Chapter 26: we love the all of you

Monday rolls around and Beth goes back to school. By the time Daryl gets to the farm she's actually already there, and he spends the day - during which he gets a tour of the machinery that needs some work over the next little while - trying to figure out how the fuck he actually feels about that, because he still doesn't know.

Yes, he knew in a very abstract sense that he's spending an increasing amount of time kissing a girl who's still technically - and also in every way that isn't technical - in high school. Yes, he was well aware in the most intellectual way that he's having increasingly vivid sexual fantasies about a literal teenager. He knows these are potential problems. He knows what a lot of other people would say if they knew. He knows they would say he's a creep.

Which might very well be the case.

But he didn't mean for this to happen, his mind protests. He didn't go looking for this. He just... He found someone who was nice to him. He found someone who genuinely seemed to like him, to want to spend time with him, and not out of pity or because she wanted anything more from him than to be in his company. He didn't mean to see her that night in the coffee shop and feel what he felt. He didn't mean...

Except for when he did. Except for when he kissed her. And when she kissed him and he didn't push her away. And all the other times, everything else, all the stuff that he really probably could have found a way to stop, every step at which the complications stacked up and stacked up, and now he's having a slightly stilted conversation with her father about transmissions and what he really wants is to know is what she wore to school today.

What. She wore. To school.

All of this feels like a pile of very poor excuses.

But what the woman said in the truck, during that strange, sad, sweet half hour.

I think you should stick with her. Sounds like she's good for you.

She is. He thinks there might be ways in which Beth is good for him that he doesn't even know about yet.

It's a clear day. Clouds roll in once late afternoon comes around, but there's no sign of rain. He finishes going over stuff with Hershel, doing some very basic chores here and there, and then Beth comes home. She's wearing jeans. Loose green top, little lacy thing around the scoop neckline. Gold heart. Flower earrings. Bangles all green and yellow and beaded. That braid, those boots, and her sweet smile that widens - very briefly - into a grin when she sees him.

He stays for dinner. He doesn't say more than a few words to her. He glances back when he's leaving, when he's starting up the truck, and she's sitting on the porch and watching him. She doesn't wave.

All evening he was itching to touch her. Literally itching. Not even in any particular way. Just his hand, her skin. Anything. With an edge of desperation.

This isn't going anywhere. This isn't going to get any better. And he isn't going to come to his senses and try to call it off.

Radio on as he drives.

and while it's on my mind there's a girl that fits the crime
of a future lover's dream that I've still to find

but in the meantime

The sun is setting, hot pink and streaks of purple and gold through the clouds - an aggressive sunset. A sunset yelling and striding around the stratosphere, looking to punch someone.

Daryl cranks up the music until the speakers buzz and stares the sky down.

Lying on the couch after midnight, Merle snoring incredibly loud in the bedroom, Daryl opens his phone and closes it and opens it and closes it and looks at the screen until there's a brilliant green blotch floating in the center of his vision.

He could text her. He could. Text her what? What do you text someone in this kind of situation?

miss you. thinking about you. are you awake? what are you doing? what's on your mind?

what are you wearing?

In the dark, TVless, lightless except for the phone and the floating blotch its screen makes, he smiles ruefully.

sweet dreams

He doesn't text her at all.

Nothing much happens the next day. Business as usual. He isn't at the farm the whole day but he's there when Beth comes home, beaded wire spiral flashing on her wrist, smile flashing on all of her. She walks up the drive in the sun - she takes the bus, an actual fucking school bus, Jesus, exactly how much more uncomfortable can this get - hips doing that very slight little sway that he can't stop looking at, like one of those things you go forever without noticing, and then once you see them a certain way you can never go back to looking at them the way you did before.

All of her is like that.

She gives him a tiny smile and a nod and walks right by him.

He's gotten nothing from her. If anything she's considerably more distant than she was when they were still just friends. But that's reasonable. This thing between them - now that it's not just him who knows about it - is incendiary. It's dangerous. Go too close to it and they'll become reckless. Toss it around. Burn themselves. Burn someone else. He's never done this before but he can sense it, how it might be a tremendous fire hazard.

So it's better to be overcautious than stupid. So if he gets nothing from her - no texts, no touches, barely a word or a look - he's not upset. He's not hurt. He's not giving her anything either. They're protecting each other.

From?

He thinks he knows all the general stuff: her family enraged, possibly guns involved, her humiliated - which is way worse to him than being shot at - him being run out of town, Merle never letting him hear the end of it. Jail time isn't actually a thing in play here - God, is he really thinking about that, would he do this anyway if it was? - but it would be unpleasant for all parties concerned.

But what would actually happen? If he went up to her in the kitchen when she's slicing chicken breasts or mashing potatoes and curled an arm around her waist, tilted her head up and kissed her? What would actually happen?

What's at stake here?

He mulls it all over through Wednesday, Thursday, watching her when she comes home, staring at his phone in the dark, doing nothing. He mulls it over and he gets to Friday and he still has no goddamn idea.

He doesn't want to hurt her. He knows that. He absolutely cannot bear the thought of her getting hurt.

But he also doesn't want to stop.

On Friday - a hot, muggy afternoon - she finds him at the far end of the yard out by the firewood racks splitting logs for stacking. He's been doing it nonstop for over an hour and he's sweating freely, straightening up with the splitter a pleasant swinging weight in his hand and wiping sweat away from his brow with the back of the other, and there she is, looking at him.

No, not looking. Staring.

He looks back at her, looks her up and down without meaning to - looks at her tight jeans and white sleeveless blouse that would be modest if it wasn't damp with her own sweat to the point of being half translucent, so that her bra is pretty clearly visible. He looks at it and sees that it's a light powdery blue and he'd be willing to lay down money that it's cotton, and soft to the touch. He looks at how the blouse as a whole is clinging to her, being persistent about it - being obnoxious.

Maybe tug it away, a treacherous part of himself whispers. Maybe take the whole damn thing off.

Strands of hair sticking to her neck, curling around her shoulders. Her lips slightly parted. Doe eyes wide.

Normally these things slip smoothly over him and they do it when he's alone, when it's convenient, when it won't be difficult to manage. This is not convenient at all, and it's not smooth; it slams down on him, almost making him gasp, and for a crazed literal five seconds he's hauling her against him, ripping that blouse off her and dragging down those tight jeans, pinning her against the full rack and hitching her thighs high on his hips and tearing open his fly and driving himself into her.

Then he isn't. He's still just staring at her.

Except then something extremely disturbing happens.

It takes him another couple of seconds to emerge from his own head - a beat or so of breath. Once he's fully present and actually seeing her again, he processes how her gaze is moving over him, and for a moment of violent, almost nauseous vertigo, he sees himself from the outside - a blurry, distorted picture, but he's aware enough of himself to at least know what she's seeing. He gets a flash of his own chest, arms, shoulders - gray tank which leaves a lot of that exposed. He knows he's muscular, knows he's strong, but that's only ever mattered inasmuch as it was something he could use to do things.

His hair hanging around his face. He knows, in a dim sort of way, that his own bare skin has to be glistening in that abusive sun.

The woman in the bar... Other women have looked at him like that, and he knows what it means: that what they see is acceptable enough to them to make him fuckable. But that's as far as his imagination of this - his comprehension of this - has ever gone. In those bars and dives and shitholes it's a flat, bestial kind of thing. Nothing in it except what happens when two bodies come together in a particular mechanical arrangement.

That isn't how Beth is looking at him. And she hasn't looked at him like this before. Not like this. Like she can't look away from him.

Like she might be feeling some version of what he is.

That makes absolutely no sense. That's impossible.

Here's the thing about his fantasies, he realizes much later when he's desperately trying to untangle the hopelessly stubborn knot that is everything: in those, she wants what he does to her. She takes some initiative; she does things too. She clearly enjoys herself. She clearly enjoys herself a lot. Of course she does. He wants that, maybe above anything else. His fantasies are for himself, but in every single goddamn one she's the center.

In his fantasies she tolerates his presence because of what he can do for her. But she doesn't want him.

She doesn't look at him like Beth is looking at him now.

"Hi," she says, very softly. Her voice is wavering just a touch. Uncertain. Like she's not completely sure what's going on either, in this moment where the air between them seems perilously close to sparking into chain lightning.

He gives her a nod. And suddenly he's just really uncomfortable. This isn't by any means the first time she's seen him dressed like this, but everything has snapped into a new kind of focus from a whole new perspective, and he feels like she's seeing way too much. Way more than he wants her to. Because this isn't anything like his fantasies. This is so much more complicated.

In his fantasies his skin is unmarked.

In fact, in his fantasies he might as well not have skin at all. In his fantasies, for all practical purposes, he's just a ball of nerve endings. Sensation. Pleasure.

Not something someone else would want to see.

"Mama's makin' a fresh batch of lemonade. Wanted to know if I should bring you some." Her voice is still low, still very soft, and this time the vertigo is temporal in nature, as if he's been flung back through time to before he kissed her at all. Maybe even before she kissed him that first time. All hesitation and awkwardness, as if last Sunday he didn't basically push her up against a tree and tip her head back and press his lips to her throat until she moaned.

Everything here continues to make no sense, with a consistency that's almost comforting.

She wants to know if he wants her to bring him... For a couple of additional seconds he has no idea what to say. The space between his collarbones and diaphragm feels like a seething barrel of aching need shot through with utter confusion. Because of how she was looking at him, and still is.

He glances up and past her. They're within direct line of sight of the house, of the big dining room's big windows. If he tugged her behind the firewood rack and did at least a little of what he wants to do, kissed her again, he doesn't think anyone would see them, but.

They're going to have to decide how many risks they want to take and how big they want those risks to be.

Slowly, he shakes his head. "I'm alright." He's not. He's incredibly thirsty. But there's a pump close by. There's water.

And Beth isn't leaving. She's still staring at him Like That, and he pauses in the act of turning back to the log he was about to go to work on, and he goes ahead and just fucking asks her. Because the nice thing about being in this deep is the list of things you need to worry about is shrinking - as the few remaining things on the list you do need to worry about get bigger and bigger and bigger.

"What?"

She smiles, breathes out a little laugh, and drops her gaze down to her boots for a few seconds. He can see her cheeks and ears reddening - holy shit, she's blushing - and when she lifts her head her eyes are shining in a way he knows pretty well by now. Excitement. Mischief. Teenage daring.

He's not the only one who's just made a discovery here, he thinks.

"You look good," she murmurs, and she doesn't sound nervous now. At least not very. There's an edge of something else in her voice, something that makes him want to shiver all over again without knowing exactly why.

He blinks at her, splitter still dangling from one hand. When he moves it he feels the muscles in that arm shift and again he catches a foggy glimpse of what she might be seeing. "The fuck you talkin' 'bout? I'm a mess, girl."

"Yeah." Her smile widens. "But you also look really good." She turns on her heel and starts back the way she came, tossing him the last remnants of that smile over her shoulder. "You change your mind, come on up to the house. It's gonna be nice'n cold."

He watches her go, still feeling face-smacked. Face-smacked in more than one way. And still aching, still burning, still wanting her with a kind of ferocity he wasn't ready for and doesn't think he ever will be.

He wanted to fuck her. He saw her like that and he wanted to fuck her, and the bluntness of that is still something he's getting his head around, but by now he's had a couple of weeks or so to at least make an attempt to get used to the idea.

What he has no idea how to handle at all is the idea that Beth Greene might see him like this and want to fuck him.

That they might both want the same thing at the same time.

Which is a real problem, because when two people want the exact same thing at the exact same time, and they want it badly enough, they usually find a way to make it happen.

And that's... He doesn't know what to do with that. It's completely fucking ridiculous, but he doesn't. He really thinks about it - strips away all the vestiges of fantasy, where everything is simple and easy and he can handwave away all complications and consequences - and he freezes up. He wants to. But it's so scary. But he wants to. But he thinks it might kill him.

She might be a teenager, he might be almost two decades removed from that, but right now, about this, about everything...

He doesn't feel a day older than she is.

Actually maybe like she has a few on him.

That night, wandering - alone - out of the slightly less terrible bar on Main Street, he gets a text.

11 tomorrow night, oak tree 1/2 mile past the farm
bring stuff to change into :)

He stands in the middle of the sidewalk for a moment, simply letting each word make its way into his eyes and wriggle down his optic nerve.

Really the only question is what stuff he'll bring.

Note: song is "In the Meantime" by Spacehog