Chapter 83: because we're graced in these matters

At some point he realizes she isn't driving him home.

The miles after Abby's place all bled together, a blur of rain and light and music, and her voice - singing, talking, he's not sure which. Both. He was still flying, continued for a while, and he doesn't think - to the extent that he can - that it's just the endorphins. Those should have worn off a while ago.

His back is on fire. The pain is like a solid thing, like the truck beneath him, carrying him. Somehow more real. It and she took him into the dark and the rain, and he allowed his eyes to fall half closed and his focus to slip away, and just felt.

Groped for her hand. Found it. Held on, and she squeezed, and the engine growled under him, duet with the buzz of the pain, and it's possible that he told her something. That he loves her. That she's amazing. That he can't even believe she's real, that he still sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night in his own bed and doesn't know where he is, doesn't know what's happening, but remembers her like a dream and is sure he's woken up and lost it and lost her. Gropes for his phone, looks at her last text message. Gropes for the wolf, closes his fingers around its cool smooth flank.

He might not have told her that. Might still have to someday.

But even if time slipped and flowed and warped well beyond reliable counting, he opens his eyes wide and focuses on the world and feels certain that they should have been home by now. It wasn't more than twenty minutes or so getting out there.

He shifts in the seat, immediately regrets it and hisses softly, and in the periphery of his vision he sees her turn her head, sees the small curve of a smile.

"Welcome back."

There's something strange about the quality of the sound and about what's in front of him, and after another few seconds he gets it. No windshield wipers. No rain-patter. It stopped.

He rolls his head toward her. "Didn't go nowhere." Which isn't at all true, but he says it anyway, and smiles loosely as he does.

She snorts a laugh and turns them to the right - down a way he doesn't recognize when he peers out the side window. Though it's hard to make out much in the way of landmarks, which makes a lot of sense given the darkness. Though he's fairly certain it's being exacerbated by heavy tree cover on either side of the road. "Yeah, you were gone. You even remember any of what you said?"

"No." He glances back at her. It's difficult to stop smiling. He doesn't want to try. "Anything interestin'?"

"Well." She glances at him again, lips still drawn into her own dry little smile. All teasing at its edges. In the faint light from the dash, as she has more than once now, she looks both very young and deeply old. Knowing. Something magical. His head drops back against the headrest and he simply gazes at her, rapt, feeling himself slipping just a touch and not minding in the least. "I think..." She shakes her head and turns her attention fully to the road. "It was, yeah."

"You gonna tell me?"

"Nope."

"You don't get to call me a jerk no more."

"I can call you whatever I want." Her smile curves more sharply, edging into the wicked, and he wonders if he actually said much of anything coherent.

He can well believe he didn't.

But she's quiet again, her smile fading, and he watches her and sinks into the silence, lost in the contemplation of a loose strand of hair curling against the side of her neck, the subtle glitter of her flower earring when she turns her head, the edge of the scar on her left cheek. The bob of her throat when she swallows. Her eyes - still so bright, so keen. All the light falls into them and they hold it in reserve for their own uses.

Shit, he's still kind of gone.

No, not gone. He's stoned. Or he was.

"Where are we?"

"Just drivin'. I wanted..." She takes a slow breath. "I just wanted to. I dunno why. I'm sorry, maybe I should..." She shakes her head, brows knitted. "I should've asked you."

"Don't think I coulda answered. You do whatever the hell you want." He looks out the window again. They've emerged from the trees and the land is opening out on either side of them. The clouds overhead are breaking up, and a few stars are shining through. Beneath it's all fields, copses of trees, fences and rolling hills, distant houses. And it's familiar, but that might be simply because so much of the countryside around the town looks the same.

Pretty, but mostly the same.

No other cars on the road. Not in front, and none behind that he can see. Just them and the night.

"How's your back?"

He grunts, shifting again. He probably shouldn't drink, but it feels like it would be one of those bad ideas that also manages to be an extremely good idea at the time it's being put into play. "Hurts."

"Bad?"

"Yeah."

"Sure you don't want me to take you home?"

"I mean... eventually." He turns back to her, reaches over and lays a hand on her thigh. She's very warm under his palm, and it might be that he's still all fuzzy around the edges, but he'd swear he can feel her pulse thrumming in time with the ghost wasps beneath his skin. "Beth, I'm alright." He gives her a slow squeeze. "Promise."

"You seemed alright back there," she murmurs, and something turns over inside him. Her eyes on him, piercing him as steady and relentless as the needle. Holding him there, like hands. Watching as layer after layer of him was peeled away.

"I was."

"Did it feel good?" Another glance, and she looks young now. Not naive, not a wide-eyed ingénue. But young. Curious. Learning. Hungry for it all. How she had been, scanning around at the the flash. At Abby's workspace. At him, as he straddled the chair.

"No. And... Yeah. Yeah, it did." He's still looking at her. He doesn't seem able to stop. "It was... I dunno how to say. You saw how I was."

"I did." She turns them again, onto a narrower road that winds down and around another wooded patch of land, roughly following the edge of a slope to a creek bed. "You..." She swallows, seems uncertain how to proceed.. "You were... You looked like you were... That one time. But the rest of it, too. Like you were..."

"Like I was comin'." He just says it, soft. It's not hard. It feels weird to just say it like that, for reasons that dance out of his reach every time he tries to pin them down, but he can. Because it's true. He felt it. Felt it so deep, felt it all through him. Made no effort to conceal it. Of course she saw it. She knows what it looks like.

"Yeah," she says, just as softly. "Like that." Another glance, quick, and he can't be sure in the colorless light but he'd bet the money he has left in his pockets that she's blushing. Which is adorable, and he's smiling again. "Did you?"

Yes. But no. He still has no idea what the fuck that was. And he's very much unbothered by that fact. He doesn't think he needs to know. "Not like you mean." He pauses, his hand finding her thigh again and resting there. "You liked it."

She takes a slow breath. "I... Yeah. I liked it. I liked watchin' you. I was thinkin'..."

She trails off, ducking her head slightly, and now he knows she's blushing. Rather uncharacteristically for her, by this point - this girl who seems to positively luxuriate in being naked when she's around him, who refuses to keep her hands off him, who seems to draw pleasure from both of their bodies like breathing. But this was something new for her, fresh territory, and maybe she doesn't feel as fully at home there as she does in the woods and the fields, and in his bed.

In his bed.

His hand slides toward the inside of her thigh. "What were you thinkin'?"

"I was thinking that chair would be pretty perfect if you turned over," she says, and now she sounds almost casual. Edged with a wicked little smile. And he laughs in quiet delight, because yes: it would have been. It would have been absolutely fucking perfect for that.

"Think Abby would pitch a fit."

"Yeah, well, you might've noticed I stayed outta the way." She pauses again, and her legs spread under his hand - minutely, but he doesn't miss it. He slides his palm higher. "It was beautiful," she says, soft once more, and his breath catches beneath his throat.

"Think you'd ever get one?"

She makes a faint, slightly surprised noise. But not so surprised as she might have been; a nice girl from a nice family, he can guess what Hershel and Annette would make of their youngest daughter with a tattoo, but yet another bet he'd be very comfortable laying is that while she was looking at the flash and while she was watching it done to him she was thinking very much along those lines. Imagining. Trying the idea on for size, just to see.

That's what she does.

"I dunno." She bites at her bottom lip. "I dunno what I would get."

"Not gonna haul you back there'n make you pick, I was just-"

"I liked the birds," she says quietly. "I... I really liked the birds."

He pictures that, at once and vividly and without a single shred of surprise. It's not even a new picture; looking at her gazing in the front window, the seed had been planted then. Her and one of Abby's lovely little birds on her shoulder, on her ankle, on the inside of her arm. Her calf. A blackbird, a starling. A tanager. He looks at her now, the shadows moving across her beautiful face, and he thinks dreamily about a singing mockingbird on the inside of her thigh. Near where he makes her sing too, with his fingers. His lips and tongue.

He thinks about the graceful curve of her back, and wings of her own. She deserves wings. Two whole ones.

She's going to fly.

"You got a lotta time to figure it out."

"You don't know that." Very soft, very solemn, and his breath tightens under his ribs. Because this is always going to be here. Like her scar. Her scars. What happened to her, twice, and what it taught her, and what she knows you can't ever really say.

"No," he whispers. "I don't."

What is it you plan to do?

"I'll get one." She says it without a hint of trepidation, with absolute certainty. As if she decided it long before now. "I don't know what, but I will."

He studies her, bemused, and squeezes her thigh again. "When?"

"When I know what I'm gonna do." She tips him a tiny smile. "After I graduate. When I know why. When I know what I... what I plan."

"You think you can ever know that?"

"No." She shakes her head, underlining the point. They've hit a stretch of long, straight road and the land has opened up again, and he's not at all surprised to see, directly in front of them on a rise in the distance, the winking red beacon of the radio tower.

And he knows where they are. And for a few seconds he can't breathe.

"Ain't about a plan, I think," she continues. She doesn't seem to have noticed that anything has happened to him. Beneath her voice, the radio muses to itself. Will we grow together? Will it be a lie? If it lasts forever, hope I'm the first to die. "I think it's just about askin' the right questions. Askin' at all."

He says nothing to that. He has nothing to say - nothing to argue with, nothing to add. It was something he began to understand in the week he was alone, something he feels as a truth that extends roots down into his bones, but that's not why he's silent. He's silent because he's watching the red beacon, the red star, the single one out of place in all these winter constellations, and he's thinking about the night he found himself on the ledge, and he stepped down off it and let her voice guide him home. Now they're here on this road, she's brought them here very likely without having any idea of what it actually is, and he's...

He's frightened. He's terrified.

And that's not all he is.

He lifts his hand from her thigh, covers hers on the wheel. "Pull over."

She shoots him a questioning look. "Daryl, what-?"

"Pull over."

She's staring at him, as much as she can without removing a dangerous degree of attention from the road, but she jerks the truck over to the side, half onto the shoulder, and turns to him, leaning against the wheel with her face drawn into a frown. "What the hell, Daryl?"

But he's already fumbling for the door, practically kicking it open. Stumbling out into the whispering grass, exhaling steam and staring out across the empty cornrows with their piles of dry leaves and husks, at the stars through the broken clouds and the pale gold moon lifting itself above the trees on the horizon. Except not gold, no; it's the exact shade of enameled molars fitted into the dry jaws of a deer's skull.

Beautiful. And terrible.

He's still more than half lost in whatever overwhelmed him back there. He knows he must not be thinking at all clearly, shouldn't be relying too much on his own perception of anything. But he feels it, as he takes a few uneven steps across the grass toward the field, hands clenched into fists at his sides. He remembers that night, the nearly overwhelming urge to sprint into the dark, to leap into the air with the unshakable faith that the air would accept him, and it's coming back now - and he's with her, and she's perceptive to an alarming degree.

She already knows something is up. He doesn't need to turn to be sure that she's standing behind him, arms folded, that frown deepening. Worried, maybe.

He doesn't want to worry her. But maybe worry is the most rational reaction here.

"Daryl, what's goin' on?"

"I was here when I called you." He doesn't turn, but the night is very quiet now, and even if he's speaking into it and not in her direction, she'll hear. "Or... No. Wasn't exactly here. But it was... This road? I think. Further on."

"Oh."

A world of understanding in that oh. He feels a species of wild gratitude; so many times he's despaired of explaining something to her, only to find that she knew it all along - or could fill in everything she needed to know when given the most basic framework. She's wise, and by now she can see down to his bones.

She knew that night. Somehow, some part of her. Knew what was happening.

He takes a huge breath and closes his eyes. Locks his jaw shut. Because he wants to run now, take her hand and run through the night with her like they're unbound beasts, like they're wolves, like she's the last girl and he's the last man and the rest of the world is gone and doesn't matter anymore. But he also wants to whirl toward her like a wind, seize her hands in his, and say things he won't be able to take back, whatever happens after. Words that could, one way or the other, bring this chapter to a close. Collapse the tangent universe and end the world.

Take me home. I have a pack and you have a pack, and I still have over fifteen thousand dollars in cash, and I have wheels and a wing and this road and it's enough, it might be enough... We're wild, you know we are, and we both know sooner or later this is all going to fall apart, but we don't have to be here when it does. We can go. If you want. If you said. If I asked.

If I asked you right now to fly away with me, would you say yes?

Would you take my hand and run?

He's lost his fucking mind.

"Daryl," she says softly, and curls her warm little hand around his. "Daryl, c'mon. It's late. It's cold. Let me take you home."

He drags the air into his lungs and holds it, eyes shut tight, and weaves his fingers through hers. He's not going to ask her that. He's not going to do that to her. He's not going to be so selfish, so cruel. And he doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to leave. Whatever happens, he doesn't want to leave.

This is his home now. The only one he's ever truly had.

"Yeah," he murmurs, and tilts his head back, looks up, watches red Betelgeuse making its slow procession across the sky. He hurts so much, even if the hurt is still the good kind, and he's so tired. "Alright."

All the way back he feels the beacon of the radio tower like a fingertip against the base of his skull.

Would you?

But he has other questions. And about halfway back he remembers them again.

After he kissed her in the rain but before she kissed him in the ruins, he drove out - like this - to an empty stretch of road and parked, lay in the truckbed and looked at the stars, and he wondered things. A lot of things. About her. Never expected to get many answers to those questions, if any, ever, but things have changed.

Everything has changed.

The radio is muttering to itself but he can't make out any of the words. He can only hear his own as they rise in his memory and then in his mind and then find their way onto his tongue, and they're incredibly fucking weird and they feel like they fit the setting as perfectly as anything could.

"What's your favorite color?"

"What?" She's been silent for the past fifteen minutes, and he's been able to feel the wheels turning rapidly in her head, almost as if he's running a fingertip along the top of one and feeling the friction burn as it spins. She sounds bewildered, and he's certain she didn't even quite understand him.

"Your favorite color," he repeats patiently. "What is it?"

"I..." She looks at him for a few seconds and then back at the headlights stroking over the dark ribbon of road, her lips parted and her jaw working slightly. Then, abruptly, she laughs. "Why do you care?"

"Why you care if I care?" He rolls his head to the side once more and lets his gaze drift over her, feeling something warm and strangely - faintly - throbbing settle into him, like a toe stubbed minutes ago and already recovering. "I dunno what it is. I wanna know."

"I don't know if I have one," she says after a few more wordless seconds. "I mean... I like a bunch. I like blue. Green. Purple. I like yellow. Red. I like 'em all."

"Why?"

She laughs again. "What's with you?"

"I dunno." He doesn't. It's not just the tattoo - still burning into him, but less painful now. A bit. It's something else. The road, the night. The moon lifting itself higher and higher to their left, streaming its light between naked branches.

Silence. Then, low: "Blue is sweet. Like blueberries. Round sweet. It curves. Green is sharp, smooth - it's like cut grass. But it's also deep. Soft sometimes. Like moss. Purple is heavy and thick when it's dark and when it's lighter it feels like clean sheets, and it smells like mulberries. Red and yellow are..."

She looks at him again, and her eyes are glittering. And in his hand he feels the roughness of the stems of roadside wildflowers, collected into a bunch and bound with twine.

This is such a weird fucking evening.

"That's what it's like for you," he whispers.

"That's what it's like for me."

"Me too."

She smiles, wider and sweeter, takes a hand off the wheel and finds his with it and squeezes. "I love you." She pauses, takes a breath, slips her fingers free. "Ask me somethin' else."

He almost remembers the order in which they came, how they flowed out of somewhere far down inside him. Someplace gently ravenous for her and everything about her. "What's your favorite food?"

"Oh, that's an easy one. Spaghetti."

He arches a brow, slightly surprised. "Really?"

"Yeah, really." She shoots him a Look. "Why, is that weird?"

"I mean, you're weird."

"Takes one to know one, Mr. Dixon," she says primly.

He releases a brief, hard laugh. She's very witty. "Yeah, fuckin' ow." Shrug. "I dunno, it's just not what I woulda guessed."

"What would you guess?"

Now he has to think, which he's discovering isn't the easiest thing even now. If anything, linear thought is getting increasingly difficult. To the extent that he was capable of it before. "You love dessert. You love chocolate. Cream. All that shit."

"Maybe you shouldn't assume stuff." This time her smile is broadly teasing, a bit of an edge to it. He takes it in, enjoys it. All her edges are keen. They shine. "Maybe there's a lotta shit you don't know about me."

"Maybe." Definitely. Hence the questions - and such basic things, too. Now that he's going over them in his mind, it startles him a little that he didn't know them before.

But some of them aren't so basic. Some of them are anything but basic. He sent them out into the universe, asked in the most general and aimless sense, not because he expected he would ever know but because they seemed important. They seemed like the kinds of things one might want to know about someone, that might reveal a lot. Not that he had any practical reason for wanting to know or anything.

God, not that at all.

"Do you want kids?"

He hears it, feels it hanging in the air like motes of dust in a beam of sun that have randomly decided to coalesce into the shape of a sparrow in flight, and he knows he's pierced something. Touched something deep, quite without meaning to, clumsy but with bizarrely good aim. That when the question sat inside him, unasked except in that most general sense, it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

That's not true anymore. Not now that he's made the words and put them there between the two of them.

That big scary future.

"Yes," she says, so soft he almost can't hear her, and he nods and looks away, and doesn't ask her anything else.

That big scary future. His and hers. He persistently hasn't thought about it. He kept it in its box, and even after that week alone, starting to be in the world, he didn't take it out. But it's still there.

Waiting.

He had no real idea what time it was when they left Abby's place, and he had no real idea what time it was when they turned around and headed for home. When they pull up in front of the house he finally tugs out his phone and checks; it's almost three.

Out there with her for hours, and it feels at once longer and no more than a few minutes. A few blinks.

She yawns expansively as she cuts the engine, rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms and turns to him. He's looking back at her, that streetlight once again oddly hardening her features, and he's thinking she might say something - no clue what - but instead she leans in and grazes her mouth over his, fingertips against his jaw.

He flows into it, eyes closed and hand lifting to cup the back of her head. And the pain flares, tightening his breath, and it's good.

"Can you get up there? On your own?"

It takes him a moment to figure out what she's referring to. Then he gets it and nods, lips brushing her cheekbone. "Yeah. Toldja, I'm alright."

He is. Or he's pretty sure he would be. But as they make their way up the front walk in a flood of moonlight, she curls an arm around his waist and he winds up leaning on her anyway. Not much, and it's not even that he needs to. She's just there, so warm and so real, and she's going to stay with him. She's going to go to bed with him, lie down and fall asleep and wake up with him, and they'll have the morning together. Maybe even more of the day. He never asked her.

He's pretty sure he would be able to endure weeks without laying a hand on her if it meant even a single night of this was waiting for him at the end of it. Endure it happily. It's enough knowing that she wants to be here.

And again, a tiny part of him whispers as they climb the clanking iron stairs, there's the big scary future. He won't look at it, not even now. Knew it, recognized it, and turned away. The present is more than sufficient for his desires and his needs.

But there it is all the same.

He gets the door open, follows her into the room, watches her shadowy form dip and fold as she crouches by the bed to turn on the light. He blinks in it, moving forward and shrugging off his coat and about to hold out a hand for hers, but she takes his instead, pushes up on her toes and tugs his head down so she can kiss his brow.

"Lemme take care of you."

He's not sure what that means. But it sounds good.

So okay.

He watches her head into the shadows of the hall with the coats, then kicks off his boots and moves into the kitchen, retrieves whiskey from a cabinet, returns to the bed and sinks down onto it. He doesn't need to get drunk. He doesn't want to dull the pain. He doesn't want to dull anything. He wants to be here for every precious second of consciousness.

But a drink or two will still be nice. For once it's actually not terrible whiskey.

"Don't overdo it, Mr. Dixon."

He turns, swallowing the sharply pleasant burn, and she's standing there half in the light, hand on her hip, amused smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. "I'm your chaperone, remember?"

"So you caught me," he says, perfectly amiable, and holds out the bottle. She eyes it, then eyes him.

"Is it better than the moonshine?"

"Depends what you mean by better." He lowers the bottle. He's not going to push her. God, that's the last thing he would do. But she steps forward and takes it from him with a smooth and total lack of hesitation, lifts it and swallows. She waits a second, a thoughtful expression crossing her face, then squeezes her eyes shut and pulls her lips into a grimace.

"Don't like it?"

"I dunno." She opens her eyes, looks down at the bottle and swallows again, hard. "It is better than the moonshine."

"Better'n what I used to get." He shrugs. "Got the money for it now. Not that I'm livin' large or nothin'."

"No, I can see that." She bends and sets the bottle down by the bed, lowers herself onto the bed and crawls toward him. He watches her, once more bemused; beneath her coat she had been wearing the thick pink sweater she seems to particularly like, but she's taken that off too, and all that's left is a thin pastel purple tank top - almost a camisole, its neckline low and revealing and her breasts lovely little handfuls cradled by her white cotton bra. He gazes at her and at the purple, its shade paler in the soft light, and what she said in the truck comes back to him.

Clean sheets.

She reaches him, lays a hand on his shoulder - just above the tattoo. "What should I do for it?"

"Bandage can come off." What she's asking... The way she looked at him, like she wanted to take him into her hands and draw those sighs out of him herself, it had plunged into him, hot and sharp, straight between his legs and blowing his veins wide. She's looking at him a bit like that now, and he has no idea how to define what it's doing to him. "Should clean it. Careful. Pretty much all for now."

"Nothin' else?"

He shakes his head.

"Still hurts?"

He nods, rolls a shoulder. "Less now."

"I wanna see it," she breathes, and she leans in, presses her cheek to his upper arm, and nuzzles at him, and his lungs and heart twist into tight, complicated knots. She's so warm, pulsing through the fabric of his shirt, and he doesn't know what taking care of him is all about or what she has planned, and he doesn't know what he's able to do right now, but he wants her to see it. Touch it.

He wants her to touch him everywhere.

"Go on, then."

She rises on her knees and shifts around to the edge of the bed, moves to the floor and stands in front of him, over him. He stares up at her as she takes his shirt off - gradual, careful - and it occurs to him as he raises his arms for her that he never knew what it truly was to be naked until her.

How wonderful it can be.

And of course she isn't stopping with his shirt. He didn't for a single fragment of a moment expect her to. She sets it aside - with odd care, it seems to him - and lowers herself to her knees, fingers working at his belt and zipper. He's hard - was as soon as she looked at him that way - and she pauses, curves her palm over him, kneads him slowly, shifts her attention to his face and gives him a lazy smile as his eyes fall half closed and a quiet moan escapes him.

"Got me wet," she murmurs. "Watchin' it. Watchin' you."

"I know."

"I know you know." She cocks her head, still working him, reaching into his fly and sliding her fingers over his squeezed length - delicious pressure, maddening. "I don't know why. I don't know what it means."

"Means you liked it, girl."

"Yeah, but I don't know why."

He leans back on his hands and stares down at her, her doe eyes and her shining, full lips, and tries to breathe. Rocks a little. "You need to?"

"Guess I don't." She bends low and he feels the heat of her even through pants that remain far too much on him, magnifying itself when she opens her mouth against the fabric that's holding his cock prisoner, presses down with her lips and drags upward, and there's something bizarrely obscene about it that flashes bright pleasure down his spinal cord.

"Takin' care of me?" His voice is rough, the words melting into a slight slur, and he both feels and sees the edge of her smile.

"Mmhm." She kisses him, pulls back, hooks her fingers under his waistband. "Lift up."

He does, and she slides his pants and shorts down - slow like fucking torture now that she's gotten him wanting it and she knows it - grinning when his cock springs free and grinning harder when she shoves his pants to the side to join his shirt and leaves him completely naked, hard and glistening and close to dripping with how ready he is for her, biting his lip to keep back his groans - though why he would want to is something of a mystery to himself.

He's been pretty considerate where Carol is concerned.

She nudges his legs apart and settles herself between them, closing him into a gentle fist and stroking him from root to head, and she laughs softly when he twitches in her hand.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Ahh... Beth." A shaky smile grabs him, stretches his face, but it's also almost pained. There is pain, twinges of it with every flex of the muscles in his shoulders, but it's only making this better, and it's only making it worse. And the words are, for some reason, playing very coy with him. "Beth, you..."

"Say it," she says, tone reproachful as she strokes him again. "Or you don't get anythin', how am I supposed to know what you want if you don't tell me?"

"Seriously, who's the fuckin' jerk now?"

She lowers her head again and kisses the very tip of him, lips butterfly-light against his slit, licking away the sheen of precome he leaves on her lips. "You deserve it."

The look he drops onto her is a hundred percent are you fucking kidding me? "I... Oh, fuck, for what?"

"I dunno." She shrugs, presses the pink tip of her tongue to her top lip, and he just about crumples backward. He's not sure how he's supposed to handle this. He's weak, she's completely taking advantage of him in the unfairest way possible. "Stuff. Things. I'll come up with somethin'."

"Beth. Please." He can say it. He can words. They're there, enough of them, and he can drag into his mind the order they should go in. "Please... God, please suck me, please..."

"Wasn't really so hard," she breathes - so hot on him, scorching him - and opens to him, takes him past her lips and into her, and he whines like a fucking dog and it's pathetic and not in a million years of trying could he care any less.

And he's giving her what she wants. He couldn't be more sure. He's pleasing her, and that's everything.

Apparently it pleases her to keep tormenting him. Because she is, if anything going even slower than before - drawing him into her and so deep he's all but certain he's going to collide with the back of her throat, backing off and sweeping her tongue across him as she does, transferring that to his head in broad, excruciating licks, and letting out a soft, happy sound like there's nowhere else in the world she'd rather be and nothing else in that same world she'd rather be doing.

Wouldn't you know it, he actually sort of believes that.

She has a firm grip around him as she ducks her head even lower and he watches, dense whimpers caught in his throat, as she laps at his balls, curves her mouth wide over him, tongues them past her lips and sucks so gently. And at that point he can't watch her anymore; he's managed to cup a loose hand over the back of her head but it falls away and he drops his head back and sobs, tries to gather up the broken syllables slipping out of him and beat them together into words, beg her to make him come, he needs to come, he needs it-

And naturally she picks that moment to stop dead and rock back on her heels, and when he manages to focus on her she's wiping at her mouth and looking enragingly pleased with herself.

With her other hand jammed inside her open jeans.

He can't know, obviously, but yet another bet he's very comfortable making is that the expression he's wearing is primarily conveying the message oh my Christ would you STOP

Except no, don't stop. Please, please don't stop.

"Beth," he whispers thickly, and she removes her hand and lifts sticky fingers to her lips and licks them clean.

He whimpers again, high and needy, and fights the urge to collapse onto his back. Because it won't be comfortable, and there actually is a limit to how much pain he wants to feel just now.

"Hey," she says airily, pushing to her feet and reaching down to tug off her boots. "I didn't come either."

That is not even sort of close to the same thing. But he says nothing, and as she moves past him and back into the hall and after a moment water starts running in the bathroom, and he turns all his attention to the task of getting his breath back - and soaking in the aching throb between his thighs.

He's felt it before, likes it, and that's another thing she knows.

He hears her coming back, her bare feet padding against the wood, and the mattress dipping under her weight. Hands against his shoulders, then the light sting of the tape pulling free and the brief shock of cool air against the abruptly exposed skin beneath. And another shock - and a slightly sharper sting - as a damp, lukewarm cloth passes over it.

He hisses, and she halts. "Is it okay?"

"Yeah. 'alright. Just still..." He lets out a breath. He doubts he has to explain.

"The lines are so clear," she says softly, and the faint wonder in her voice is bare as his skin. He loosens under her free hand, muscles slackening, and sighs.

"They'll stay pretty clear if it heals good."

"It's beautiful." Her fingertips skating down it; he can tell she's tracing its outline. Something that isn't fully at the level of a burn flares, and a moan rides out of him on another sigh. He's still hard, jutting up dark and bobbing slightly with every breath, and all at once it's taking everything he has to keep from wrapping a hand around his cock and just holding it, giving himself whatever pressure he can.

Whatever she'll let him have.

And hell, maybe she really can read his fucking mind, because he feels her lips on his shoulder, the nape of his neck as she moves the cloth again in slow, careful wipes, and he shivers violently when she whispers touch yourself.

Oh, she's so merciful. And she's so cruel.

He does. Slow, slow as she was because he doesn't need to be told that it's what she wants, and slow because if he's fast and rough now he'll come and he doesn't want to, not yet - and he shudders under her hands and whispers her name, the light in front of him fading into a warm blur. But he turns his head - no idea what prompts him to do so - and across the room is the shelf and the wolf with its stained blue crystal eyes, and the light touches them and they snap into focus like stars.

"Done," she murmurs, and her lips ghost over the wing's highest curve, the place where it folds, and he shudders again and presses back into it.

But she's gone.

He half turns, blinking, looking for her - in time to see her shifted back and up onto her knees, pulling her top off and tossing it onto the floor, reaching back to unhook her bra. Her eyes are huge in the dimness and her lips somehow seem even fuller than normal, plump and ripe, and he wants to close his teeth on them. Bite down and tug, so gentle. Scrape them down her throat, the line of her collarbone. Her pinched little nipples, falling into view.

He wasn't sure he was up to fucking her, but he thinks he can probably make it work.

"Daryl."

Her voice still isn't rising above a murmur, and she lowers herself, sits back, wriggles her jeans and panties down. And he's seen her naked so many times now, has learned so much of her territory, mapped her with his hands and lips and tongue, but each time it's a bit like the first time, and as she moves up on the bed and reclines against the pillows, a golden moon opening itself into the night sky, his breath disappears into some neighboring dimension where breath goes when it isn't needed anymore.

He turns over, pushes up and starts to make his way toward her, cock a humming, swinging weight beneath him, but she stops him with a foot in the center of his chest, gives him another one of those lazy smiles, and rolls smoothly over onto her stomach, her ass lifted just a touch and her legs slightly spread.

"Like this." She cranes her neck and looks at him over her shoulder, still smiling, and his heartbeat joins his breath and his muscles are strongly considering making a day trip. "I want you like this." She arches, rolls her hips down and reaches beneath her, her fingers working. He can see them, brief glimpses. "God... Oh, slow. Go slow, I want..."

Everything. Everything slow. He should go slow, should be careful, with her and with himself. He's new. He's a new thing, and that's true every single morning. Every single moment.

The condoms are still by the bed and he laughs as he reaches for them, fumbles one free and rolls it on, crawls over her and bends to drag his lips across the ridge of her shoulder. "Think slow is just about all I could do anyway."

"I know." She lifts herself on her hands and presses up against his chest, reaches back and hooks an arm over his neck, and he can practically feel the warmth of her smile. "That's all I need. C'mon down here, Daryl, I..." She laughs, softer than he did, and when she rolls her hips again his cock slides into the cleft of her ass, and his breath hitches and twists as she lowers her arm and reaches beneath her and back and grips him, guides him. "C'mon in."

He does.

She wanted slow and it's slow, an easy slide into her that leaves them both gasping, and then he's settling against her back, not putting his full weight on her smaller frame but letting her feel him, that he's here, that he has her. That she has him. He braces himself on his elbows but lies flush with her, for a few moments not moving at all. Resting inside her, the way he did the first night she came to him here, leaning his cheek against her shoulder and matching his breath to hers. His wing still burns, but even lower now, a pleasant smolder like the last of a high fire, and it's so sweet to be with her like this. It's so good.

"I love you," she breathes, and when she rolls against him once more, he starts to move.

Barely moving at all, really; rocking his hips down and in and back, feeling her cunt tighten so hot around him, feeling her muscles tense and loosen as a little moan vibrates out of her. He's been on the edge for what feels like hours - might be hours in one way or another - but now it feels like he could do this for hours: just be in her, sleep inside her, fill her up and be filled. He doesn't even care about coming anymore. If it happens, great, but this...

I want to stay here. I don't want to leave, that was stupid, all I want to do is stay.

Even if she took his hand. Even if she said yes.

He does take her hand, closes his over hers and interweaves their fingers and squeezes, and squeezes harder when it starts to build after all, a warm swell upward like rising through deep water. She's moaning constantly now, an ahh-ahh-ahh sound in sync with his gentle thrusts, her free hand fumbling beneath her again and fingertips grazing the base of his cock as she manipulates her clit - even that done slow, rising with him, turning her head to press her mouth to his jaw.

And it's still burning, burning through him and hauling him up, pulsing itself into his head as he stiffens and shudders and releases her name in ragged panting, over and over, losing it into formless incoherence as she trembles beneath him and follows him over with a soft cry muffled by the pillows.

"You're so good, Beth." He's only half aware of what he's saying and that's just fine, still breathing with her. Floating on the wave. "Oh, you're so good, God, you feel so fuckin' good, I love you so much..."

She laughs again and holds his hand so tight, and he maneuvers an arm under and around her - and he can't stay inside her. But he can dream about it. All night with her against him and his back a sweet, throbbing burn, like her touch inked it into him rather than the needle.

He wants to stay. He can. In his few scattered moments of brutal, terrible honesty, he knows what he knows and she does too, but he can stay.

My girl, we don't need to run to fly.

Note: song is "Five O" by James.