AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"I didn't give you money for cole slaw," Agnes scolded.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"If I don't got money to buy a lady a cup of slaw, I can't hardly call myself a man, Agnes," Daryl said. "Besides—if I'da just got you chicken and potatoes, you wouldn't have nothin' green to eat."
"Does your wife know you're taking such good care of another woman?" Agnes asked, her voice taking on the quality that it always did when she was trying to get a response from Daryl.
He laughed to himself and left the dining room, crossing into the kitchen, to get a drink for the old woman.
He didn't bother to respond, and he didn't have to. Agnes was teasing him and nothing more. She believed he was married to Carol, and he didn't correct her. Daryl told himself that he didn't correct the woman because he didn't want to confuse her—her mind was more easily confused than it had been in the past. There was no need to confuse her and, consequently, to upset her when she realized that she'd jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Of course, Daryl's gut also told him that there was another reason that he didn't correct Agnes—and that he allowed her to constantly mention his wife, ask questions about his wife, and give him a hard time about his wife's possible jealousy surrounding the pretend relationship that Agnes teased existed between them.
Daryl liked thinking of Carol as his wife—even if only in the safe environment of Agnes's imagination and created world.
He liked to think of Carol as his wife, really, every chance that he got.
Daryl didn't know what women really liked when it came to rings and things of that nature. He'd never much been around women, to be honest, and women like Agnes didn't even wear rings for him to draw any conclusions from observing their preferences.
He'd felt overwhelmed when the jeweler in town had taken out four trays of assorted rings in his price range. After eliminating one color band entirely, because he'd never seen Carol wear anything in that color, Daryl had only cut those four trays down into two—two trays of beautiful, sparkling, rings.
And only one of them, he'd worried, would be the right one to get Carol to say that she'd like to be his wife outside of Agnes's created fantasy world.
It was fast, and he knew it. It was probably too soon according to all socially created calendars for pacing relationships. Still, he felt like fast was only bad if the relationship was wrong, or if it was being entered into for the wrong reasons. The women he'd tried to shoehorn into his idea of what love should be—those would have been women that it would have been bad to give a diamond.
But Carol?
He loved Carol.
He loved her until the point that loving her sometimes made it difficult to breathe.
Daryl didn't know, before meeting Carol, that he'd actually know what romantic love was. He loved his brother, though they didn't often use those words or talk about those feelings, and he'd love his mother before she died, though it had been many years since he'd felt the freshness of that feeling. Daryl hadn't known, though, what romantic love was, and he'd been afraid that he might never feel it—or that he might never recognize it if he did.
The love he felt for Carol, though, was unmistakable and undeniable, and it didn't matter to his heart or soul that his brain said it might be too fast—everything in him cried out just to be near her and just to be assured that she would remain in his life.
She wanted to have a baby with him, and he wanted to have a baby with her. He'd always wanted children, and to have them was certainly part of the dream that he'd always entertained about how life should go, but he realized, when it came to Carol, that he wanted the baby as much for her as he could ever want it for himself. He could see, in her eyes, that she wanted it.
And Daryl wanted Carol to have everything she wanted. He wanted to give her everything she wanted.
So, he wanted to give her a baby, and his heart felt like it might actually explode when he thought that, by giving her what she wanted, he would get what he wanted, as well.
That, he was pretty sure, was how love was supposed to work—a true symbiosis where each of them, by fulfilling each other's dreams, would naturally find their own fulfilled.
The diamond, then, didn't seem like it was impossibly fast. He loved her, and he believed she loved him when she said it—whether she said the words with her mouth or she simply said it with the way that she touched him and loved him—so why shouldn't they marry? Why shouldn't he tell her he wanted her to marry him? If she could carry his child—the thought of which, flitting across his mind, made his hands tremble slightly as he filled a glass for Agnes in the kitchen—why shouldn't she be his wife?
The jeweler had been more than patient as Daryl went through every diamond in the trays, examined it, imagined it on Carol's finger, and asked opinions of the man—and the woman working there—about which seemed the most likely to earn the most positive response of the woman that he loved.
Carol was beautiful, so the ring had to be beautiful. She was simple, though, and she didn't like overly ornate things. Everything about her was relaxed and understated in such a way as to bring out her natural beauty—she didn't need all the overly fancy dressings. She was still the most beautiful woman that Daryl had ever seen without all the extra.
Daryl had explained as much to the jeweler, and the lady that worked there, and together they'd helped him choose just the right ring.
It was a one and a half carat solitaire set in titanium—since Daryl had never seen Carol wear yellow gold. He'd begged the jeweler, and the lady that worked there, to promise him that it was the kind of ring that Carol would say yes to, and he'd paid for it outright, in cash, from his savings. He'd also chosen titanium wedding bands—a his and hers set—to put aside for payments since he didn't need them until Carol actually said yes and let him know when she wanted to marry him.
He had tucked the ring into the back of his drawer at home, and so far, he hadn't managed to go into his room for even a minute without taking it out, looking at it, and imagining how she might see it when he showed it to her for the first time.
Daryl knew, from all his movies, that the ring was very important. Brides loved the ring. It was a visible reminder that they were getting married, and they liked showing it off to their friends. Naturally, he hoped the ring was something of which Carol's friends would approve. He knew that Michonne had a rather gaudy diamond—he'd seen it at the party—but nobody else had even been wearing a ring at all, not of any kind, despite the fact that he knew Jacqui was married to her husband who hadn't really wanted to be at the party.
Every bit as important as the ring, though, was the proposal.
The thought of a proposal made Daryl's stomach feel like it turned itself inside out and liquidated itself.
He wasn't as creative as some of the people in his movies. He wasn't as good with words as some of them were. He didn't know how to arrange the perfect proposal. And, although summer was rapidly racing toward its end, he didn't want to wait until a picturesque holiday scene to drop to one knee and offer Carol the ring that he'd chosen for her.
He wanted to be married to her now—yesterday, even. Someone might say that the proposal was too soon, and that the relationship was moving way too fast, but that would be someone that didn't understand that he didn't want to even spend one more day without Carol as his wife.
It wasn't moving fast enough—not for Daryl.
So, rather than wait for some distant holiday, he'd chosen, instead, to take her up on her offer to go with him, somewhere, for a weekend. He was nervous that the trip he'd chosen wouldn't be good enough to inspire her to say yes, if such a thing was as important as it seemed in the movies, but he'd tried. As soon as he'd heard about the "Golden Oldies" event at the beach on the radio, he'd gotten the feeling that they had to go—and, later, he'd gotten the feeling that he had to take advantage of the opportunity.
He'd rented a little beach house already—built in the fifties and, although much of it had been updated, it retained a certain aged charm. He'd bought tickets to the event—really nothing more than a dance—but they were selling cheap entry tickets to ensure that they didn't overshoot the fire safety numbers for the building on the boulevard. It was a whole weekend of golden oldies, played in the evenings, for dancing and reminiscing about the "good ole days," whether you'd been there or not.
Daryl thought it sounded like the perfect trip for his "best girl," though he hadn't told her yet that she needed to pack her favorite fifties dresses, a bathing suit in case the weather was nice enough—and retained enough warmth—to spend some time on the beach during the day, and her appetite for all-you-can-eat seafood and crab legs along the coastline.
He thought Carol would like the trip—and he would surely enjoy the chance to be with her on the trip—but he wasn't sure that it was proposal worthy. He wasn't sure it was the kind of trip that made a woman want to say "yes" to a ring that may or may not be the perfect one. He wasn't sure it would make the best stories to tell later in life about how he proposed.
It wasn't, exactly, as romantic as the proposals he knew from his movies, and he didn't know how important that might be, in general.
But he could only hope that Carol would understand his intention and accept it for what it was—his best attempt.
Daryl brought the glass back into the dining room and placed it on the table next to Agnes's food.
He was working on her cabinets. He had all the materials he needed now, and Tyreese had cleared his schedule of any other minor maintenance jobs for other clients. He was simply to focus on this job until it was done. None of them wanted Agnes toddling around her house with active construction going on for too long, so it was better not to leave the job partially done for a while. Daryl would barrel through it and get it done in as few days as possible. Agnes needed new cabinets and, as part of her agreement with Tyreese, Daryl would stain them, once they were installed, to her specifications. He was also putting new flooring in the bathroom since the flooring that was in there was lifting up at the edges and, according to Agnes's jokes about the situation, might as well go as long as he was tearing the house down around her.
Daryl didn't mind doing the work for her, and Tyreese didn't mind paying Daryl to do it in a series of long days. Agnes was a good customer and she always paid her debts. Beyond that, she was practically a living legend in Living Springs—even if everyone else tired of her stories and her rambling rather quickly.
Tyreese didn't mind the extra things that Daryl did for her, either, and encouraged him to look out for the woman.
She liked her lunch early and had expressed that she didn't feel like cooking. In response, Daryl had run to the place, uptown, where she wanted to get food, and he'd delivered her back the chicken and potatoes that she wanted—the slaw had been his addition. He'd grabbed himself a boxed meal, too, and though it wasn't quite what he would consider lunch time, he figured he might as well eat with her instead of eating his food later, when it was cold.
Daryl excused himself momentarily to go to the back bathroom—the one he wasn't disassembling—and relieve himself. The bathroom was primarily blue, and Daryl stared at the duck on the back of the toilet while he willed himself to relax enough to piss. He found it oddly difficult to relax when surrounded by unblinking ducks that stared at him like they were judging his performance and, in some strange way, disapproving of it.
When he was done, he washed his hands and made his way back to the dining room.
Agnes was wandering about in the kitchen, maybe gathering condiments or additional silverware. Maybe she'd simply gotten distracted by movement outside her window and had gone to look out and count the birds that fed at her birdfeeders or to scold the squirrels that stole the seed—the furry little creatures that, secretly, she loved.
"You gonna eat, Agnes?" Daryl asked. "You know you hate cold chicken."
She turned around from her spot near the window and smiled.
"I like cold chicken just fine," she corrected. "I don't like when you put chicken in the microwave. Dries it out. Ruins the flavor."
"Well, you about to eat it cold if you don't come on," Daryl said.
"I'll eat. Don't you worry about me," Agnes said. "But your little wife is here."
"What you talkin' about?" Daryl asked, his stomach flipping at the thought of Carol.
"Your wife is here," Agnes said. "And from the looks of it, she's brought you something better than store chicken, Daryl." Agnes winked at him. "She's brought you something made with love."
Daryl's heart pounded, and it went beyond Agnes's joking.
He'd been texting Carol—nearly every chance he got to put down a hammer and pick up his phone—and he'd talked to her at night until she simply stopped talking and fell asleep on the other end of the line, but he hadn't seen her in a few days. He'd had too much on his plate to try to get done so that everything was ready for the trip that she hadn't even agreed to take yet.
Just the very thought of her—of seeing her—could make his heart pound and his stomach grow butterflies.
He rushed to the window, hoping that Agnes wasn't confusing some strange woman for his imaginary wife, and he saw Carol outside. She was standing by her car, a large bag in hand, staring at the house like she wasn't certain if she should approach it or run away from it.
"You tell her to come inside," Agnes said. "Don't you leave her out there in the yard."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"You start eatin'," he said. "There ain't no need for your food to get cold. Don't wait."
"I won't wait," Agnes said. "But you tell her to come inside."
Daryl nodded, quickly stepping out the door.
"Don't worry," he said. "I will. And you can have mine—if you want it."
