Chapter 75: I'll remember your song but I'll forget your name
He's still a little out of it, still floating, when he feels for and finds her hand and gently tugs her up, pulls her close. She swings a leg across him and straddles him, settles into his lap, and she kisses him for a while, slow and relaxed and deep - sometimes pressing in and stroking him with her lips and tongue, sighing, and sometimes just resting her mouth against his, hardly moving at all. He can taste her, the subtlest hint of sweet jelly. He can taste the salt of his own come. He sinks into it - it expands, filling the world. Everything around him is violently, piercingly bright, sharp, so real it's like a blow, like it's beating him over the head with its sheer existence, but it's fading behind her mouth, behind what she's given him. What she'll give.
But she pulls back a little when he reaches down, pressing his hand between her legs and curving against her through the fabric of her jeans, and he's mildly surprised to see her shake her head.
He breathes a laugh. "What about you?"
"No." She leans in again, smiles against his mouth, his jaw. It's a half kiss, wet and smooth. "I got what I wanted."
"You sure?" Not surprise anymore, not quite. But he wants to be sure. He wants to know.
Her answer is barely even a whisper. He feels it, the words in the drift of her lips across his. I'm sure.
He doesn't suppose he's going to argue with her. She would definitely be in a position to know better than him.
But he drags her back in and closes his teeth on her bottom lip, on the ridge of her jaw, scrapes them down her throat and makes her tremble. And he arches and rocks against her - even, steady movements, rise and fall of his hips. Not a real grind, not the kind he could give her if he was still hard, but even if she doesn't want anything from him he knows she's soaking her panties, can practically smell it, and he can tease her until she tells him to stop.
She doesn't. She moves with him, shifting until her crotch is resting directly on his thigh, and she rolls like she's riding him - is riding him - and her breath speeds up and tightens into tiny whimpers, shallow. She's working herself toward the edge and that tight breath catches when he runs a hand up her shirt, sending tremors through her belly, curving over her breast and tweaking at her nipple.
They used to do this. He hasn't forgotten. They used to do exactly this: Horny teenagers kissing and groping at each other in shadows and the truck bed, in that field where they drank moonshine - they carried each other up until they were gasping and shuddering, until it was almost too much, and he didn't even completely understand why it felt so good to want and not get.
But it did. It does. Just another thing she taught him, and just another thing they don't have to lose.
He thinks she might actually make herself come after all and he's pressing back, encouraging her, but abruptly she stops and shakes her head again, tugging at his hair and panting hot against his ear. "I don't want to. It feels too good, I don't…" She giggles and drops her head back, arms curled around his shoulders, and he cups her ass and pulls her down and in, licking at the hollow between her collarbones.
You really sure?
"Daryl." She laughs again - high and giddy - and pushes herself off him with her hands against his chest, stepping back, gasping for air. He makes a playful grab for her but his fingers skim against the sides of her waist and fall away, and he's left there, looking up at her, cock still hanging out of his pants and sure he's a completely ridiculous human being.
He can't remember a point at which this whole thing wasn't ridiculous.
She's already turned away from him by the time he's zipped up and found his slightly wobbly feet, and there's something about her back, about the way she's holding herself and setting her boots against the ground - center of gravity lower than usual - that tips him off. This was already wild - everything here is wild. To come into this space is to be wild, carve away everything that covers up older beds and channels, let it all flow. So he's not surprised when she whirls, tosses both her hair and a smile over her shoulder at him, and launches herself into the trees, scrambling up the slight incline away from the bank.
She didn't have to tell him. He already knew. Come get me.
It's not a steep slope, not like the one they have to descend to get to the stretch of old lawn, but he still has to work for purchase, using saplings and slim-trunked pines to pull himself upward. He can still see her, bright flashes of pink among brown and red and gold, but once she told him she was fast and her self-evaluation was accurate. Even under cover she's fast. He wonders just how much speed she'd work up with open, level ground on which to gather it.
But he can tell she's also not trying to avoid capture. Not really. She's just making him work for it. So his breath tightens into something that almost slips into his own laughter, cutting across her right as she crests the small ridge and takes off along it, hair bouncing and flying behind her, arms pumping and her strides long and graceful - and still possessing that small remaining hint of teenage awkwardness.
Little deer.
He doesn't take the ridge; he keeps to her side, edging closer - nudging her to the left. They're running roughly parallel to the service road they took, the gravel strip itself a little further up. But he doesn't think she's making for that, and she isn't; she veers right again, meaning to slip in front of and past him, back downward, sliding and skittering through the leaves.
And the pass is close. She means it to be. The incline is forcing her to slow just a bit, and she crosses barely feet in front of him, flashing a grin - knowing he'll follow her easily and much closer behind.
He does, letting his weight carry him down, digging the sides of his boots into the leaf litter and dirt and catching them on protruding roots. His focus is on her back, her legs, the swing of her ponytail, but when he first met her he noticed so many strange little details about her, almost fixated on them, and he's doing it again now. When she passed him, gave him that grin, a shaft of deepening sun caught her and held her and touched her heart pendant and flashed it into his eyes. He saw it in slow motion and it's replaying over and over as he closes in on her, a wider and dryer stretch of bank coming into view below them. Those delicate joined hearts, carried into the air by the bounding movements of her body.
Why the hell that detail? He has no idea. A lot of things are still mysterious to him.
But some things aren't, and those things are also simple. Like momentum, like the workings of gravity, and like the ability of his hands to grab and grip her shoulder, tug sharply. As they reach the leveler ground together she jerks, they spin, and he hauls her backward into his arms and she goes with a breathless little squeak, half struggling, kicking at the moss, kicking harder and dissolving into shrieks and violent squirming when he holds her with one arm around her chest and shoves his free hand under her sweater and shirt and digs his fingertips into her ribs. Her cries ring off the rocky outcrop across the creek and startle sparrows out of the trees, and he grins against her neck, bites her gently and then not so gently, growls.
They might not be children anymore and the summer might be receding faster and faster with each shortening day, and maybe they lost things they won't get back.
But they're still animals. And they can still play.
Eventually they make their way back to the ruins, still panting and a little sweaty with leaves stuck in various places, and as they pass above the bench he catches her by the arm and pulls a twig free from her hair, pokes her in the back of the head and dodges when she swipes at him.
He wasn't interested in keeping track of time; neither, he gathers, was she. But they've passed through most of the afternoon, and the sun is touching the edge of the opposite slope, lighting up the very tops of the stone and brick towers, and it's as though it's raising shadows out of the water and ground as it goes.
They stand in the middle of the interior, and he looks around at it - the blanket, the remains of the picnic, the faint glitter of the stone and the way the sun casts the bricks in a much deeper red, the bare treetops and branches well on the way there - and he looks at her beside him, and he feels for her hand and wraps their fingers together, warm and tight. All at once he feels like they've veered around and slid back into being kids, just for a few moments in the last hours of what he knows is a last day. Kids standing hand in hand in the kind of hidden place kids find and keep secret between themselves and a select few - a select one. Her, his girl - and maybe not his, not really - and something precious and very fleeting.
He learned early that his body could be damaged. But death remained the kind of curious abstraction that it does for most children until he was close to smashing head-on into adolescence. Even seeing animals killed, somehow it never really made sense to him that his life might have an end. That he might die. Life just was. It wasn't even about taking it for granted; it was simply a fact and seemed personally eternal. There was no reason to question it.
Even his mother… She was just gone. He never saw it happen. He never saw her after. There was no body to bury. It wasn't real. She just went away. She left and she wasn't ever coming back.
So precious wasn't really a thing. Even after he did start to get it, the concept of anything around or in or of him being precious would have seemed comical if anyone had ever floated the idea.
But it is. It is precious. It does matter.
And he's a man.
She squeezes his hand. "I should get back. They're not gonna worry, but…" She sighs. "I should."
"Yeah."
But he holds onto her for a moment longer and looks at her sidelong - at the shadows covering her up, her gold hair losing its color and fading into silver, pink sweater darkening to magenta, her eyes deep and her skin pale. He looks at her and he fixes it in his mind, her like this, everything like this, and all at once he really feels it: Gripping this like he gripped her, pulled her against him, and here he can't hold on. It's slipping away. He accepted it a while ago, most of it done during that week alone; he let go of a lot of what he used to have and to be, and he's all right with it being gone. But this is the last day like this they're going to get, and it twists into a hard coil at the top of his throat, and for a second he can't breathe.
"Daryl?" She's turning to him, frowning. Growing concerned. He refocuses, shakes himself, finds the ground under him, and he's over and past it.
"'m fine." He curls his hand tighter around hers and then reluctantly releases her. "Let's get this stuff picked up, get outta here."
It doesn't take very long. There isn't a lot of stuff.
But they don't hurry. They make it a point to not hurry - or he does, and gets the impression she's doing the same. No words exchanged about it, or about what they're doing - her putting the containers and garbage into her pack, him shaking out and folding up the blanket, handing it to her. Fingertips brushing under it like a table.
They're holding hands again when they walk beneath the arch and back up the slope.
Before it was just the leaves all red and gold, all fire hues. Now the sun has set fire to everything, every shape edged and outlined in red, gold so deep it bleeds right across the line between it and crimson. It seems to swirl over everything as they drive out through the heavier tree cover and into lighter growth, glimpses of the sky expanding to more than glimpses, bands of cloud arched above the sinking sun like ripples around a stone.
It's red. Very. The trees cut away and he's staring up at it as he turns them onto the main road, flanked by pines, and he thinks not only fire but blood.
It should be disquieting, maybe. But blood can mean lots of things. Many of them aren't bad at all.
The world is so alive.
Beth has the window down again, hand out and arcing, head tipped back and face turned away from him. He can see the soft curve of her cheek, her jawline, a very faint red mark just beneath that he knows he left there. Hair falling loose around her neck, over her shoulder, and her pendant gleaming like it did - gleaming darker.
He can just see her lips.
They're moving. He can't hear. The radio isn't on, but the wind is drowning out her voice - if it's there at all.
And that seems like a shame. He's about to say something, about to ask her, hand reaching for her knee, and she turns and meets him halfway. He glances away from the road again and when he sees how she's looking at him, little wild thing made of fire, her blue eyes not blue at all but some color for which he's not sure there's even a word…
He has no idea what to do with her smile.
"You remember that song I sang you?"
He swallows, brief flutter beneath his ribs. It's been a while since she knotted him up quite like this. She always knots him up, but this is different. This is older.
And also not. It's new.
"You sung me a lotta songs."
"You know this one." She curls her hand around his, weaves their fingers together, and sings him the first line.
just where it now lies I can no longer say
And yes. Yes, he does know. He nods.
"Sing it with me."
"I-" He jerks his head around, gives her what is, by this point, a very well-worn Look. Are you fucking kidding me right now? "Fuck off, girl. I ain't gonna sing."
"Come on." Gentle. But persistent. So. Yeah. This is one of those things he's not going to get out of. "You know the words. I've sung it to you lots of times."
But. "Yeah, and you can sing it on your own this time too."
"No. You're gonna sing it with me." She lifts his hand, turns it and raises it, presses her soft, warm lips against his palm, and he's hers. He's absolutely hers. Always was. Never wanted to be anything else.
Wants. Not needs.
"C'mon," she says again, smiling that incredible smile against his wrist, and she lifts her head and starts to sing.
just where it now lies I can no longer say
I found it on a cold and November day
in the roots of a sycamore tree where it had hid so long
in a box made out of myrtle lay the bone of song
the bone of song was a jawbone old and bruised
and worn out in the service of the muse
and along its sides and teeth were written words
I ran my palm along them and I heard
lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness
I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest
He doesn't sing.
Except he does. Rough, very soft under her voice, but as they leave the pines behind and the blazing fields open out on either side of them, the sky burning down the world, she lifts him and carries him, and while his volume still doesn't match hers it's closer. Flying just beneath. Flying with her.
then the bone was quiet, it said no more to me
so I wrapped it in the ribbons of a sycamore tree
and as night had come I turned around and headed home
with a lightness in my step and a song in my bones
lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness
I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest