Chapter 42: I want to wake up where you are
One in the morning when he gets to her, so it's October anyway. Has been for an hour.
He mulls on that as he walks down the road from where he parked the truck, finally wearing long sleeves in the cool night. He mulls on it as he makes his quiet way up her drive in the moonlight. It's just a day. It shouldn't really mean anything. But it does. He was with her through August, through September - Summer fling, maybe, and now he's sliding deeper into fall.
Summer flings don't survive the fall. He knows this old story well enough to know that. Summer flings aren't evergreens. They don't come out the other side of winter. The term for this, he supposes - he's heard it before - is May-December, and he's the December. He's the edge of the turn of the year. He won't make it to the new one.
He's aware that this is a pretty goddamn pessimistic line of thought. Maybe more pessimistic than is appropriate given what he knows, and even more, what he doesn't know. But Merle wasn't all wrong. He knows that too. Merle was wrong about a lot, but he thinks Merle was probably still batting over .500 there. He doesn't think Beth is using him, even benignly. She's not like that. No artifice. No pretense. She's true and she's honest, and most of all he suspects she's honest with herself. She wouldn't lie. She wouldn't do that to him.
That doesn't mean this isn't an old story, and it doesn't mean it doesn't have a pretty clear and well-established end. Wouldn't be her fault. It would just be.
He'll love her no matter what. Love her and never blame her.
The house is dark and silent, its eaves cast in silver. The trellis is pale bone patchwork. He takes hold of it, feeling very much like he's slipped back into a dream, and makes his slow, careful way up, distributing his weight as evenly as he can, listening for creaks or any other indications of strain. There aren't any. He reaches the top - dark window, blinds half closed - and taps.
A second or two and the window opens, and she leans out, her hair silver too, face marble, and he thinks yet again about that night by the swimming hole, and the night in the field under the stars, listening to her play her guitar, wanting her so bad it burned in his veins.
It burns again now.
"C'mon," she whispers, and steps back, and he reaches up and grips the sill, lifts himself through and inside.
He's seen her room in the day. He's seen it at night, in the soft light of her lamp. Now it's all moonlight and she's standing in front of him wearing a thin camisole that looks like it might be powder blue if there was any color to speak of, and long pajama pants - soft but not fuzzy. She seems very small. Her cheek is unbandaged now and the stitched line across it stands out sharp.
He wants to stroke a thumb over it, so carefully. He wants to gather her into his arms and just hold onto her, feel how alive she is. That's all he wants.
Except not. This is all he wants. Just standing in close proximity to her. In roughly the same space.
"Hi," she murmurs, and he nods. And she reaches out to him, touches his hand. "C'mere."
He goes with her to her bed. She lowers herself to its edge, swings her legs up - a little gingerly, he thinks, like she's still sore - and brings her knees to her chest and hugs them, her uninjured cheek leaning on one and her loose hair falling across her neck, looking at him sideways. She doesn't turn on the light, and her face is half shadow.
"Sit down?"
He does, turned, looking back at her.
God, this hurts. It's always going to hurt.
"Your lip," she whispers, and he ducks his head. He forgot. It doesn't really ache anymore and he hasn't looked in a mirror in a while.
"Yeah."
"Are you alright?"
He shrugs. I'unno.
The correct answer is not really.
"Like I said. I wanna talk." She pulls in a slow breath. "Look, about... what happened. What I saw."
Here it comes. He ducks his head lower, closes his eyes against it.
"That was your brother?"
He nods.
"On the floor... That was drugs. Wasn't it."
He nods again. His hands are boneless in his lap. He doesn't know what else to do with them.
"I don't understand it," she says, very quiet. "Not all of it. Daryl... I want to. I don't wanna just... assume somethin' if I don't know. I wanna understand. Can you help me? Can you help me do that?"
It's not what he expected.
What did he expect? Maybe some version of the Friend Talk. That she just can't deal with it - that when he was just a drifter that was one thing, when he was just a drifter exactly twice her age it was something else but still okay, but him and his brother beating the shit out of each other with drugs all over the floor of their unbelievably shitty apartment, well, that's just a little more than she can handle. Sorry and everything, it was fun, it really actually meant a lot at the time, but she's... She's barely eighteen, and she has her whole life ahead of her, and this isn't how she wants to spend the next few months of it.
All right. That's fair. He was all ready to nod and be understanding - because he does understand it, he understands it perfectly - and he was ready to agree and then slowly, like he was thinking before, consider some gentle exit strategies for the sake of them both.
But she says that instead. And there was the note.
This, too, was a gift.
That hadn't felt like rejection. Not at the time. He had been so tired, out of his mind with tired, and later he hadn't been sure, but at the time?
At the time it felt like anything but rejection.
A box full of darkness. And a gift.
He has to say something. He takes a huge breath, lets it out slowly. Another one. She waits in silence: boundless mercy, boundless patience.
He can't hope to ever deserve her.
"He's my brother," he says, so quiet he can barely hear himself. "Two years ago he... he got outta prison and I picked him up, he skipped parole, we went runnin'..."
And then he finds himself telling her everything, everything, starting very slow and very halting but gradually picking up speed as he goes, like he's rolling downhill, or it's water behind a dam and the dam is cracking and cracking, more and more water spouting free, until finally the whole thing bursts and floods. Halfway through, one year in, he couldn't stop even if he wanted to, and he thinks about the woman in the truck and how he felt like he needed to tell someone about Beth, needed to because he didn't have anyone else, and not even that was as easy as this is becoming.
She's listening, he can tell she's just listening there behind and beside him, and he's not afraid because she's not judging him, because she's never judged him. Even if she wants to end it after this she still won't be judging him, and he loves her so much he wants to bury his face in her neck and sob.
He tells her right up until they came to town, this town that dragged him in and trapped him, and then he starts working backward again, swinging back around to the beginning. And this is where he folds in on himself a little and he doesn't look at her, can't look at her; he looks out the window - blinds still open after he came in - and he watches the moon, and he thinks he can see it moving across the sky, rising. Not quite full, but on the way. Another few days. Months and weeks and years - and he slips back to the bad days, the worst days, though there's a lot there he doesn't tell her, a lot he leaves incomplete, and a lot he says only in the spaces between the words, leaving the holes there for her to dig through if she wants, because he can't.
There are some things he doesn't have words for.
This is an old story, but it doesn't begin with her. It doesn't even have a beginning. Stories like this never do. Nor do they really have an end. They circle around and around forever, and he goes back as far as he can, as far as his memory extends, and he tries to tell her about learning fear before he learned anything else, about love as thin as watery blood, and about needing the latter and having too much of the former, and not knowing how to say what he wants, and then learning that he shouldn't want it at all. That what he has is all he deserves.
He tries to tell her about loneliness and terror and pain, about how there was so much of the last that what he eventually learned was to take himself away from his body when it got bad, look at this thing made of meat and blood and bone from the outside, detached, even hating it a little because look at what's being done to it. Hating it because it's weak and broken and not good for very much. Hating it because he's being taught that he should.
Coming back into it but never really feeling like it's his. It's not for anything but work and transportation. He feeds it, he washes it, he makes sure it functions. It's meat. That's all it is. Even tattooed, even trying to find a way back into it with an image and a needle, it's still just meat.
Losing that and then losing everything. His mother. His brother. Being left alone with this monstrous man, watching every idea he ever had about a future for himself torn apart and thrown into the trash. Too stupid for school. Too much of a loser for a real job. No point in learning how to do much of anything except what his father cared to teach him. The tiny little pleasures he kept close, kept secret, eventually discovered and destroyed, or twisted into something he didn't want. He liked animals; it was never safe to have a pet. He liked reading; books were for fags and pussies. He liked being out in the woods with the trees and the quiet and everything growing and alive; good, he could learn to kill things, because what the fuck else were the woods for?
He's just some redneck asshole. He's nobody. He's nothing.
Beaten down to a tiny shred of that nothing, and then his brother, getting his brother back, everything supposed to be good again, only then two years of the same shit except now he's the one holding it together, holding everything together, he's taking care of his big brother who he loved - worshipped - for so long, and he's so tired and so sad and so scared, and he just wants to be done.
He just wants to be done with all of it.
So that's what she saw that day. That's what she saw.
In terms of literal words, he tells her almost none of that. But it's there. It's there, and he thinks she's perceptive enough and wise enough to get at least some of it. Even if most of it lodges itself in his throat and won't come any further.
And there's one more thing he doesn't say.
He wants to. For a few seconds he tries. But though Merle said the words aloud and though he knows them - has been thinking them over and over for four days now and in truth he's been thinking them over and over for a lot longer than that - he can't. He doesn't know how.
No one ever taught him how.
At last he's silent. The moon is high. She's still there; she hasn't moved, beside and behind him, and he can practically feel her thinking, and she doesn't judge him and she never will, but he feels like he's waiting for her to pass some kind of sentence on him.
And she wraps her arms around his waist and leans her head against his back, right between his shoulderblades, right where she did the night he showed her what his shirt conceals.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "Daryl... I'm so sorry."
No. No, he was supposed to say that. It was supposed to be him.
Nothing is going the way he thought it would.
That keeps happening, with her.
He doesn't cry. Not this time. But he lowers his head and breathes, everything in him going loose and heavy, and lets it all flow out and away from him, passing through the dark and then through rivers of moonlight to a great and unseen ocean.
"Stay," she says, and it startles him. When he was talking he lost track of the time; with her holding him like this he lost track of it again. He looks up and the moon doesn't seem to have moved, at least not much. It takes him another few seconds to process what she's said, the word, and then he's not sure. Not sure about that.
Isn't that dangerous?
He gently pulls free from her, turns to look at her. He can see enough of her face to make out her expression, and it's...
He never has words for her. He just never does. She defies them. She won't be contained by them.
She pushes up onto her knees and lays her cool, smooth little hands against the sides of his face, frames him, and tips her forehead against his. "Just 'til I fall asleep. Alright? Will you?"
Anything she wants. Anything. He nods. She holds onto him, leans in and kisses him, and when he moans against her mouth he sounds pained, because he is.
But it's a good kind of pain.
She lies down, pulls the sheet up over her, and he lines himself up along her back like he did that first night he came to her like this, but this time it's different. He feels hollowed out, but not like something's been taken away from him. He feels scrubbed and scraped clean, ready to be filled up with something new.
She settles back against his chest and he curls an arm around her, and then - because he senses it's okay - he slips his hand under her camisole and up to cup her breast, and she sighs and presses into his palm.
For now he doesn't feel a surge of heat for her, though it's there, burning low. She's warm and he's warm with her, and as he feels her body relaxing and her breathing going slower and deeper, he thinks about how it might be if he could stay like this, if he could stay all night with her, fall asleep with her and wake up and not have to leave her.
That would be a good thing. That might be the best thing. The best thing he can imagine.
But he does have to leave her.
So he does.