Chapter 56: what if our love is the cost

He lies there for a while, waiting - patiently - to be able to do anything again. He can think, sort of, but he doesn't have to, so mostly he leaves that project alone. But he can see, and the moon has traveled a little way from zenith, and he's able to scrape together enough cognition to be aware that they can't stay here too much longer.

And they haven't even been swimming.

His laugh is hardly more than a trembling breath, but it feels good.

"What?" She lifts her head from where she pillowed it against his chest; he doesn't remember her draping herself over him with any real clarity but apparently it happened, and she's warm and tucked so perfectly against his side.

"Nothin'." He has no idea how to explain it. The part of his brain in charge of words is still mostly out of order and he's thinking in sensations, scents, his thumb stroking over the angle of her shoulderblade, her weight and the tickle of her hair against his nose, her breath on his skin and her fingertips sketching idle shapes over his collarbones. "I just..."

She smirks at him. "Did I break you?"

"Yeah." He nods and smiles at the sky. In a low-key kind of way he almost feels giddy. "You did."

That's exactly what she did.

Again.

Silence for a while, comfortable, just their slow breathing and the mutter of the frogs, an owl calling somewhere in the distance. He's still returning, floating back into himself - except he didn't go anywhere. He went deep, folded in and curled around his own core, was fully present, fully there. It was always pain and fear that made him leave, turned his body into a place in which no one in their right mind would want to remain.

She guides him back.

He thinks maybe he's been waiting for someone to show him the way for over thirty years.

"Daryl?"

"Mm?"

"Can I ask you somethin'?"

He sighs, turns and presses his lips to the top of her head. Her hair is loose but her braid is still in place, and once again - like he loves, like he can't seem to stop doing - he's tracing its curves, weaving in and out, and ghosting before his eyes is the image of her hand in the wind and its smooth dolphin arcs. "Yeah, you can."

She lays her mouth briefly against his skin, less than an inch from his nipple, and it does something to the nerves there and he shivers a little. "Why didn't you want me to? At first, like that?"

Why.

The muscles at the top of his chest clench, close up in a way that reminds him of crying without bearing much real resemblance. There was no way she wasn't going to ask this, and he isn't surprised, but that doesn't in any way make it easier. Neither does knowing at least most of the reason. There's knowing and then there's telling, and maybe the latter is becoming something he can approach without so much stumbling, but she can't open all his doors and she can't clear all his tunnels. There are blocks and places too narrow to get through. There are a lot of old cave-ins in the less well-traveled parts of his mind.

But she makes him want so much to try.

"I didn't..." He trails off, and frustration twists that clench higher. "There's... I thought maybe you'd..." The memories, what they did to him, still do, how they twisted him up, and how they made him look at her and look at himself and at this and how he hated that, and it's just not coming. He shakes his head, jaw tight, and she reaches up and lays her fingers against his mouth.

Kind girl.

"You don't have to tell me," she says softly. "I just... You liked it?"

"Beth, I." He wants to laugh again. He can think of no possible way to adequately answer that question. Utterly inadequate will have to do. "Yeah. I did."

He feels her smile, and can also feel somehow in its curve that she's deeply pleased. "I was... I mean, I never did it, I was thinkin' maybe-"

No way is he letting her get any further along that line of thought. At least not aloud. Not after everything she's done, everything they've done, the way she can lift and carry him with a brush of her lips. "Beth, it was fuckin' amazin'."

And he hesitates - he can't help feeling like this is a far more awkward question than any she could ask right now but he needs to know anyway - and lifts his head a little, trying to focus on her face. She raises hers just as he does, and her eyes are large and dark.

He already knows the answer.

"Did you? Like it?"

She breathes a laugh and pushes herself up a bit further, turning to rest her chin on her hand. "Yeah, I did." She pauses, her other hand moving over his chest again, returning to his nipple and traveling in lazy circles. Another shiver runs through him and with a faint pulse of heat he wonders whether it might feel good if she did even more than that. Maybe sometime. "You know it's this thing people talk about."

He shakes his head. He knows how the people he's spent way too much of his life with talk about it, but he's reasonably certain that's not what she means. "No, I don't."

"Oh." She laughs again, sounding the tiniest bit embarrassed. "Yeah. You're not exactly goin' to my school or anythin'. I mean, it's like..." She tilts her head and the moon casts her half in milky light, and she looks thoughtful. "We're not supposed to. Good girls," her mouth twists, "don't do it. But there's also this thing where boys are always gonna want it. Eventually. So you have to, or..."

She lets that sentence remain incomplete, all it's uncomfortable implications plain, and gazes at him in silence for a few seconds. He slides an arm behind his head, lifting himself enough to see her better. His fingers are still working through her hair, easy and careless, and maybe their time is limited but he feels no need to rush things. The idea of rushing is somehow blasphemous.

They're in that tangent universe. All their time is their own to spend. And if that's an illusion he'll make himself believe it for now.

"So I thought it was kinda weird," she continues, soft - gentle, even, like her hand on him. Soothing. She so clearly doesn't want to upset him, and this time that clench in his throat is there for an entirely different reason."Y'know, when you didn't want it. Not right away."

He gives her a small smile, and it takes no effort. "I'm kinda weird, girl."

"Yeah. Me too." She leans her cheek on her hand, eyes half closed and face relaxed. She looks happy, he realizes, happy just to be right where she is, and he feels every part of him warming. Once more the ungoodness he felt when he was waiting for her seems like it was gnawing at someone else. "And I liked it. A lot." Her smile turns dreamy, but even in the moonlight he catches the flush darkening her cheeks. When she speaks again her voice is even softer, like she's afraid she might be overheard.

Shy. It plucks at him, trembling him like a string. She's found another thing that makes her shy.

"I liked... I liked swallowin'. Swallowin' you."

If an electric shock could be slow, striking him between the ears and rolling bright and hot down his spine. If it could, and it can, because it's what he's feeling. She liked that. Likes it.

Taking him in.

"Girl," he whispers, and he has no idea what else to say.

"I love you." She strokes her fingers down his cheekbone to his mouth, traces the seam of his lips and stops against the split, pressing lightly. As if she intends to punctuate this statement. "Daryl, I love all of you."

He can say it now. He can say it back to her. He found it, and when he did it turned out it was really very easy. It was just a question of getting out of his own goddamn way. But there are still times where his heart crowds against the bottom of his throat, everything trying to escape all at once, and nothing gets through.

So he looks at her, lying against him in the warmth of this part of the night they've stolen for themselves, and he knows he doesn't have to say anything at all.

They came - ostensibly - to swim, so they do.

They don't have a lot of time and now that fact is inescapable; she's supposed to meet a couple of friends, sleep over, and that's really not something she can risk missing. But she checks her phone and they have half an hour or so, so she drops it back into the pile of her clothes and turns, shoots him a gleeful little smile, and takes off past him and down toward the pond.

Like she claimed, she's fast, her strides long and full of her strange awkward grace, but his strides are longer and he catches her just as she reaches the narrow strand of grainy bank and hauls her into his arms, tosses her into the deeper water as if she weighed nothing. She shrieks as she hits in a shower of broken moonlight and comes up spluttering, shoving her hair back from her face and - he's sure - planning elaborate revenge, but he's already in with her, plunging beneath her and looking for greater depth.

And this isn't like before. This isn't some kind of unplanned, unformed ritual. This isn't any kind of baring of his soul. He was stripped here once already and he's been stripped again, and now he's coming into this shriven, penance long since done. But there's still power here, and down in the wet dark he feels her fingertips against his and something turns over in him.

She's beside him when he breaks the surface, splashing into his eyes and laughing at him, roughening that laugh into a moan when he pulls her hard against him and kisses her, wet hands combing her hair back, mouth open on her cheek, her jaw, her brow, her fingers clutching at his shoulders and digging in when he licks the trickles of water off her neck.

They can't stay. But this is a warm night in October, an increasingly precious thing, and like she said, she doesn't want to waste the time. So he floats on his back and stares up at the pinprick brightening stars through those bowing branches, forgetting her just long enough for her to reach the rope swing, climb onto it and sail through the air, arcing pale and lovely like the dolphin of her hand and cannonballing into the water a foot away from him.

He got to see her dive. Sort of.

When they get back to the shore and start to towel off, he attacks her ribs with his fingers and makes her pay.

The drive out was silent and the drive back is the same, and as always the silence is a comfortable one.

Or it begins that way, and he suspects it stays that way for her - at least until he finally decides that he has to give in and say something. But for him every mile away from the swimming hole is one more returning knot to his gut, and the visit to their private world doesn't seem to have helped. If anything the knots are tighter, rising and winding around his ribs, shifting in time with the driving beat from the radio and the uncomfortably appropriate lyrics.

anyone perfect must be lying, anything easy has its cost
anyone plain can be lovely, anyone loved can be lost
what if I lost my direction, what if I lost sense of time
what if I nursed this infection, maybe the worst is behind

They're a couple of miles out of town, skyglow ahead burning away the dark, when it finally cracks him open.

"Can I ask you somethin'?"

She turns her face to him, and it seems like she's coming back from somewhere. She had been gazing out the window, head leaned back and her hair unbound and flying around her face, drying in the breeze. Maybe it had lulled her. Maybe it had been something else. But she blinks, immediately focused, and nods with a warm little smile that makes him feel like a piece of shit, because he doesn't know that she's going to be smiling in a few more seconds. He thinks he might be about to slap that smile right off her.

"Guess it's only fair."

He swallows, and for the span of a couple of breaths he almost pulls over. He's not sure he wants to be driving when he asks this. He's still not sure he wants to ask it at all.

This became such an elevated level of scary because he spent so long not looking at it. That's how monsters feed themselves.

On being ignored, and on life being stupid enough to get good.

Just fucking do it, you fucking coward.

"What happens if they find out?"

The question hangs in air suddenly gone still, in spite of the rush of motion all around them. The interior of the cab has become a kind of enclosed chamber in which the thing is just sitting, and he can actually imagine it glowering at them like a malevolent little imp. He can feel her staring at it, circling it, turning it over in her hands and analyzing it, and he almost clarifies with your family, except that would be ridiculously unnecessary.

She knows perfectly well what he's asking.

She might even know why.

"I dunno," she says finally - slowly, her face turned forward, watching the road coasting past beneath the pool of the headlights. He can't completely see her expression, but he's also not completely trying. There's still a degree of avoidance going on here even now. "I... I dunno." Her voice is difficult to read, and she lets out a small, tight laugh. "I mean, it wouldn't be good."

He echoes her laugh, just as tight. He feels tight. Those knots have multiplied and worked their way into every single one of his muscles. "Yeah, I kinda figured."

"They like you." Soft, and thoughtful, and he's not convinced she's not speaking half to herself, working through this as she talks. Though she has to have thought about this before now. She was the one who said no one could know. "They like you a lot. Especially after you got me outta the water like you did. But they..." She shakes her head, and when he glances at her and catches a glimpse of her face, weirdly lit by the dashboard's glow, he sees the same tightness that he heard in her laughter and he would give almost anything to take the question back. "Not that much. I don't think. And you're..."

"I'm twice your fuckin' age, girl."

There's something almost cruel about how he says it, words bitter and sharp on his tongue. It's the first time either one of them has actually said it, said it like that - not you're older or you're younger but exactly the numerical ratio they're talking about, with all the unsavory implications inherent in its bluntness.

It hasn't mattered with her. He didn't even know what twice your age really meant except as an abstract concept and a collection of potential social consequences. His own internal sense of his age has never been all that coherent. Looking back, he doesn't think he's ever felt his own years, his own time. He's always been in a kind of temporal drift, and now he's realizing that even if it hasn't mattered with her...

She changed it. Changed him. She said he didn't act his age, and it took him a while to understand what she meant by that, but he gets it now.

He was adrift and she moored him.

He feels it.

She's silent, a heavy silence, and he's suddenly terrified that he's hurt her, terrified of looking at her and seeing it on her face, ice twisting itself around his spine and panic spiking into him, but when she finally speaks again she doesn't sound hurt. She doesn't sound angry.

She's quiet. And a little sad.

"Yeah. You are."

His jaw is so tight his teeth ache, his tongue thick and useless behind them. But he's trying to cobble something together, maybe some variant of I'm sorry, when she cuts off his chance.

"That's why. You know that." She turns back to him and the sadness in her voice is in her eyes, the curve of her mouth, and it pierces him, slides cold between his ribs like a knife. "Daddy would be the worst. I don't think any of them would... Maybe Mama." Mama. Yes, maybe. "But you know what they would think. It was all you. It wasn't me." She smiles at him, and it's a pained smile. "Kind of an old story, isn't it?"

He nods. Yes. Yes, it is.

He really hoped this was a different one, though.

"I wouldn't be able to see you again."

Not a question. She pulls in a slow breath and rakes a hand through her hair. Through drying and wind her braid remains intact, stubbornly beautiful thing. "They'd sure as hell try to stop you. Daryl..." She angles her body toward him and reaches for him, laying a hand over his leg - lightly, almost cautiously, as if she's expecting to have to suddenly withdraw it.

As if he might bite her.

"Why're you askin' about this now?"

She asked him why he didn't want her to suck his cock - or at least why he was reluctant - and he hadn't been able to answer her. For a moment he expects the same to be true now, the same blockage in his head - knowing failing to translate into telling - but that's not what happens. The words are there. They don't cover all the ground, don't fully reveal the fine details of this particular issue, but they don't need to do those things. She's not stupid. She'll get it.

"'cause now it's real."

"Oh," she whispers.

And says nothing else.

Not that he fucked her. Not that she fucked him, that she rode him in the grass and practically flung herself into his lap in the truck. That one act was never the all of it. He was inside her before that; he's been inside her for so long, and she made a home in the marrow of his bones a week after he first tasted her mouth, first heard her sing.

But he said it. She said it. They came to the edge of the water and they joined hands, threaded fingers, and they jumped.

I love you.

"I don't..." Again he considers pulling over, but he can't seem to get his foot to the brake. He's locked into motion. He should look at her when he says this; she's looking at him. She's looking right the fuck at him, her face a pale half moon, and there's nothing she doesn't see.

He shudders. Everything, all that hot sharp everything, pounding against the inside of his skin.

"I dunno if I can lose this."

She doesn't move.

Then she does, lifting her hand from his leg and laying it against his cheek, and there's the thing about how with a touch like that she can utterly undo him, and he shouldn't be fucking driving because all he wants to do is turn to her and go to her and hide his face in the warm shelter of her throat.

"You won't," she whispers. And he squeezes his eyes shut and he nods.

Later, alone in the dark and completely abandoned by sleep, he thinks it's the first thing she's ever said to him that feels like it might be a lie.

Note: song is "Falling For the First Time" by Barenaked Ladies