Chapter 53: were you ever so bright and sweet

Once upon a time, many years ago in a life that every day seems to have less and less to do with this one in which he's found himself, Daryl thought all the time about doing something like this.

Not a little boy's impractical conception of running away from home. For him it never felt like a home to run away from, and anyway, where would he run to? What was out there? Then Merle left and rather than inspiring him it just made the rest of the world feel less attainable, less real. Made him feel caged. Chained to what was happening to him, as it got worse and worse and worse. Merle got away. Daryl wasn't strong enough for that.

And if he didn't make it, if he didn't actually get out, if he got hauled back, everything would just get worse still - because yes, that was possible and he knew it. It wouldn't even be about punishment. It would be about reminding. He wouldn't be allowed to forget his place. Who and what he was.

But he did think about it. About this. It was a tiny secret rebellion. Lying awake at night on his groaning mattress, wrapped in dirty sheets, hurting and tear-streaked and trying to find his way back into his own body, he would stare up at the ceiling or out his single dingy window at the night and he would think about somehow being in a car, in a truck... on the back of a motorbike. How maybe Merle might come back and take him away, at least for a while. How they would just drive and drive, down dark roads with no people and no light but the moon, the stars - or sometimes a brilliant sun - and they wouldn't have anywhere to go. Nowhere to be. They would simply drive, ride the road like an asphalt horse all black and faintly sparkling, and it would be perfect. Better than perfect: it would be okay. For a little bit of time he would slide into another universe and he would be free.

Long before a certain life-ruining girl, these were his most intense and most abiding fantasies.

Then - of course - he got them in the flesh, in the solid real. He got what he wanted. He got two years of it. And it was horrible.

But the last few weeks have been one long process of reeducation. His fantasies, his dreams... He can have them. Maybe.

And they might be better than he ever dared to imagine.

They're driving. Just driving. Her hand is out the window again, rising and falling in those lovely arcs made even lovelier by the fact that it's her hand, small and slender, and the honey-colored afternoon sun is spilling itself out past him and onto her hair, bathing them both but naturally giving her more attention, attracted to her. Like to like. Her head is tilted back just a bit and her throat is pulled into a graceful line, a flow straight down to her collarbones and the swells of her breasts beneath her neckline. She's ditched the cardigan - it's warm in the sun even with the breeze - and she's all long limbs, a thing made to run. Made for speed.

Out of nowhere he imagines her on a bike. On the back of one. The back of his. Arms wrapped around his middle, hair streaming in the sunset like rocket flame. They could ride.

Strange. But he's aware that if he has that fantasy now...

Goddamn, it might just fucking happen. Might actually do so.

They're driving and he feels like they're outrunning everything, like - and God, he knows this is so untrue and in the background it's sort of killing him - he might also get that part of his fantasy, the part where they just keep going and they never stop. Because he thinks he might be happy with that. Definitely could be happy with just her. The only thing at all his, and she isn't. She isn't his.

But for a while she might let him pretend that's how it is.

Later he'll realize that in this fantasy, Merle might as well not exist.

But that's later. This is a glorious Now that stretches out and out, and he does love this country, does like being here, and he loves her so much it feels like his heart is exploding out through his breastbone, making a firework of itself. Rumbling down a road on which they still haven't seen any other cars, any other people - just fields and occasionally cows, bird on the wheel overhead, murmurations of starlings and exaltations of larks.

They're moving too. Everything is Now, but the cold and the dark is coming.

But not here. Apropos of nothing she cranks the volume again and grins at him and sings along, and he wishes Dan Wilson would be quiet so he could hear her better.

all alone on the overpass
wired and phoned to a heart of glass
now I'm falling in love too fast
with you or the songs you chose

and all the stars, play for me
say the promise you long to keep

I can hear you sing it to me in my sleep
I can hear you sing it to me in my sleep

Being in love is the most utterly ridiculous thing anyone was ever stupid enough to do. It's not a smart move. It's a questionable decision at best.

Sweet blessed Jesus Christ, it's the best fucking thing he's ever done.

"Daryl!"

She grabs his arm tight, and her voice is bright and delighted and close to laughing - her face as well when he jerks his head around to her. She's pointing out the window. "Oh my God, Daryl, we have to go there."

For a moment he peers out her window and at the landscape along her side of the truck, and he can't see what she's so excited about.

Then he does, and well. Yeah.

They pretty much have to.

It's very big.

Beth stands right under it - in its shadow - and stares up, her head craned, mouth hanging open. Daryl's torn between looking at her and looking at what's looming over them, because both are honestly pretty great.

"It's really somethin'." She sounds even more delighted than she did in the car. She sounds thrilled.

Daryl isn't sure he shares quite that level of enthusiasm, but he can't deny that it's the largest fiberglass Tyrannosaurus Rex he's ever seen. Probably will ever see. It has to be at least twenty five feet tall, painted all over in swoopingly abstract rainbow hues with a wide mouth and white teeth that give it the appearance of wearing a mildly crazed grin, and with the lowering sun gleaming off its flank...

He wouldn't call it majestic. But it's definitely something.

About thirty yards away across a dusty patch of packed dirt is an ancient picnic table and a sad-looking ice cream stand manned by - Daryl guesses - the guy who built the thing. Daryl kind of wants to ask him what he was thinking. Not in a disparaging sense; Daryl has made worse life choices. But he still wants to know.

There's no sign by the side of the road announcing it, either. Nothing naming it or identifying it as any particular attraction. It's weird. The T-Rex would be weird enough, but even so. It's just sitting here surrounded by more cornfields, like it fell out of the sky.

Beth has started walking around it, still gazing upward, one hand out and fingertips gliding along its immense hind leg. She's painfully beautiful standing under a fiberglass dinosaur. She's painfully beautiful no matter where she is. He watches her and he happily soaks in the pain.

"You gonna climb it or somethin'?"

She tosses a brilliant smile over her shoulder. "I'm gonna take it home. How much money you got?"

"You're gonna have to pick this thing or ice cream."

"Shut up, I got money too." She hops nimbly over the tail and he thinks about moonlit puddles, the taste of her lip gloss. "It'll fit in the back, right?"

"Room to spare."

"Yeah, speakin' of, I don't think it would fit in my room. And I dunno if Daddy would want it on the lawn." She comes back to him, mouth downturned, regretful. "Guess not. How about ice cream?"

They get ice cream. The stand is indeed sad-looking, slightly crooked at every angle, the pictures of the available fare peeling and faded, but they're allowed to sample and the ice cream itself is good, and she gets them both chocolate cones with rainbow sprinkles. They're about to turn away when Daryl gives into his curiosity, because for all he knows they'll never come back here again.

And he's pretty sure that paying attention - as an approach to life in general - means going ahead and asking questions. At least sometimes.

"So, uh." He jerks his head in the direction of the T-Rex. "Gotta ask... Why did you-"

The man - small, balding, wearing a stunningly green Hawaiian shirt decorated with pineapples and toucans - arches a brow. "I need a reason?"

"No," Beth says, beaming and tugging at Daryl's arm. "You sure don't."

Daryl supposes he doesn't. No one should need a reason to do something like that. Looking at it, towering and grinning and aggressive in terms of its very existence, he thinks that aggressive existence is reason enough. It doesn't need to justify itself by anything other than that it's here. The world needs shit like this.

Ice cream also.

He drops the tailgate and they sit on it side by side, looking out at the fields and the patches of trees, a couple of distant farmhouses and barns, and go to work on the cones. The sun is very low now and the day is cooling off, the air gentle. Pleasant. Ice cream season is almost done - it's a little surprising the stand is even open, though surprising is probably par for the course with the guy - and it feels like they've grabbed for and caught another final shard of summer.

Watching her lick melted ice cream off her knuckles. Jesus.

"You really didn't know about this place?"

"Never been out this way." She nods to the short packed dirt drive and the lack of a sign. "Does it look like he advertises? Aside from the actual thing, I mean."

On a whim he pinches her side, and she swats at him and squeaks a laugh.

"What else's out here you don't know about?"

"I dunno." Her smile softens, and once again it takes on that quality of secrecy. Wisely childlike solemnity behind it. "We should find out."

They should. They really should. He wants to - go exploring with her, go anywhere, take that small whim that made him pinch her and blow it up large, fly it like a flag. But this isn't a fantasy. Not actually. And the sun is going down, sky streaking gold and red, and it's a long way back to town. "I gotta get you home."

"I know." She leans against him, biting into her cone and crunching a hefty piece of it off. "But some other time."

"Yeah." He'd like that. He'd like that a great deal. Because fucking her was so good, fucking her was everything he wanted and so much more, his hands on her, the taste of her skin, her mouth, the sounds she made as she bucked against him, but there's also this: sitting with her and talking and sucking sticky chocolate off his thumb, looking at an enormous fucking rainbow dinosaur, and it's just as good. Every bit.

She wanted to be friends. They are.

"There will be some other time," she murmurs, and it sounds just as much like a question than a statement. He turns his head, watches her for any indication of something more, but she just crunches down the last of her cone and keeps her attention fixed on the T-Rex, not looking at him at all.

"I mean... Yeah. Why wouldn't there be?"

"You're talkin' about gettin' a different apartment. Better. So you're... You're stickin' around?" She hesitates, hand halfway to her mouth, and glances at him. "'cause I bet Daddy would keep you on. There's still stuff to do over winter. Not really so much, but... He likes you."

"Enough to keep payin' me even if he don't need me?"

"He would. Otis used to work for him, stayed on all year round. Lived in the house for a while, 'til he got married and bought his own place."

For a moment he says nothing. Big scary future - he hadn't thought this far ahead. Not in detail. It seems like he does that: he gets as far as wanting, as far as allowing himself to want, making some plans and throwing some money at them... But nothing more. Nothing with any specificity. He might just still not know how. He's new to this. He picks things up fast, but this might be something else.

Stick around.

He can't imagine not sticking around. If it's possible.

And she wants him to.

"Yeah," he says softly. "Yeah, I mean... I could."

"You kinda have to." She leans against him more fully, and - because he can, because she'll let him and because it feels so right - he slides an arm around her shoulders and leans his cheek on the crown of her head.

Her clean, fresh scent. The world full of her.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I'm the boss." Smile in her voice, tiny but warm. "And I love you. So there's that."

He can't argue. He wouldn't dream of doing so. He squeezes her, presses his lips to her temple and closes his eyes into the setting sun. Love you, girl.

He gets her back to the Target shortly after dark. She's going to meet some friends, get some dinner before she heads home. But she doesn't let him go; she turns and frames his face, tugs him in, nudges his lips open with hers and kisses him - his mouth and jaw and the top of his throat - until his joints are loose and shaky and he's so hard he aches against his zipper.

She pulls back, wicked little grin. "Sorry," she murmurs, reaches between his legs and kneads him, and breathes a laugh when he grits his teeth and shudders. "Didn't mean to."

Another flash of that grin, a quick kiss on his cheek, and she hops out of the cab and walks away toward the front of the building, not looking back. Leaving him there diamond-hard and no one to take care of it but himself.

GIRL.

Note: song is "Singing in My Sleep" by Semisonic