Chapter 59: if it's real it stains your hands like wine

Monday is grayer, colder. Hershel is indeed talking in a vague and vaguely suggestive kind of way about winter, about the things that need to be done right now to prepare for it and the things that will need to be done during the months that will follow. There's more maintenance that needs doing on the equipment they'll only just have finished using. There's trees to be cleared and hauled. There's hay to be baled. There are a hundred tiny things that add up to a lot of time, more time than one would think. His vague suggestiveness doesn't sound entirely conscious, and Daryl thinks it's possible that Hershel is working through the idea of keeping Daryl on rather than subtly suggesting something already worked through.

So he's quiet and lets Hershel talk, and he does his work, and he brings the harvester in and helps Shawn with the milking, and he can't quite keep his eyes off the sky.

For reasons unclear to him, he keeps thinking about snow.

melting flakes of snow
will catch you when you fall
baby, that's not all

He usually breaks for lunch outside - he likes the farmhouse but he can't imagine that he'll ever genuinely feel comfortable there - but it's chilly enough today that he makes the first of what he imagines will be a series of exceptions so long and consistent that they'll become the rule and eats at the breakfast table in the kitchen. Annette is putting together a marinade for the roast she'll be making for dinner; she makes small talk and thankfully doesn't appear to mind when most of the talk in question is on her end. She knows him by now.

Well. She sort of doesn't.

Daddy would be the worst. I don't think any of them would... Maybe Mama.

Except no. Because maybe Hershel would be the worst in terms of a reaction, but he thinks about Annette finding out and looking at him like she might do, like he imagines she would - with shock, with anger, with betrayal, with disgust - and he can't take it.

That would be the actual worst.

It's not even Halloween yet but Annette is talking in an idle kind of way about Thanksgiving, about Maggie coming home, about the boy she'll apparently be bringing with her, and Annette seems both excited and apprehensive about meeting this boy. The latter is subtle and Daryl is halfway through his sandwich before he really picks it out, but it's there, and after that he starts picking out some of the even subtler reasons why it's there.

She doesn't really know anything about this boy. Maggie had a rough time right around when Hershel remarried and they're still a bit concerned about her even if it's not completely fair. They love - Annette loves especially - the idea of their daughters getting married and having kids and her and Hershel getting to be grandparents because who wouldn't want that, but you always worry. You want the best for your children. You want them to do well. You watch them growing up, you learn bit by bit that you're losing control, and that's terrifying.

Annette wants this to be a nice boy, and she wants to like him and she wants him to like them, and she wants this to turn out to be what she wants for a girl who really is, as far as she's concerned, her daughter.

She actually says very little of this. Daryl pieces it together from what he's picked up previously, from the unspoken sides of the words Annette is using, and from the drawing of his own conclusions.

If it turns out this isn't a nice boy, the whole thing is just going to be very, very awkward with no real avenues of escape.

And Hershel is such a sweet man, but he can be so bullheaded about things. He gets fixed on a idea or an attitude and he won't be budged from it.

No matter what.

The small talk isn't so small. Annette apologizes. Daryl gives her a tiny smile that he almost means and finishes his lunch in silence.

He hears her voice and the gentle, rhythmic strumming before he sees her. Then he steps out onto the porch and there she is, sitting on the steps with the guitar across her knee and a little notebook open next to her. As he stands for a few seconds, watching her - the way her hair falls from the root of her ponytail, the way her spine curves when she bends over to write something, the flash he gets of one leg stretched out in front of her - he actually hears what she's playing and singing, and it's not only unfamiliar but unformed. A lot of what she plays and sings is unfamiliar to him, but this is different.

This isn't yet a song.

She's making it right in front of him.

He thinks maybe she did this once before. In the field when they hopped the fence, when he first thought about fucking her under the stars, when she told him she wasn't ready but that she wanted to, she wanted him, and hearing that was almost as good as if he had. And of course it turned out that it was good to wait. Better than good.

That night she had her guitar and she played a song that wasn't quite a song, just a series of chords drifting up into the starry dark, and now he realizes - in a way he hadn't before - that this girl is a mockingbird but she doesn't just play covers. She knows the pieces of a song, gathers them in like a harvest, builds her own.

It's a silly, overly romantic way of viewing the process, and anyway it's not like he would even know, but to him it seems profoundly mystical.

She draws down the unseen moon.

When he steps forward a board creaks and she turns, pen in her hand, and smiles. Small smile, warm. He doesn't exactly smile back but he knows he doesn't have to.

She sees everything.

But for a few seconds he almost sits down next to her, almost lights a cigarette and just listens. Like he used to. Maybe says a few things. Maybe asks her about it. Casual, innocent, and he wouldn't sit too close, but he could still be there and enjoy the simple fact of her presence, look at her a little out of the corner of his eye, and it would be fine. Anyone who saw them, it would be fine. It would be nothing.

Except it wouldn't. And he's invaded by the feeling that if he did, a bright, burning line might form and extend from him to her, blaze and bend with the wind; they might become flaming Tesla coils, fingers of fire reaching for each other.

Kind of hard to miss that.

So he walks past her and down the steps into the grayness, all the color leached out of the world. But he hears her singing behind him, something that is fully formed, part of that thing she's creating now completely in that world. Part of it forever.

my cheeks burn red from your kisses
my blue heart shivers and misses
your brushstrokes, a masterpiece made in the rain
made to wash away

That night at dinner his hand brushes hers under the table and their fingers curl before he can stop it. They tangle. He thinks about legs, about tongues, about getting lost in her hair.

She doesn't blush - he checks - but her hand is scorching his. He imagines her leaving marks. It's almost unbearable. He clutches at her and he thinks This is out of control.

That isn't exactly a new development.

But looking around the table - Annette laughing at something Shawn's said, Hershel smiling slightly, and Beth with her own tiny, secret smile that no one else there will be able to decipher - he knows they have to find away to get it under control, and right fucking now. Because he can't lose this. And this is so much more complicated than he thought it would get and it's getting more and more complicated all the time. He was never supposed to like these people. He was never supposed to give a shit.

He was never supposed to rely on anyone for anything. Except Merle.

I dunno if I can lose this.

You won't.

He's completely and utterly certain that when she said that, she believed it. And maybe she can manipulate the universe. But he's also completely and utterly certain that there are limits to Beth Greene's power. There are things even she can't do. One of them is guarantee anything of the kind.

He wonders if she can lose it either.

He wonders just how dangerous this is getting.

In the dark, her voice in his ear. He's come to equate her voice with her hands, which makes these late-night conversations even harder, even more aching, everything she's doing to him without even touching him pounding inside his head, like his whole body has become a giant heart. He pours out everything he was keeping in all day, almost whimpers - it's painful to see her, just as painful as it was before she knew he loved her, before they started doing anything at all - and tells her how God, he wanted to fuck her, he wanted it so bad, just wanted to pin her against the barn wall, lift her against it and hitch her legs high on his hips, or bend her back on the porch steps and just take her. So this time she guides him, tells him what to do, and at first he confirms what she's saying and he describes some of it, how it feels - the heat and weight of his cock in his hand, the slick of his precome on his fingertips, the dense jolt when he squeezes himself and strokes - but at some point his words melt into moans and gasps, and he fucks his own hand while she whispers how much she wants it, how she can't wait until it's her he's fucking, until he's inside her and he's making her feel it, what she does to him, how she makes him wild for her. How she needs his hands on her, his mouth, his cock pumping into her, how bad she wants to make him come-

She says it and he does it, biting his lip to keep from crying her name. Settling for shouting it in his head. Beth, Beth, oh God.

Oh my God, I love you.

Her singing along with him, his favorite of any song he's heard from her. That song he's learning by heart.

He asks her the next afternoon, a few moments when they're walking side by side to the barn - her to brush the horses, him to repair another broken stall. It seems safe enough to talk. Also the sun has emerged from behind the clouds, deep late afternoon gold, and it's lighting her up like a beacon, and he can't really help being near her. Or he could, he really could, but he doesn't want to, and the intensity of the feeling almost translates to ability - or lack thereof.

A lot of lines have been and are becoming a good bit blurrier.

"What was that? The thing you were playin' before?"

"Oh." She glances at him, smiling a little, looking abruptly shy. "It's just somethin' I'm messin' around with. Got an idea, I wanted to see where it went." She pauses, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and the movement of her hand shakes the beaded bracelets around her wrist and flashes them green and gold. "It's not really anythin'."

"I liked it," he says, very quietly. What he doesn't like is her saying it's nothing, when it was so lovely it hurt him. "A lot. Didn't sound like nothin'."

"It's not done." She doesn't sound like she's arguing with him. He glances at her again and she looks pleased, her smile still faint but somehow uncontrolled. A bit helpless. "I'm gonna try to finish it. I was thinkin'... I was thinkin' maybe if I do, I'd play it at one of the open mic nights."

"You should." His turn to pause. They're near the barn now, near enough to hear the hollow, mournful sound as a gust of wind shoves itself against its side and presses fingers of air through the gaps in boards and slats. Patching up the barn is something else he's going to have to do.

A lot of things not done, and December fast oncoming.

The big scary future. So the question comes to him and he sees no reason to not ask it. It actually seems like it might be important to do so, like it might be something about her that, for reasons as yet mysterious, he needs to know.

"You think you wanna do that? Be a singer?"

"Like for a job?"

He nods.

"I dunno." She tips her face down, watching the pace of her boots. "It's hard. I mean, you don't make a lotta money. I think Daddy would really rather I did somethin' else. He's just..." She shrugs. "He wants me to be okay, y'know? He just has these ideas about what is and isn't okay and it's hard to talk him outta them. But Mama... Mama taught me piano. Mama got me singin' in the first place. Since I was tiny. Too little to even get what I was doin'." She smiles at the ground, as small and warm as any smile she's ever given him. "I think maybe she'd like it. At least some. I think maybe... She'd get it, anyway."

Nothing about that surprises him. Not about Hershel. Not about Annette. It's what he would have assumed, if he hadn't been told. How it would go.

He pulls open the barn door for her, watches as she enters. Watches how she moves, how the lines of her body shift as she walks. "Kinda never figured you for carin' all that much about money."

"I don't." She shoots him a wider smile over her shoulder. "Told you. I don't want perfect. I want real."

It shivers through him, sharp and hot, what they were doing the last time she told him that. Sense memory again. Every memory with her seems to be deep as instinct. She has access to parts of his brain that he didn't even know were there.

They both get to work. They're in adjacent stalls, separated by a wood divider. He kneels down and opens the toolbox, lays out what he needs, and begins to slip into the semi-trance of doing work that takes very little of his actual attention but makes soothing use of his hands. Beth is singing softly as she brushes down the mare - named Nellie, and he's heard her referred to as Nervous Nellie on account of her tendency to spook - and her voice drifts into his distant attention and fills it like a voice in a cave. It echoes, floats in the air - dust motes in a beam of sun. A song he knows he's heard her sing before.

she said she gave her heart to you
if it was precious why'd you lose it
but if it was golden it'd shine
if it's big it won't be hard to find

Her voice and the occasional steady drum of his hammering, the whisper of her brush and the wind through the roof, and he's so deep in it that he almost doesn't notice when she speaks, her voice low.

"Tell me what you'd do to me."

He freezes for half a second. Processes. Jerks his head up; he can't see her from where he's kneeling. She's quiet, and for half a second more he's almost certain he imagined it. But then he hears her voice again, so soft, even rougher.

"Right now. If you could. Tell me what you'd do."

He doesn't... This is new. This is new and it's smacked him in the side of the face, kneeling with his hammer poised over a nail, the inside of his head churning in rapid circles, spinning like a whirlwind full of scattered debris. In the debris is an answer, answers, words, but they keep slipping out of his grasp. He knows what he would do to her right now if he could. So many things. And they've done this before but that was over the phone and in the dark, a blank space to fill with heady images and sounds and everything that might slide under his hands and cover his fingers with wet slick, his tongue... And now she's right here, feet away from him, separated from him by a thin row of boards, and they're in the open, anyone could walk in, and just because he isn't actually doing those things to her...

"Please."

Just a breath. Breathless. Almost inaudible over the wind. His fingertips are tingling and he lays the hammer down in the straw, the nail protruding from the wood, and he sits back on his heels and lets out his own long breath. Emptying his lungs. Letting the deep burn of it slip all through him.

Fuck, he's already rock-hard. And he could handle it himself. But he likes to burn.

Burn so hot for her.

"I'd kiss you." Because he would. He would start with that. He would also be content to stop with it, to end with it. Just her mouth, her tongue... Her voice released into him, her moan. His name.

"How?"

"Slow. At first. I'd get harder, I'd... taste you." His eyes are drifting closed, rolling back slightly. He has the words. Somewhere. They might not be elegant or profound or even especially descriptive, because he's no songwriter and he's no poet, but he doesn't think she really cares about any of those things, and what he has will get the job done. "I fuckin' love how you taste, Beth."

"What else?"

Fuck, he doesn't know. Or he does, but what's in his head is everything at once, and he can't plan this stuff. He just does it. He gets her under his hands and he just does what he wants with her. He almost never really thinks, never has, and in fact that might in significant part be to blame for this.

But he'll try.

"Get my hands up your shirt. On your tits - they're so perfect, they're... Fuck, just get the whole thing off, get everythin' off. I want you naked."

"Yeah." She sighs, shaky, and he wants so badly to see her, but something is keeping him down here with his eyes closed, not even touching himself though he's throbbing against his fly. "What then? Tell me."

"I could pinch you if you wanted. Suck you. Get your nipples hard. I know you like that, I could..." He has to take a breath, his eyes squeezed shut and the world red dancing colors. "Make you make all those fuckin' noises. I love when you get noisy, girl. But you gotta be quiet in here."

"I will. Daryl..."

"I'd feel how wet you are."

"I am. I'm so wet." She is, she must be; he doesn't have to touch her to know it. He can practically hear it in her voice, the little tremor sharpening, the harbinger of a moan. A series of them.

"I'd play with your clit. Get my finger in you. I wanna fuck you but I want you to come first, I want you even wetter for me, I want..." The words are tumbling end over end. He stops again and swallows; without meaning to he made a concession and slid a hand down, cupped himself, and he's grinding slowly with the heel of his palm. Simmering. "I love watchin' you come, Beth. You're so beautiful, it's incredible, you got no fuckin' idea."

"Think I do." She laughs softly, still shaking - if anything shaking even more. "Tell me..."

"I wanna fuck you. I wanna be in you, your cunt, I'd do that- I'd get your legs around me, get you up against the wall, just fucking ram into you. I'd fuck you hard, girl."

"Daryl..." She says his name in a high little whimper, and he knows. He knows what she's doing - really has known for a bit now - and all at once he needs to see it, he needs to see it, and he doesn't care how stupid this is, and that in itself is so intensely stupid. But he pushes to his feet and lays his hands on the top board of the stall, looks over, and there she is against the far divider, fly open and her hand working in her jeans, her other up her shirt and moving against her breast. Stroking her nipple with her thumb, a gasp and hard shiver with every circle as she rolls her hips in time with the rhythm of her nimble fingers. Her breath is ragged, almost those moans her voice was promising, and she raises her half-lidded eyes and looks at him, face flushed and lips parted and wet, and he thinks it could be possible for him to come right there without a hand laid on his cock.

He lays his arms on the top of the divider, just like they're having a regular conversation, and watches her. He thinks he's doing a fairly good job of playing it cool. He thinks it might not be completely obvious that his knees are about to buckle.

Even if she probably knows anyway.

"I'd fuck you so hard," he murmurs, the words edged sharper, escaping him in pulses like thrusts. "Fuck you 'til you wanna scream. But you can't. Someone's gonna hear. I'd kiss you again, shut you up - God, your hot fuckin' mouth, Beth, I want all of you, I want my cock in you, I wanna come in you, make you feel it, make you come again, fuck, girl, I want you to come all over me-"

She's been moving faster, faster, her teeth capturing her lower lip to muffle the harsh whines trying to escape her, and now she stiffens, her head jerking back and the tendons standing out in her throat, her hand clamped down on her breast and her fingers moving frantically as it crashes in on her again and again.

And he just watches, neither hand on himself. He watches the last ripples of her pleasure and he feels the agony of how much he wants her, and he soaks in both in equal measure and he loves them both equally.

He should suffer for this. That's only right.

She sags back, her head hanging and her breath coming in shallow gasps. The hand under her shirt has slipped out and down and dropped limp at her side, but her other is still in her jeans, and after a moment or two she withdraws it and something hot and deep and hungry inside him twists. Her glistening fingers. How he knows she tastes. What he could have.

She focuses on his face again, locks her eyes onto his, and lifts her hand and sucks her fingers clean.

He's been holding it together. But he cracks, groans, and she laughs gently around her knuckle.

For a moment, stillness. Just the wind and the shifting of the horse against the back of the stall, their breathing - hers loose and heavy and his strained. Tight. As she continues to come back a confused expression flits across her face.

"Ain't you gonna..."

He shakes his head. He's not.

"Daryl." But she doesn't argue. She sighs and pushes away from the boards and starts toward him, but he puts up a hand. Outside, not far at all, he can hear Shawn calling to Hershel about something.

They've pushed their luck already.

"Don't."

"I wanna kiss you," she whispers, and she looks playful, still heated and still hungry, but she also looks very slightly disappointed, and a pang stabs through him. They'll take what they can get now, but most of the time it's not going to be quite enough.

"I want you to." He shakes his head again, slowly. "Don't."

She stands for a few seconds, her mouth tightening just a bit, but she nods. She gets it. Gets all of it.

"We gotta be careful," he says softly. My girl, I'm so sorry. "We gotta be so careful now, Beth."

"I know." She sighs and pushes her hair back, glances at the door though he hasn't heard anyone coming. "I just... I wanna be with you. All the time."

"Me too." Me too isn't even approaching what he feels. It's a vague gesture at a fucking blue whale. He doesn't want to be with her. He wants to crawl inside her skin. He wants to make a home in her ribcage. There is no way to describe what he wants without resorting to some frankly horrific imagery.

In fairness, it is slightly horrific to feel like this.

"But I'd rather not be with you now than not be with you ever."

"Yeah." She glances at the door again and zips up her jeans, reaches into her shirt and does something with her bra. "I should... I should go help Mama with dinner."

He nods and she picks up the brush, gives Nellie a pat on her flank - Nellie starts a bit - and moves toward the door. But she stops and looks back, her face and her eyes both a little sad, and for an instant he almost beckons her, begs her, pleads with her to come back and kiss him, kiss him as long and as deep as she wants. Take whatever she wants from him. He'll give it all and fuck the consequences. They're inconsequential.

But he can't. He can't lose this.

"I love you so much, Daryl," she whispers, and it's like a kick to the gut.

He whispers it back to her and closes his eyes against the pain, braced against the stall. He didn't know it was going to be like this. He didn't know it was coming at all.

Note: songs are "Baby That's Not All" and "The Bad Actress" by Josh Ritter, and "Masterpiece" by Emily Kinney.