Chapter 4: came in from the weather though not yet together

Pro: It's before eleven, so there are free bagels.

Con: The only bagels have raisins in them. Daryl doesn't like raisins. But the bagel is free, and free is something to respect, so he picks the raisins out of it and goes to work on it anyway. He doesn't have to look up at Beth's face to know that he's amusing her again. He's not sure he completely hates that.

He likes her smile. In less than two hours total time spent with her he's come to that conclusion and it feels like a solid one.

His coffee is also technically free, and it's black and strong like a smack in the face, which he appreciates and which he doubts he would have gotten from the across-the-street nemesis Starbucks. He's never been in here before - it's not the kind of place he would normally go into - but he likes it okay.

In his head, Merle is making faces.

Merle can fuck right off.

Beth apparently does like raisin bagels, and she's still spreading strawberry cream cheese on hers when she leans forward slightly and he senses that she's about to say something.

He looks up, piece of freshly raisin-free bagel in hand. No cream cheese. He doesn't really get cream cheese.

"So where're you from?"

He frowns at her from beneath his hair. He knows this is one of those questions people ask, and sometimes they're really asking and sometimes they aren't, and he's not sure which this is, but she looks like she's actually interested, and that means the stakes are higher, and that makes him less sure what to say, and it's just remotely possible that he's overthinking this.

So there's a familiar dodge. "Why the hell you care?"

"Why the hell you care if I care?" She gives him a little smirk. "I bought you a coffee, you owe me."

"I drove you, we're square."

"C'mon." She cocks her head to one side, still with that smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth - softened now. "It's just a question. What is it, some big secret?"

He looks at her for a few seconds, then lowers his head and goes back to work on the bagel. "Around."

"That tells me a lot, Mr. Dixon."

"Still not sure why I gotta tell you anythin', girl."

"Alright, so we could sit here and be totally quiet. That wouldn't be awkward." She sits back and takes a bite of bagel, and when he glances up at her again she doesn't look frustrated or exasperated. She just still looks amused.

She actually wants him to talk to her.

Well, so did he. The other day.

"Kinda near Atlanta."

"We're kinda near Atlanta right now. You wanna narrow it down at all?"

"Nope."

"Okaaay." She does sigh, just a little, but he gets the distinct sense - without looking directly at her again - that she's thinking about this more than anything else. Thinking around corners. His corners. Like he's something she's trying to find her way around. Get open. Like he's a puzzle.

This is something else he's not sure he completely hates. As far as he knows no one has ever really found him interesting enough to try to figure out before. But there also isn't a whole not to figure out. He just doesn't feel like talking about it.

"So you, what, just kinda drift around?"

"Mostly."

"So you're a drifter." She sets down her bagel and picks up her drink - not coffee. Hot chocolate, whipped cream. Little chocolate shavings on the cream. Like her jewelry, he noticed this, noted it, filed it away. "You're like... literally a drifter."

"Guess so."

"What's that like?"

"Quiet." He realizes immediately after he says it that it's ambiguous as to whether he's describing what it's like or telling her to do something, and he elects to leave the ambiguity... Except neither is true. It's not quiet, what he does. Frequently it's a lot louder than he would prefer, a lot louder than he would choose. He likes the quiet moments because they don't come all that often.

And he doesn't want her to be quiet. He hasn't since she started talking. Hasn't since that first night. He's just not sure how to talk to her.

"Lonely?"

That word again, a word that jabs him in the gut. It's not a word to which he ever would have attached himself, not something to which he would have drawn a connection. But she asks, and while he seems to be able to avoid certain things - if not gracefully - he doesn't think he can lie to her.

He's never been a very good liar. Though in fairness it's also a skill he's never tried to cultivate.

"I got my brother."

So there it is.

But it's also not really an answer.

"You got a brother?" She takes a sip of her hot chocolate and thumbs whipped cream off her upper lip. "Where is he?"

On the couch, drunk or high. Unless he decided to wander back down to that shitheap he got kicked out of, try to either score or make some deals. "Around."

"Around," she echoes softly, and there's something about that softness that catches his attention and twists something in him. Something like a warning and also not like it at all. He looks up at her again, right at her, and really takes her in. She's still damp but drying, her hair in wavy blond tendrils around her face, her shirt no longer clinging to her frame. She looks extremely together, more together than he thinks he has possibly ever been, and she also looks like she's seeing right through him.

Maybe not seeing everything. But enough. He doesn't want to talk about his brother, his brother is a sore subject - she knows that. She's keenly aware. The only question is what she'll do with the information.

What she does is she lets it drop, and that's when he realizes that she's not just a little pushy and a little daring and very perceptive.

She's kind.

Yet another thing he doesn't know what to do with.

"Don't talk a lot, do you?"

"You do." He doesn't quite smile.

And she does smile, that same sunny smile she gave him when she got out of the truck, and there's no pretense about it, nothing artificial, and this is yet another revelation, though really it doesn't surprise him because he already sensed it on such a deep level: there's not a single particle of artifice in this girl's entire being. What he sees with her is exactly what he gets.

So if she's smiling at him now, she means it.

"I guess we balance each other out, then."

He doesn't have anything at all to say to that, but she isn't making him feel like he needs to. So he looks at her for another moment or two and goes back to the bagel, and when he's done with that it's just the coffee and her and her whipped cream and sprinkled chocolate, the soft hum of what passes for an incoming lunch crowd in a coffee shop in a small Georgia town, the rain outside - moving from a spatter back to a drum. She's half looking out the window and as far as he can tell she's not looking at anything at all, and he takes the time to just watch her without being watched.

She looks very young, but there's something in her that doesn't feel young. Something deep. He can't quite get a handle on it.

"I should get back," he says quietly, and she starts just a bit, as if she was off wandering somewhere and he's grabbed her and pulled her in.

"Yeah. Okay." She pushes a few strands of hair behind her ear and gives him a smile - smaller but no less warm. "Thanks for the ride."

"Thanks for the coffee."

He's just getting to his feet and turning when something presents itself in his mind and he turns back to her. "How you gonna get home?"

She looks up, again appearing almost as if she had left and he called to her. "I... I can call Shawn, he can come get me."

"From the farm?"

She nods.

"Ain't that kinda outta his way?"

"'s not far, you know that." Her eyes narrow suddenly - not with any suspicion, not exactly, but like she's onto something. "You offerin' me yet another lift, Mr. Dixon?"

He shrugs. He thinks about saying no. Saying no would make a lot of sense. Maybe he should say no.

But he doesn't.

"Ain't it kinda outta your way?"

Saying things has been hard for him this entire conversation. Which things to say, how much, whether there's anything to be said at all. How honest to allow himself to be - because if he starts talking honestly he's going to have a hard time stopping, because he is how he is. But she asks that question, a perfectly rational one, and he could ignore it or look for a dodge or just say Okay, whatever, never mind...

And instead he's honest.

"I like makin' the drive. I like..." He sighs. "I don't like bein' here."

A world contained in five words, only one of which is more than one syllable. Simple, unvarnished, every one of those syllables a truth.

She hesitates. For a minute - and it's actually sort of an awful minute, and that throws him for something of a loop - he's certain she's about to turn him down, because she has a lot of her own reasons for doing so. He's sure. It would make total sense to tell him no.

Instead she smiles, a smaller version than the others... And yet somehow the warmest of any of them.

Because he's given her something, he realizes later. Given her something she was trying to get out of him the entire conversation. No dodges. No single-word answers. No question-volleys of his own.

Just the truth.

"Alright. What time you get off work?"

"Four."

"Meet you outside the store at four?"

He nods. Then he pauses another moment, wondering if he should say something else, until he feels like things are getting awkward again and there's really nothing at all to say. So he gives her another nod, shoves his hands in his pockets, and leaves.

And he meets her outside the store at four.