever liked sex with her and as the years of their marriage ticked on and time marched across her body, he'd liked it even less.
And she wasn't asking for it, not from him or from anyone else. He might have accused her of being some kind of promiscuous woman, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. She barely even looked in the direction of other men out of the sheer concern of how she might pay for it if he found out about it and didn't like it.
Yet he'd been gone so little time and already she'd practically thrown herself at two people…two very different people, no less.
And she had enjoyed it. Alice had been right. The touch, the sensations, the feeling that someone wanted what was happening between them and wanted to be close to her and enjoying her body…it was incredible on its own, but it was far more incredible when it was someone like Daryl, someone that she found sexually attractive.
She did find him attractive. He wasn't handsome in the movie star sense of the word, but his body was nice and there was something of an innocent charm to him that made her want to do things with him that she hadn't even known that she might imagine. She wanted to do things with him that she wasn't even sure were legal or even possible.
And her own thoughts made her blush because they felt like they weren't even hers. They felt like they belonged to someone that she didn't even know, or at least to someone she hadn't known in a very long time.
Her body could still feel him. It had been something so long forgotten to her body that it felt like her nerves were trying to hold onto the memory of it to keep for if it never happened again.
Carol was surprised too, that she was already, whether she wanted to admit it or not, a little concerned with whether or not it ever would happen again.
She thought she wanted it to happen…maybe many more times…but she thought that she didn't want to be the one to tell him that. She didn't want to be the one to come begging to him to take her back again. If she did, she'd be ashamed of herself for being that way and she'd feel like it was her that wanted him and he was simply humoring her because he was a man.
And that wasn't how she thought of him and it wasn't how she wanted to think of him.
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111
"I'm never drinking again," Glenn declared, his hand in his hands while he sat around the breakfast table.
Carol pushed Sophia through the short line to get food and laughed to herself at Glenn's predicament. He wasn't the only one that was hung over. Most of them wore an expression of regret for the liquid that they'd drank the night before. Even Carol had a pain in her skull that throbbed every now and again, particularly when someone was too loud.
"I've gotta say," Jacqui commented, "I think I'm done with wine for a while too. I can even smell myself. I think? Is that what I smell?"
T-Dog chuckled and leaned down near the woman, putting down a glass of juice as an excuse, but then obviously taking a whiff of her.
"You smell fine," he said. "First damn time in a while any of us can say that. We smell clean. The whole place smells clean. I thought I'd never take a breath and get anything besides nasty rotting corpses again."
By the time that Carol got Sophia and herself both settled at the table with food and something to drink, everyone else had trickled in. Carol let her eyes flick toward Daryl as he went through the line. He clearly wasn't awake yet and his eyes were still swollen from sleep. He pawed at them as he stood, holding his plate, and following Alice through the line.
Carol snickered to herself, too, when she saw that while he was standing there, Alice was shoveling food onto her plate and his at the same time, just the same as Carol had done in helping Sophia fix her plate, and Daryl wasn't saying anything about it at all.
Anyone who didn't know the doctor might have assumed that she was as equally involved with one brother as she was with the other. But Carol suspected that it might be some kind of deeply ingrained need to care for people that was manifesting itself more than anything.
When those three made it through the table, Carol turned her attention to chatting with others at the table who didn't seem to want to chat too much until they were fed and rehydrated. She didn't know how Daryl would expect her to act and she didn't want to make him uncomfortable by letting him find that she was following him around with her eyes while he was trying to have breakfast.
But he didn't make it easy, because he sat down right in front of her and started to eat his food like a starving man. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him blatantly staring at her, but when she turned to look at him, he would look away.
And in a way, that just made her almost excited, even if she couldn't explain why.
"Woulda slept damn good last night if it weren't for Al's damn snorin'," Merle said to no one and everyone at the same time.
Alice smacked him in the back of the head and Carol was surprised to hear Sophia laugh at them. Sophia was watching the two of them with a broad smile across her face, though. And Merle chuckled in response to the smack and to Sophia's laughter. Carol caught, because she was looking, a quick wink tossed from Merle to Sophia before he took a piece of meat off of Alice's plate and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth all at once.
When Carol turned her head back, glancing in Daryl's direction again, he was smiling slightly. And he was looking right at her. He held it a moment, and then he dropped his eyes back to his food.
Carol felt her cheeks flood with color and she hoped that no one else at the table noticed it.