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It’s all burning.
“Beth!” she can hear her mother screaming, the sound far away and muffled under the crackling of flames. “Beth, get out of here!”
The barn is collapsing around her, the smoke thick and unyielding. It feels like it’s just fog surrounding her—like if she blinks, she’ll be by the stream in the woods, where she goes sometimes in the early mornings just to be at peace. But when she takes a breath, she can feel the smoke crackling in her lungs, and she knows it’s not just fog.
She’s going to die here.
“Beth!”
A hand seizes her and pulls her up just as a beam starts to come down, and some part of her knows it’s her father grabbing her. He manages to push her away just in time, so that when the beam comes down, it’s on him. Her daddy screams, then, a hoarse, ragged sound, and when she dares to open her eyes and look, she sees his unconscious body, leg partially trapped under the burning beam. She opens her mouth to scream for help. Help that she already knows isn’t coming in time.
She already knows, because this happens every night. She feels her lip start to tremble. Her breaths come in faster and faster.
And then she wakes up.
*
The nightmare isn’t unexpected, is the thing.
She has them almost every night. Between that, and the therapy sessions, and the way people tiptoe around her and fuss, she feels like she’s been reliving the fire every day since it happened. There’s not a moment that goes by when it’s not on her mind, in some way.
Even if she wanted to forget, she couldn’t, for the simple fact that the worst day of her life took so many things away from her, in addition to her peace of mind. Her momma. Her brother. The horses.
Once she’s recovered from the dream enough to get up, she realizes that there’s only twenty minutes until her alarm goes off, anyway. She splashes some water on her face, gets dressed, and puts her bracelets and gloves on before heading downstairs. She can hear whistling well before she makes it all the way down, and she knows her father’s awake and waiting for her. Beth braces herself as she reaches the bottom.
“Bethy!” Hershel says with feigned cheer. “Good morning, sweetheart.”
“Mornin’, Daddy,” Beth says. She puts on a smile. She crosses the kitchen to where he’s sitting at the breakfast table and leans down to kiss his scratchy cheek. He hasn’t shaved much since Momma and Shawn died. Or since his surgeries.
He shifts his weight in the chair, like he can read her thoughts, and she can see in her periphery where his pants leg is abruptly tied off below the knee. That’s another thing they lost in the fire.
Hershel shifts again, sensing her heavy gaze on his leg, and he pats her arm with a smile. “I think Carol will be by a bit later today,” he says, referring to his physical therapist. “We have a few new exercises to get through, but she says I’m coming along well.”
Beaming so hard it hurts her face, Beth makes sure to look him in the eye and not look at his leg. He’d never say anything, but he’d notice, and it would hurt his feelings. “I knew you would, Daddy,” she says. “Have you heard anything else about that prosthetic the doctors mentioned?”
He half-shrugs, in that way that means “no” but that he’d rather not discuss it. “Prostheses are expensive, Bethy,” is all he says in reply.
And their funds are wiped out. From the damages of the fire—insurance was never going to be enough. From the funerals—Shawn didn’t have life insurance, and Annette’s wasn’t enough to cover both of them. From the surgeries—Hershel needed a lot, after the fire, and Beth spent some time in the hospital herself.
“I know,” she says with the smile she still doesn’t feel, “but it won’t hurt to ask again, especially if you’re making progress. Maggie’s been pulling doubles at the bar, and I’m working a lot of shifts at the diner. Money might as well go somewhere good, right?”
He gives her a soft, loving smile. “I don’t know what I’d do without you two girls,” he admits, but he reaches for his cane and holds it as if to prove a point. “But I’ll be okay no matter what, Bethy. We ought to put some of that money aside for your college fund.”
Beth almost snorts, but she holds the instinct back. College had been in the cards once—to get certified to teach music, probably—but now, at nineteen, it feels just as out of reach as anything else she used to want. She graduated high school from a hospital bed—who cares about college? Maggie had just barely gone back to school and graduated herself, after the fire, and she’d only hung on because Beth and Hershel had forced her to finish it. Her degree’s been sitting and collecting dust ever since, for over a year, while she’s worked at the bar in town. There’s no point in Beth leaving town to get a degree in something she also probably won’t use. They’re needed more on the farm, or on what’s left of it, and Beth doesn’t intend on leaving her father alone with it all.
No matter how much she wants to get out of this town, she thinks ruefully.
She makes her father some eggs and toast—he can do it himself, but she likes to help him with anything she can, whenever she can—before she feeds the chickens and heads out for the day. She has an afternoon shift at the 24-hour diner, but before that she needs to go to the grocery store, and then to the pharmacy to pick up her and Hershel’s prescriptions.
The family truck gives her some trouble starting, like it usually does now, but she’s honestly scared to take it to a mechanic and hear how much it’ll cost to fix it. She’s content for now to stick a piece of colored tape over the “check engine” sign, and leave it to fester for another day. She thinks back to just a few years ago, when she was preparing for college and never even worried about money, and wants to go back in time and smack her past self silly. “You were so naive!” she’d shout. “And so stupid, and so helpless, and you’re helpless now too, but smart enough to know you can’t do anything about it. And that’s worse!”
For better or worse, though, she can’t time travel and go scream at her innocent past self, so instead she fiddles with the key until the truck finally comes sputtering to life, and she makes do. The drive is pleasant, at least, worn into her with muscle memory as she leaves their rural farmland for the slightly-less-rural Main Street.
It’s Saturday morning, so the town’s as busy as it ever is, and she can feel people’s eyes following her truck as it chugs along the road. It brings her mood down, and she stops humming with the radio. “Poor Beth Greene,” she imagines them saying. “That awful fire. Did you hear she tried to—?”
Well. She’s heard them say worse—to her face, even. But that doesn’t mean she should get caught up in her own head, letting herself imagine it. She turns the music up. Singing’s been hard, ever since the fire, but she can hum a little, and Springsteen’s tunes come easy to her, like always. Annette loved Springsteen, had taught it to her practically from birth, and Beth probably still has most of his songs memorized, even though it had taken her months after the fire to be able to bear listening to her momma’s CDs.
She parks in the grocery parking lot and grabs a cart before perusing the aisles. She’s made a list, like always, but she finds the grocery store is often the perfect place to wander and daydream. As long as nobody stops you, of course.
“Beth Greene!”
Her shoulders hike up to her ears, and she holds back a cringe at the familiar voice. Oh, Lord. She turns, slapping on a fake cheery smile, and says back through clenched teeth, “Jimmy!”
Her high school ex-boyfriend leans on his own shopping cart, grinning broadly at her. His own cart is full of soda liters and chip bags, and she wonders idly if he’s throwing a party. He hadn’t been a big partygoer when they’d dated, but then, she imagines it must’ve gotten hard to date the town downer for nearly two months after the fire. He’d waited long enough after her family tragedy that it wouldn’t be cruel to break up with her, just painful, and she’ll give him that, at least. Maybe he’d turned to partying afterwards to liven up his life a little.
“You look good, Beth,” he tells her, looking her up and down.
She knows she doesn’t, knows that her hair is in a ratty braid and her t-shirt is too big on her after the weight she’s lost, weight she couldn’t really afford to lose. She’s not wearing any makeup, which she never did before the fire either, but she knows she could use some concealer for the bags under her eyes these days.
His eyes catch on her gloved hands, on the bracelets on her wrist, and she all of a sudden wishes he’d broken up with her sooner. Those two months had been full of empty platitudes. Sure, he’d held her while she’d cried, sat next to her in hospital waiting rooms and funeral folding chairs, but he’d been gone as soon as the dust settled. Some part of her had known it was going to happen soon, and could feel in her bones that he was just trying to time it right. She’d been hoping he’d stay, that he’d prove her wrong.
Life’s full of disappointments. Jimmy was just one of them.
“Thanks, Jimmy,” she says. She tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear and tries to nonchalantly scan the cans of green beans in her line of sight. “How’s life treating you lately?”
“Oh, great,” he enthuses, though he stops abruptly and gives her an ill-concealed look of guilt and pity.
It makes her vaguely nauseous.
“Throwing a party?” she asks, when he doesn’t continue. At his look of confusion, she jerks her chin to his grocery cart. “Looks like a fun time.”
“Oh!” Jimmy scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. “Yeah, my, uh, my new girlfriend is bringing some of her friends over. You could, um…” he trails off.
Beth feels even more nauseous at the thought of attending a party with her ex-boyfriend, his new girlfriend, and their beer-filled, happy-go-lucky friends. That might’ve been her, once, but she’s glad it’s not. Better to have learned that Jimmy was a fairweather boyfriend, than to still be clueless. “I gotta get back to my dad,” she says, her words stilted. “And then I have a shift at the diner tonight, so…”
“Sure!” he says, nodding too enthusiastically. “Sure, sure, just, just let me know if you ever wanna hang out… a bunch of folks in our class miss seeing you, y’know? Except at the diner, of course.”
She nods curtly, offers him a “Have a good one, Jimmy,” and makes her escape down the aisle before he can say anything else.
It’s not that she doesn’t know she’s being a little irrational. Call Beth a lot of things, but emotionally immature isn’t one of them. She’s always been what her momma used to call an “old soul,” someone who understood other people often better than they understood themselves. And she knows that not all people are bad.
But a lot of people are awful gossips, especially in a small town like this one. She’d heard the whispers after the fire, after the funerals, after her hospital stay that had had nothing to do with the burns on her hands. Most of the talk going around town had happened out of concern, she’s sure; they’d been a local tragedy for months. The worst day of her life has taken up a lot of local news station airtime and quite a few newspaper headlines. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that people watching you, and whispering to each other whenever you walk by, changes you. It makes you secretive, makes you closed off.
So, even though most of the people who watch her in public are nothing more than harmless old gossips, she’s protective over what’s left of her family—and understandably so, she thinks. She trusts two people these days: her daddy and Maggie. Everyone in town shows concern and pity when they speak to her, but where are they when the Greene family needs real help? People dropped off casseroles for two weeks after the fire happened and considered their charity done. Now they gossip about how sad they are for her, how much they pity her, and think that counts as helpful. She doesn’t want more charity, but she would like for them to not stare at her hands every time they come into the diner while she’s working… or at least to not tell her how sorry they are for her, over and over again.
Maybe the fire’s made her a little bit bitter. Beth doesn’t like that about herself. She kind of misses the days where she’d been optimistic and hopeful about human nature. Another part of her says that it’s better this way, not to expect too much of people.
She finishes grocery shopping, winces at the total before paying, and loads the bags in the truck. The pharmacy is just next door, so she stops there, too, shelling out way too much for her father’s pain medicine and her own antidepressants. Thank God Maggie’s still in good health, at least.
In one last stop before going back home, she drops by the bar with Maggie’s lunch. “You gotta quit forgetting this,” she says as soon as she steps through the doors.
A few daytime drunks turn their heads to look at her, but Maggie only rolls her eyes from behind the bar, where she’s cleaning glasses. “They gotta quit putting me on morning shift, then,” she retorts. “I don’t understand why we open at eleven in the morning when I was just here for closing at three last night.”
“Because the owner wants to make more money, and y’all can do that by calling yourselves a ‘restaurant and bar’ and selling defrosted cheese sticks?” Beth suggests cheerily, shoving a paper bag in Maggie’s direction.
Maggie takes it with a roll of her eyes, but she’s smiling. She gestures widely to the tables—there’s only one occupied, by a family that’s eating their microwaved nachos halfheartedly. “Yeah, that’s obviously working out real well for him. Me and one waitress on shift, and the ‘cook,’ if ya can call him that. Nobody tips at bars in the morning,” she whines, taking a peek in the bag. Her eyebrows raise. “Ooh, leftovers. Great. Yum.”
“I’ve been working a lot, too, lately,” Beth points out with a huff, a little frazzled from too many errands, on top of being annoyed at all of the social interaction of dealing with Jimmy. “Not much time to cook, sorry.”
“Aw, Bethy,” Maggie reaches over the bar and clasps her shoulder, a look of regret on her face, “you know I’m just teasing ya. Your two-day-old leftovers are better than most people’s fresh food.” She flashes her a grin. “Thanks for bringing it here for me.”
She gives a helpless smile—Maggie’s always been too charming by half, and worse, she knows it—and ducks out of the bar before her sister can stop her with any more conversation. She needs to get home before the groceries go bad and make lunch for her father and herself. She needs to check on the hens and make sure Daddy’s physical therapy went all right. She needs a damn nap before her shift—she can still feel the tiredness in her eyes from working yesterday’s double shift, and then sleeping poorly, thanks to bad dreams. A little sleep would go a long way right about now.
*
She manages it, for the most part. She spends too long lying in her bed and staring up at the ceiling, instead of sleeping, but by the time her “get ready for work” alarm goes off, she’s at least feeling a little calmer and prepared for the outside world.
Hershel’s asleep when she gets up—he’s doing better, he really is, but those physical therapy appointments still take it out of him—so she leaves dinner in the microwave, with a sticky note bearing a smiley face pointing it out to him. Maggie will be home from the bar in time to make sure he really does eat it.
Their dad doesn’t really need half as much caretaking as they push on him, and part of Beth worries that they’re smothering him with it, but she and Maggie have come to an agreement. They work, and Daddy heals. They worry about the money, and Daddy focuses on preparing for a prosthetic. They force him to eat, even if none of them are feeling very hungry these days.
She pulls up to the diner lot with ten minutes to spare before her shift, fixing her hair in her rearview mirror and making sure her uniform looks all right. It’s an old-style vintage diner, one of those that makes you feel like you’re in the fifties, with a jukebox machine in the corner and Elvis posters on the wall. It smells permanently like coffee beans and burned bacon, and she grew up eating Sunday lunch here after church with her parents and siblings. It’ll always have good memories for her, if for no other reason than that, and she likes working here most of the time, even if the tips aren’t amazing.
Her shift starts off busy, like most Saturday afternoons are once people decide to go out for dinner, and she knows the end of Maggie’s shift must be getting busy, too. She’ll be mad that she has to leave right as tips are picking up, Beth knows, and she can imagine the sound of Maggie’s over-exaggerated complaining so easily in her head that she smiles. She’s still smiling when the bell above the door rings, and she turns with a smile, plate of waffles still in hand, to greet whoever’s come in.
She takes in the man standing in the doorway, and she abruptly feels time seem to freeze. This town doesn’t often get strangers, and it’s unusual for anyone to get past the welcome sign without the town gossips spreading the news around so far and wide that even she hears about it, despite the fact that she doesn’t talk to much of anyone anymore.
But this man is most definitely a stranger. He’s older than her, by at least a decade, with shaggy, unkempt dark hair and blue eyes. His skin is tan, and in the summer evening heat he’s only wearing a leather vest, a white tank underneath, and holey blue jeans with grass stains on the knees. His boots clank on the tiling as he walks in and sits himself at the bar top, and only then does she realize how rudely she’s been staring.
She hands out the waffle plate and goes back behind the bar, pulling out her pen and pad. “Hi! What can I get you?” she asks cheerily, thinking longingly of her half-cold coffee back in the kitchen. Maybe she can grab a sip when she hands back his order.
The man stares down at the laminated menu that they keep on the bar top, skimming it for a moment, then looks up and locks eyes with her. This close, his eyes are even paler and bluer, and it’s almost hypnotic, the way he doesn’t shy away from her gaze. Too many people in this town will stare at her, only to avoid her eyes when she looks back. “Black coffee to drink,” he says, and his voice is a rough scrape against his throat that sounds like too many cigarettes over the years.
Beth swallows, hard. “Okay!” she says, forcing herself into normal waitress behavior. She points to her nametag on her chest. “Well, I’m Beth, I’m your waitress tonight. I’ll be back in a minute to grab your food order, but if you need me before that, just call my name and I’ll come check on you!”
The man nods again, barely glancing down at her nametag, and she sweeps back into the kitchen to grab a deep breath. There, she finds the coffee pot and pours out this man’s mug, getting a glass of water and a lemon slice as well. When she delivers it to the bar, the man raises an eyebrow at the lemon wedge, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Figured out what you want yet?” Beth asks with a smile, pen at the ready.
He looks at her up and down, like he’s trying to discern if she’s worth asking whatever it is he’s got on his mind. He must decide she is, because he puts down his menu. “What do you like here?” he asks.
“Oh! Well, we have a bit of everything—”
“What do you get?” he asks, cutting off what promises to be a very nervous ramble on her part.
Beth stares blankly at him. It’s not the first time someone’s asked for her recommendation, but nobody words it like that—what do you get?—as though her own tastes are what’s important here, and not whatever’s palatable enough to please the general population of whoever’s asking. “I get the chicken pot pie,” she answers automatically, before she can overthink it. “It’s good comfort food, and it’s nice and hot.”
“Hm,” the man says, not breaking eye contact with her. They stare at each other for a good five seconds, him studying both her and her answer, and then he blinks and nods. “I’ll have that, then. Thanks.”
“Oh… um, of course,” she rushes out, feeling pleased for some reason that she’s passed his test. She scribbles it down in her messy handwriting, then, pausing, looks him over again. “You’re new around here,” she says tentatively.
The man jerks his head down in a rough nod. “Hm,” he says again. “M’brother and I just got in yesterday.”
She looks around, but everyone else here is familiar, the usual Saturday evening diners. Then, she realizes that almost everyone is staring at the two of them: the town charity case and the unknown stranger. Their rubbernecking gazes make her stiffen up, hot under her waitress uniform’s collar, and she asks with sticky sweetness, “And will he be joining you, Mr…?”
“Dixon,” he says after a minute, looking her up and down. If he’s noticed the change in her, or everyone’s stares fixed on them, he doesn’t say so. “It’s Daryl, though. I’m no ‘Mister’ anything. And no, he won’t. He’s at the bar.”
Beth smiles before she can help it. Something about that statement was charming, even if he clearly didn’t mean for it to be. He’s certainly not flirting, too awkward and avoidant to even be trying, but some part of her wishes he was. He’s new, and he doesn’t know her story, and he isn’t babying her or watching her like a train crash that’s about to happen. New means nonjudgmental.
And she gets the feeling that, from the look of him, new could also mean exciting.
“My sister works at the bar,” she informs him.
“Hope she’s got a thick skin, then,” he mutters, staring down at his menu and picking at the skin of his thumb. “My brother’s not too nice to waitresses.”
“But you are, aren’t you?” she says, with a hint of a grin at her mouth, and his eyes dart up to look at her in surprise, like he didn’t think she had it in her to be brave enough to tease him, or to flirt. “And she’s not a waitress,” she adds, “she’s the bartender.”
Daryl coughs behind his fist, then swallows down half of the coffee in one go. “Y’all need a fresh pot,” he mumbles thickly, avoiding eye contact. He seems thrown off by her halfhearted attempt at flirtatious banter.
She suddenly wishes she hadn’t done it. He clearly didn’t like it. And what a great look, for the one person that didn’t know her enough to judge her by her past: to see her as some easy floozy, flirting with every stranger that came into the diner. All the stereotypes of the slutty waitress spring to her mind, and she flushes. “Let me start a new pot, and I’ll put your order in,” she says quickly, and she’s gone before he looks up.
Beth makes a fresh pot and hands the order back to the cook. When she re-emerges into the dining area, she breezes past Daryl, attending to her other tables. She spends an easy few minutes that way, clearing up empty plates and writing down orders, and by the time she goes to the kitchen to pick up Daryl’s meal, she feels better. She pours a new cup of coffee, too, and she gains a small amount of satisfaction by thunking it onto the countertop in front of him.
Daryl looks up, too steady and practiced to be startled by the sudden noise and movement right in front of him. “Thanks,” is all he says.
“S’a fresh pot, just for you,” she replies easily, and she sets his food in front of him. “Enjoy. Lemme know if you need anything, okay?”
“Wait,” he says, just as she’s turning away to tend to table 9. She looks back at him, how he’s playing with the lip of his mug. He’s staring up at her through the fringe of his bangs—they need a trim, and soon—and he seems hesitant. “Y’know what time the bar closes?”
“Three-thirty,” she tells him. Technically it’s three, but it takes half an hour to convince the drunks to go home, some nights. Maggie complains about it often enough.
He bites at his lip but doesn’t break his gaze. “And this place?”
“We’re twenty-four hours. But ya gotta buy something every few hours, can’t just nurse a cup of coffee all night,” she recites, still memorized from her training. This place has been a 24-hour diner her whole life, though it gets deserted most nights by 1AM. Then, it picks up when the drunks move in here at 3AM, and then it’s dead again until 6AM.
He nods. “Well, shit, guess I can’t convince him we gotta leave early, then,” he mumbles to himself.
“Your brother?”
“Yeah, I’m his ride,” he says, with resignation in his words. “Or I will be, once he drinks enough.”
Beth tucks a stray strand of hair that’s come loose from her ponytail behind her ear. “Sorry,” she tells him. “I don’t go home till midnight—I’ll make sure you get the fresh stuff.” She jerks her head down to the coffee mug.
He cracks a smile, tiny and crooked, like he’s not sure he’s doing it right. That little smile sets her back at ease, makes her feel like she can joke around with him again. “You in here every night?”
“Most nights,” she says. “Why, you gonna need someone to top off your coffee most nights?”
Daryl shrugs. “Depends on my brother. I got a shift at the mechanic’s every morning… probably won’t matter to him if I get any sleep before it. Merle might wanna stay in some night… when pigs fly, maybe.”
She nods in understanding. She wasn’t even born yet when Daddy drank too much, nor was Maggie, but the lingering effects of alcoholism have haunted them despite that. There’s never been any alcohol in their house—not even after the fire, though that was mostly because Daddy was too hurt to get himself down to the bar, and not due to lack of wanting—except for the few times Maggie snuck mini bottles of vodka in during her high school years. Momma never drank either. But Beth has seen the town drunks stagger into the diner, and she’s heard Maggie’s stories of having to cajole them into going home or being picked up by their spouses. This is the kind of town where if something bad happens to you, whether it’s drinking or a bad reputation, a lot of the time you’re stuck with it for the long haul.
She understands that, too.
“Well, I’m usually here,” she says cheerfully. “I gotta go check on some other folks—try your food, while it’s still hot!”
The rest of her shift passes. She checks on the lingering tables, makes some middling-to-decent tips, and refills Daryl’s coffee every now and then when it gets low. She notices when she goes to take his plate that he’d cleaned it, but she has other tables to tend to and doesn’t get the chance to rib him about liking her recommendation. By the time she clocks out, seeing him still sitting at the counter nursing a half-cold coffee, she’s barely gotten to speak to him again at all.
But she thinks about him the whole drive home. More than she ought to.
*
The next morning, she hauls herself up bright and early to wake Maggie and Daddy. They all used to be good early risers when they still had the barn—horses need tending, after all—but ever since the fire, and with Maggie and Beth both working lots of late shifts, they’ve all gotten a little bad about it. After she feeds the chickens and gathers the eggs, she makes everyone else get up and get ready for church.
Church is still the one major thing tying them to the community. They’d taken two weeks off, while Hershel was still in the hospital, because Beth had been a mess and Maggie had never been very religious anyway. But after Beth’s breakdown, Hershel had insisted from his hospital bed that they start going again, because it would ground them and make them feel better.
Beth used to believe in God. She’d still like to. It’s just harder now, some days.
They load up in the truck, Hershel with his cane and his nicest suit, Maggie and Beth in decent dresses. She spends the drive preparing herself—church is about the only time the three of them are in public together, and that means people will swarm them if they get even a hint of vulnerability—and taking deep, even breaths. If they get there early enough, they can get a good pew in the back, where people are less likely to bother them.
Annette had had a half-row in the front practically reserved for the family. She’d haul Maggie and Shawn and Beth awake, forcing them to sit up straight in their nice pew that she was so proud of having. She and Hershel would dress everybody up real nice, and take them out to the diner afterward for a milkshake, and they’d all laugh and enjoy the day. The memory makes Beth’s lip tremble before she forces it to stiffen.
The service is interminable. She smooths out her skirts over her lap repeatedly just to give herself something to do, half-listening to the preacher’s speech on forgiveness and healing. It’s a nice speech, but it’s still long, and she finds herself tapping her foot, hoping and praying to get out on time. If you pray to God in church, does that make it more likely to work?
It doesn’t work. Or, it does, but it blows back on them like it always does. They do get out early, but Jaclyn Smythe stops them as they’re walking out, practically draping herself over Hershel’s arm that isn’t holding up his cane. She’s a debutante, an old-fashioned Southern belle, and she’s well-known around town for how quickly she’d adapted to widowhood and how eager she is for attention from the local widowers. Not that Beth is one to judge, but she doesn’t like it when strange women hang all over her father, and she doesn’t think she can be blamed for that.
“We all around town just want to check in on you,” Jaclyn croons, taking in the whole family one at a time: Hershel’s untamed beard, Maggie’s fidgeting, Beth’s deep under-eye circles. “After all, to lose your family… and then we all heard about Elizabeth’s stint in the hospital—”
Different folks lingering in the pews after service swivel their heads to look at her, at her wrists, like clockwork, and Beth snaps. Without a word, she stalks out of the church, past Maggie’s grabby hands, and knowing all the time as the whispers increase that she’s just drawing more attention to herself by walking out.
Well, fine. For once, it doesn’t bother her. Let her feel their stares on her back—but she’s gonna do it her way, and have their stares actually mean something.
She steps out of the church and looks out onto the street. It’s near noon now, and people are wandering through the town square, heading off to lunch and window-shopping and all kinds of things. And there, down the street: Abe’s, the only place you can go to get your car fixed. She’s been avoiding it for weeks, though the truck needs a trip badly.
She walks there now. The whole time, she doesn’t let herself think, doesn’t let herself consider that this is too forward of her, not to mention stupid, and likely to make Daryl think she is actually either crazy or fast and easy. Well, if he thinks those things, then fuck it, at least she’ll know that he’s just as judgy as Jaclyn fucking Smythe and the other unbearable people that judge her, pity her, criticize her every move.
She walks into the shop, having not made many plans past that, and finds Abe at the desk, talking up Rosita, his girlfriend slash receptionist. “Is Daryl here?” she asks.
Abe looks up at her in shock. They know each other—everyone in town knows each other by name and face—but they’ve never spoken beyond mild pleasantries, and he probably can’t imagine why she’s asking about his newest hire. “The drifter?” he grunts out, recovering. He jerks his head back beyond the front office, toward the outdoor section of the shop, where they actually work on the cars. “Back there. You, uh… you need him?”
Beth doesn’t let herself think about the implications of that sentence. Clearly, she isn’t here to make an appointment, or she’d just talk to Rosita. But does she need him? “Yeah, thanks,” she answers shortly, stalking into the back without another word.
She finds Daryl easily, laid out underneath a car and swearing up a storm at whatever he’s found in the engine. She recognizes those holey jeans and well-worn boots. “Mr. Dixon?” she asks, and his head bangs up against the car, causing more swearing, before he wheels himself out from underneath the car.
His eyes don’t widen. Somehow, she gets the sense that nothing she could do would get him to actually show his surprise. “Diner girl,” he says, and his eyes flicker as he takes her in: bags under her eyes, prim and proper Sunday dress, determined look on her face. “Y’having car trouble?”
“No. Yes,” she amends. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
He raises an eyebrow up at her, wordless, waiting for her to tell him on her own time.
She appreciates it, the lack of pressure, and it lets the words come out more easily for her than they might have. “I like you,” she says. He doesn’t even blink, just keeps looking at her, steady and sure. “And I,” she pauses, reassures herself, then continues, “I think you like me. And I think we should do something about it.”
Daryl glances again at her dress, all breezy and pink and springlike. “You sure you’re not just doing this to piss off your dad?” he asks, like she’s some teenager going through a rebellious phase.
Color flushes her cheeks, and Beth holds her fists at her sides. “I’m an adult,” she enunciates clearly, “and my dad has nothing to do with my dating choices. You sure you’re not just trying to chase me off by making me mad?”
“And why would I do that?”
“’Cause you’re scared?” she suggests.
He scoffs. “I’m not scared of nothin’,” he declares, and he sits up on the wheel cart, looking at her seriously. “Fine,” he says after a moment, wiping his greasy hands on his white shirt, not caring about the mess it makes of the fabric. “You got anyplace to be tonight?”
Beth smiles. “My night off,” she answers.
“’Kay.” He thinks for a second. “Well, since this is your idea, y’can plan it. I’ll meet you back here at five.”
Before she can respond with anything else, he’s lying back down and rolling himself under the car, focused again on his task. She doesn’t want to have to beg for his attention—that feels like losing, somehow, and she wants to continue considering this a victory—so she walks out, feeling Abe and Rosita’s eyes burning into her back. Her steps feel lighter somehow, like doing this took a huge weight off her back. It feels good.
She meets Maggie and Daddy at the car, fending off their questions by telling them she just needed to walk around and cool off. She can still feel the sensation of eyes on her, of Rosita’s gaping mouth and Abe’s raised eyebrows. She smiles to herself.
Those kinds of stares, she could grow to like.
*
True to his word, Daryl’s waiting outside of Abe’s Mechanics at 5PM when she arrives. She feels slightly guilty for lying to her dad about her work schedule, but it couldn’t be helped, since if she’d told him that she had a date, Hershel definitely would have had a million questions. She’d had to wait for him to lie down for his post-PT nap, then sneak out in an outfit that bridged the gap between “nice” and “not too nice”. She has a feeling that the latter would just scare Daryl off.
So she’s here, in her pink t-shirt and blue overall shorts, her hair up in a loose ponytail, wearing only the slightest hint of lip gloss and mascara. She’s more pleased than she should be to see that Daryl has changed too, probably hastily as soon as his shift ended, into a new blue t-shirt, with no grease stains. He’s still wearing his angel wing vest and the same jeans and sneakers, but the change in shirt implies an effort that she wasn’t sure he’d make for her.
It’s an overreaction on her part, but it still makes her feel all warm and fluttery inside to see that he did try for her.
“Hi,” Beth says as she gets out of the truck, her bravado from this morning suddenly gone dormant. She flashes him a smile and studies him further. His hair is messy, still, but looks like he tried to finger-comb it. She likes it. It makes him look like he’s been nervous, thinking about her all afternoon.
And, to her surprise, he does seem a little nervous. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, not really looking her in the eye, before he abruptly says, “My bike or your truck?”
She looks to where his gaze is, and sees a giant motorcycle, with big handles, nearby in the parking lot. It’s one of the only vehicles left, and it doesn’t surprise her that it’s his. It fits him somehow. A new thrill goes through her at the thought of riding it, circling her arms around him and holding on tight, but that won’t fit with the plan for tonight, so she regretfully puts that daydream away for next time. “My truck,” she says firmly. “I know where we’re going, remember?”
He clambers into the passenger seat without any protest, and doesn’t say anything either way when she turns up Springsteen. “I’ve got other CDs,” she says as she peels out of the parking lot, sure of herself as she takes turns and moves onto the back roads.
“This’s good,” he says. “Who doesn’t like Springsteen?”
She grins at him and keeps her eyes on the road, humming a little along with the music. It doesn’t escape her notice, out of the corner of her eye, when he smiles back.
Eventually, she finds herself on the dirt road she’s been heading toward all along, and Daryl looks at the woods around them with interest. “Y’ain’t taking me out back to murder me, are you?” he says, unconcerned.
“I’m half your size,” she retorts. “Maybe I should be the one scared, huh?”
He gives her an unimpressed look. “Figured a girl like you would be smart enough to have a weapon on ya if a guy tries to hurt ya. ’Specially if you’re the one driving him out to the middle of nowhere.”
“This whole town is the middle of nowhere,” she says, snorting. “And don’t you worry, I’m not defenseless.” She doesn’t elaborate—her pocketknife sits snugly in her overall pocket, folded up and out of sight unless it’s necessary.
Daryl lets the matter drop, exhaling roughly through his nostrils in what might generously be called a chuckle. When she parks the truck under a copse of trees, he gets out and waits for her, surveying the area. “What is this place?” he asks.
She shrugs. It’s technically not part of the Greene property, but it’s only a few minutes’ walk from her house, and she used to come here all the time just to breathe and relax in the mornings. Before the fire, anyway. “S’just a place,” she says, pulling a bag out of the truckbed. “But I thought we could eat here. Maybe swim in the river.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Y’tryin’ to get me to go skinny dipping on the first date?”
A thrill runs through her, sharp and electric, at him saying “date,” and she shakes her head with a nervous laugh. “No, the water’s just nice and cool in this heat,” she answers, and he follows as she heads through the trees, right to the edge of the water. It’s really more of a stream than a river, but in the middle of one section, it gets deep enough to reach her shoulders. She used to swim here sometimes with Shawn, growing up, and she smiles at the memory, pushing it back in her mind before she gets sad.
Beth sits by the water’s edge, setting her shoes to the side and letting her feet dip in the water. As promised, it feels cold and refreshing in the humid Georgia air. She watches Daryl tentatively remove his boots and socks before following her example, and he lets out a rumble of contentment at the feeling of the cool water. “Hot?” she asks.
“You try sweatin’ under cars all day,” he grumbles, but he’s smiling at one corner of his mouth. “Abe don’t pay for outdoor air conditioning. Just a coupla shitty fans. Didn’t have time for a shower before you got there.”
“You coulda gone home and showered,” she counters, grinning merrily. “I’d have picked you up there just fine, too.”
He shakes his head once, quick. “Y’don’t need to see my place,” he says roughly, but with enough firmness that it’s clear it isn’t a joke to him.
“Oh,” is all she can think to reply. “I know you just moved, but—”
“Y’don’t need to meet my brother,” he clarifies, and he’s avoiding her eyes now, staring down at the water as it rushes past them.
“Oh,” she repeats. She searches for a way to change the subject, since this is clearly something he’s not budging on, and she doesn’t want to tease him about it. “Well, I brought food… unless you’re too hot to eat?” she jokes.
Daryl looks up at her, then, with a little wariness still in his eyes, but something in him lets go of the tension and he relaxes. “Never too hot to eat,” he says.
She grins and reaches for the bag, pulling out the sandwiches she’d made before coming to pick him up. She also listens for the clink of glass and pulls out the bottle she’d managed to beg Maggie into giving her. It’s from Maggie’s personal collection that she keeps hidden in her room, so there’s no telling what kind of quality it is—Maggie’s stint with alcohol in college focused more on quantity than quality, as far as Beth can tell—but it was nice of Maggie to give it to her. Although, she thinks ruefully, eventually Maggie is going to make her tell what exactly she needed a bottle of peach schnapps for.
“Where did you get that?” Daryl asks dryly, seeing her gripping the neck of the bottle. “Thought you were too young to buy.”
“Oh, relax,” she says, reaching back into the bag for two Solo cups. “Unless you don’t like schnapps?”
“Never turn down free alcohol,” he says with a shrug, but his face suggests that he’d prefer something a bit stronger.
She pours a little into the two cups—not enough to get them even tipsy, she hopes—and passes one to him, taking a sip of the other for herself. It makes her nose wrinkle. She has drank before, at a few sleepovers and parties before the fire, but always from whatever other girls could sneak from their parents’ liquor cabinets, and it’s been awhile since then. The taste is overly sweet and heavy, and she digs into her sandwich to swallow down the taste. When she looks Daryl’s way, he seems very amused, but he’s intentionally not looking at her as he smiles and eats his own sandwich.
It’s quiet while they eat, and she wonders if this is what he’d had in mind when he’d accepted her request for a date. “What are you thinkin’?” she asks suddenly, wanting to interrupt the silence and allay her nervousness all at once.
He shrugs. “This’d make good hunting ground.”
“You hunt?” Somehow, she can’t quite picture him with a gun, but he does have the look of a hunter.
“Crossbow,” he says. “Picked it up when I was a kid. My brother taught me.”
She nods. “I could see that. I bet you know how to track and walk real quiet.”
He shrugs again, which she’s beginning to learn is really just a confirmation from him. “Had to do it to eat, sometimes. Pick up on it real fast.”
Beth rests her elbow in the grass and props her chin in her hand, looking over at him. “Could you show me?” she asks suddenly. Beth doesn’t care much about the concept of hunting—Daddy never did it, though Shawn went with friends a couple of times—but she likes the idea of tracking, of knowing how to find her way when she’s lost.
He looks over at her, eyes cool, and dips his head in a nod. “Sure.”
“I… I don’t have any money to pay for lessons or anything like that.”
“S’fine. I’ll teach you.”
She shakes her head stubbornly. “No. I gotta pay you back somehow. I could teach you something?”
“What have you got that I’m gonna wanna learn?” he asks, lips quirking up in a smile, amused by her tenaciousness.
Beth frowns. “Singing, I guess.” She notices his immediate reaction, which is a raised eyebrow of doubt, and laughs. “Okay, maybe not. Um, I could teach you the piano?”
“You got a piano? Don’t exactly have ’em lying around in the trailer park,” he says brusquely, but there’s at least a hint of interest in his voice that encourages her to keep talking.
“We have one at the house,” she says to him, thinking of how that would go. Daryl in her house, around her dad, his fingers on her keys. She swallows thickly. Well, she’ll have to introduce him to her folks eventually… if this date doesn’t end up a total disaster, which is still within the realm of possibility. “Would you… would you be interested?”
Daryl looks over at the water. “My mom played piano, growing up,” he tells his reflection.
She looks at the little fish, wriggling in the stream, and listens to the bubbling of the water as it flows past them. “Is that a yes?”
“Sure,” he says after a long moment of silence. “Ain’t got nothin’ else to do in this town besides work and pick up after Merle.”
“And teach me tracking,” she prods with a grin.
He smiles a little. “And teach you tracking.”
After a moment, she stands up and wanders further into the water, feeling the mud squishing under her feet and between her toes. “Gonna join me?” she asks, stretching out a gloved hand.
Daryl squints up at her in the dying light of the sunset coming through the trees, but eventually he reaches up and takes her hand. His palm is callused and rough, and there’s still a little grease under his fingernails that he’s tried to scrub out, but his skin is warm and reassuring through the fabric of her glove. She links their fingers together before he can let go, drawing him closer as he wades in. She steps backward, stumbling as the stream gets unexpectedly deeper, and they both end up knee-deep. He’s not wearing shorts like she is—he’ll be soaked from the knees down—but he doesn’t complain. He doesn’t say anything, actually; he just keeps staring down at her, his eyes trained on her mouth.
“Sorry,” she says breathlessly, all too aware of his gaze on her. She can’t stop looking away from him, too nervous to even blink. “I didn’t mean to pull you so far in.”
“S’okay,” he whispers, and then he’s leaning down, his eyes closing, and kissing her.
Beth has only a split second of shock before she feels herself melting into it, leaning up on her toes and trying not to slip as she puts her arms around his neck and kisses him back. It’s hesitant, and gentle, and soft. She can feel him trying not to kiss too hard or too messy, keeping himself perfectly still under her arms, so much so that it takes a minute before he moves enough to put his hands on her waist and keep her from falling over into the river.
Something about his touch on her waist makes her surge up into him, intensifying the kiss, and she removes her arms from his neck so she can cup his face. His cheek is scratchy under her hand, five o’clock shadow rough against her palm, and only then does she realize that, somewhere in the excitement of the kiss and looping her arms over his shoulders, she’s lost her right glove.
Daryl stills under her hand at the touch, his lips breaking apart from hers with a soft sound. She keeps her eyes closed, frozen at the thought of him asking about her hands, asking how she’d gotten the burn scars and the wrinkled, marred skin. With her glove off, he can probably also see the thin, pink line on her wrist, and the thought makes her unable to move.
But Daryl doesn’t say a word. His hands leave her waist, and suddenly they’re on her face, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. He rubs his thumb against the edge of her mouth, saying in a low rumble, “Messed up your lip gloss.”
She giggles and opens her eyes without even realizing she’s doing it, whispering, “It’s okay,” as she meets his steady gaze. He isn’t looking away from her face, and it’s then that she realizes that he’s not going to ask. He definitely noticed, but he’s not going to ask.
She kisses him again.
Later, when they’ve stopped kissing and she’s realized that her glove, whenever she dropped it, has doubtlessly floated down the stream, she keeps waiting for him to ask. They pack up her bag and the mostly untouched bottle of schnapps—she’ll return it to Maggie and hope that that keeps her from asking too many questions—and get back in her truck. She hums in the car, keeping her lips pressed tightly together so she can feel the hot swollenness of her mouth from where she’s been thoroughly kissed.
In the passenger seat, Daryl isn’t half so obvious, but he clearly enjoyed the kiss too, if the half-smile playing at his lips is any indication. He doesn’t say a word when she reaches over and takes his hand that’s in his lap, holding it the drive home. His thumb rubs over her scar tissue on her palms, where it’s the worst, and he keeps silent.
Part of her had been afraid earlier to even mention it, but her good mood has the words spilling past her lips, barely even worried. He’s already shown that he isn’t the type of person to judge or fawn or pity.
“There was a fire,” she says into the quiet, interrupted only by Springsteen crooning out a ballad. The music gives her something to pay attention to, to pretend that she isn’t telling this story. “In our barn. My mom and brother died in it, and my dad lost his leg. He was, um… he was trapped under a beam, it was on fire. I got these scars pulling him out.”
She doesn’t like to think about it, is the thing. Her nightmares always interrupt themselves right after the beam falls, at her moment of overwhelming helplessness. But she remembers, even though by that point she was dizzy with smoke inhalation: how she’d forced herself to try to move the beam, screaming with pain as it burned her, only to have to stop; how she’d dragged her dad out from under it, already able to tell that his leg was beyond repair; how she’d managed to pull him out of the barn by his suspender strap, sobbing with what little breath she had left in her lungs by that point. The neighbors had called the fire department by then, and the town’s single firetruck rushed in a few minutes later, just as she was about to go back in for her mom and Shawn.
But a fireman had stopped her at the doors, which were too hot to touch, and told her to wait there with her dad and the ambulance. As she protested, swaying with smoke inhalation and pain, the roof had caved in. She’d heard the sound of Annette’s screaming.
She doesn’t remember much past that part. But she knows the firemen had had to hold her back from going back in—she’d heard that part from her doctor—until she passed out from exhaustion. And meanwhile, Shawn and Momma burned.
“I didn’t have time to go back for my brother or my mom,” she forces herself to keep talking, aware that she’s gripping the steering wheel too tightly. “I spent a while in the hospital… so did my dad. Anyway, that’s… that’s why my hands look like this.”
Daryl’s quiet, and she’s not sure if it’s a thoughtful quiet or an uncomfortable one. But he clears his throat, murmurs out, “Everybody’s got scars,” and keeps holding her hand.
And that’s enough, for them.
She drops him off outside of Abe’s, where he can get to his motorcycle easily. He comes around the side of the truck and kisses her through her window, cupping her face and pressing his thumb against her jaw to keep her steady for it. When he says goodnight, he says it with a little half-smile.
She hums the whole way home.
*
“Patty Webber says she saw you with that drifter guy last night,” Maggie tells Beth at the breakfast table the next morning. It’s her day off from the bar, so she’s gotten up at a half-decent hour, for once, and joined Beth and Hershel for eggs and bacon.
Beth exerts some self-control and manages not to choke on her bacon. “What?”
“She was near Abe’s Mechanics and says she saw Daryl Dixon get in your truck,” Maggie adds.
Hershel looks up from his breakfast and over at Beth, who tries not to avoid his eye guiltily. “What’s all this about?” he asks delicately.
She takes a deep breath. They had to find out sooner or later. “I had a date,” she tells them. “I’m sorry I didn’t come clean about that, I just… I wanted to see if I really liked him first.”
“Bethy, he’s trash!” Maggie scoffs. “They’ve only been here a couple of days and I’ve already had to escort his brother out of the bar, watch him puke in the alley. Daryl picks him up at night, you know that? It’s enabling, is what it is. Besides, nobody knows them!”
“That’s the appeal!” Beth says, flaring with anger and surprised with herself over it. She’s known that she likes Daryl… she maybe hadn’t known that she likes him this much, to defend him over breakfast with her family. “He doesn’t know us. Doesn’t give me sad little pity eyes like everybody else in this town. And he’s… he’s sweet. He’s a good person, Maggie.”
Hershel clears his throat. “That’s enough, girls.”
“No, it isn’t!” Beth says, feeling her blood heating up in her veins. They always talk around it, how the town treats them, and now that she’s mad, the words won’t stop coming out. “Everyone in this town treats us like some sympathy case, aren’t y’all just sick of it?! I’m sorry I wanted someone around who wouldn’t stare at my hands all day long! You know what he said when he saw ’em? Nothing! Daryl likes me, and I like him, so you will just have to suck it up, Mags, I’m sorry!”
“Enough,” Hershel says, with a fierceness he hasn’t shown since before the fire. He sighs at their startled looks and glances over at Beth, deflating and giving her a tired look. “He makes you happy?”
Beth nods stubbornly. “It’s only been one date. But Daddy, I like him.”
“Well, let’s not judge folks by their families, sweetheart,” he tells Maggie, then looks back at Beth. “But I expect to meet this man soon, all right?”
Beth winces, already sure from her time with Daryl that he won’t react well from having to play the “meet the parent” routine. But there’s no getting around it—besides, she’d planned on bringing him here one day, anyway, to play the piano. She nods and goes back to her bacon. “Yes, Daddy.”
Damn it.
*
Daryl raises an eyebrow at her from across the counter at the diner that night. “I have to what?” he asks.
“My dad is… old-fashioned,” she says uncomfortably, still pouring out his coffee. Her heart had thudded excitedly in her chest when she saw him sitting there midway through her shift, until she realized she’d have to tell him the news. “He wants to meet you. I know we’ve only had one date, I know it’s—weird , but—”
“It’s fine,” Daryl says. He shrugs when she gives him a bewildered look. “Well, I was comin’ over anyway, right? For the piano.”
“Right,” she says, surprised by his complacency. “Well… okay. I was thinkin’... the next time we both have a day off. We could go by my place?”
Daryl shrugs. “Sure. But m’checking out your truck first. Thing barely started last time.”
Beth’s aware, then, of the weight of eyes on them, the near-empty Monday dinnertime crowd all staring heavily at them. Patty Webber can’t keep her big mouth shut, never could, but all the staring doesn’t make Beth as self-conscious and angry as it normally does. In fact, just the opposite: it makes her… happy. All these folks, seeing her with this kind, sweet man, who drank her shitty peach schnapps and kissed her in the creek.
“Okay,” she tells him with a shy smile, and she goes off to serve someone else.
*
The next time they have a day off together, he checks out her truck then leaves it in the mechanic parking lot, telling her that he’ll check some parts in more detail later, when he’s working. She climbs up onto his motorcycle behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek into the leather of his vest, just near the exposed skin of his shoulder and upper arm. She can just barely see a bit of scar tissue peeking out from under the vest. She doesn’t ask about it—it doesn’t feel like her place to do so, when he was so understanding and helpful about her own scars.
Daryl shudders underneath her when she lays her head near the scarring, and she worries for a moment that she may have gone too far. But he settles and starts the bike, and suddenly they’re roaring off onto the streets.
The ride is fast and thrilling, like she’d thought it might be, but time seems to slow without any conversation or music to anchor them, and she finds herself lost in the drive, lost in the sensation of her cheek on the rough, warm leather. She closes her eyes and lets herself be lost, lets herself drift in the comfort and excitement and safety of being on this bike with this man she barely knows, but somehow trusts so much. She knows she should be suspicious of that, of how quickly she’s letting herself fall for him, but she can’t help it. Something about her and Daryl together just fits.
When he stops in her driveway, having easily followed the directions she gave him before they left, she lifts her head off his back and smiles at him as she removes the spare helmet he’d given to her. “Ready to play the piano?” she asks brightly.
He grimaces. “Ready to burst your eardrums, more like.”
“You’ll do fine,” she promises. She’s used to teaching folks with no experience, and she’s sure she can handle him just fine. “I’ll go easy on you.”
“Thank God,” he mumbles, dismounting. He takes the helmet from her, hanging them both off one of the handlebars, and follows her inside.
Where Maggie and Hershel are promptly waiting. Beth cringes at the front door. She’d expected her dad to be there, since he usually does all of his PT and errands in the morning, and it’s early afternoon now. But Maggie works late tonight, and by all rights she should still be asleep. The fact that she woke up early just to grill Beth’s new boyfriend is slightly infuriating, slightly sweet, and completely unnecessary.
Just as she turns to Daryl with a whispered apology on her lips, preparing to take him into the lions’ den, he surges ahead of her, one hand extended for a handshake. Hershel takes it easily, without even a raised brow. “Daryl Dixon,” Daryl says, clearly debating whether he should tack a “sir” at the end of it. He doesn’t, in the end, but he lowers his eyes respectfully.
Hershel studies him: black leather vest, white tank top, faded blue jeans. The messy, too-long hair, the worn work boots. White trash, he’s probably thinking. Or maybe he isn’t, Beth isn’t sure. Her dad’s always been a tough one to read.
After a moment, Hershel gives him a benevolent nod. “Hershel Greene. And this is my other daughter, Maggie,” he gestures with his free hand to a scowling Maggie. “Nice to meet you, Daryl.”
Daryl nods at Maggie, lowering his eyes. Meanwhile, Beth is frozen in place behind him, unsure of how to react. Her dad and Daryl have both surprised her, in a good way, by seeming to get along.
“We’ll leave you two be to practice piano,” Hershel says, then gives Beth a conspiratorial smile. “Won’t we, Maggie?”
She shoots him a betrayed look, then a protective glance at Beth. “But, Daddy—”
“I think you need to start getting ready for work,” he interrupts, “don’t you?”
Beth resists the urge to fling herself at her father and kiss his cheek. “Thanks, Daddy,” she says, taking Daryl by the hand before she can talk herself out of it. She didn’t wear her gloves today, half-giddy and half-terrified to go without them even if it was just for the drive into town, and it’s bare skin on skin. She holds her breath a little.
But then she feels the pressure—it’s not exactly sensation, in some areas of her palms where the burns were worst—of Daryl rubbing his thumb against her palm. She breaks out into a grin, not looking over at him, and pulls him away from her family and into the sitting room before her father can change his mind.
Once there, she sits him at the piano bench, pulling out an introductory book of sheet music that she hasn’t used in a while. After confirming that he doesn’t want anything to drink, she sits down beside him, feeling a little thrill at how his thigh brushes hers. “Okay, we’ll start with keys,” she says, and starts listing them.
Daryl is incredibly focused—now that he’s said he’s a hunter and tracker, she can’t imagine him as anything different, with the amount of concentration he gives everything he does. He remembers how to read music from school, which already makes everything easier. He picks up the basics fairly quickly, though his fingers are clumsy on the keys, and Beth lays his fingers on top of hers to guide him. “Like this,” she shows him, trying a scale.
He catches her wince. “You okay?”
She shrugs, caught, and tries not to feel too uneasy. “I didn’t play piano for a long time, after the fire. The muscles in my hands aren’t used to it. Between that and the scar tissue, sometimes it…” she drifts off.
“Hurts?”
“It’s uncomfortable,” she shrugs again. Hurts isn’t quite right. “Gets easier once I’ve played for a minute or two. Here, I think you’ve got it. Try it again, on your own this time.”
After an hour, Daryl seems to be picking it up quite nicely, with a determined crease between his brows that shows his level of concentration. “Tracking is easier,” he mutters when she teases him for it.
“I’m sure I’ll say the same thing about piano when you take me,” she says with a laugh. “You’re doing great. Are there songs you wanna learn? Most people start with ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’.”
He shakes his head. “Show me that last scale, again?” She does, and he nods with satisfaction, saying, “I got a song I wanna learn.”
That’s all he says, content to leave it a mystery for now, and she smiles at the harmless secrecy. “Okay. Any other requests?”
“What’s the first song you learned?” he asks.
Beth can’t even remember that far back. She was probably two or three when her momma started teaching her. The pang in her chest at the flood of memories is expected. It even, she thinks gratefully, feels kind of good. “It was probably a psalm or something,” she says with a shrug. “And then the oldies, like my mom liked. I’d play anything she’d teach me.”
When she looks up at him, he’s staring at her with those dark, solemn eyes. “Play something,” he says, jerking his chin toward the keys. “If it don’t hurt you, I mean. Play something she liked.”
She blinks. “You sure?”
He smiles a little. “There ain’t no jukebox, so,” he says, teasing her a little over the diner jukebox. Other diners will play the same songs on repeat all night long, and she’s commiserated over it with him before. “Whatever you wanna play.”
Beth smiles back helplessly. Before she can consciously decide yes or no, her fingers are pressing down on keys. It’s a little awkward at first, but her fingers warm up, and soon she’s playing and singing, her voice a little scratchy in her throat from disuse. She hasn’t sang in so long… but it feels right, now.
“We said we’d walk together, baby come what may
That come the twilight, should we lose our way
If as we’re walking, a hand should slip free
I’ll wait for you, and should I fall behind, wait for me…”
She hardly dares to glance in his direction once she finishes the first verse, but his eyes on her are steady and open, taking everything she’s giving. Her fingers move more confidently over the keys, and she keeps singing.
He puts a hand, then, on her thigh, and far from making her nervous, it only makes her smile through her singing as she reaches the third verse.
“Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true
Oh, but you and I know what this world can do
So let’s make our steps clear, that the other may see
And I’ll wait for you, if I should fall behind, wait for me…”
She drifts off, letting the piano die down and not chancing the fourth verse about the wedding. That would make her blush, and it has the possibility of making him uncomfortable, which is the last thing she wants.
But Daryl is giving her a knowing look when she stops. “Springsteen, right?”
“My mom’s favorite,” she murmurs, lifting her hands off the keys and stretching out her knuckles with a resounding pop. “Well, I think we’ve successfully got you started on the basics,” she says with a laugh. “Should we go pick up my car?”
The look he gives her is studious and uncertain. “We could,” he says.
And then she realizes what he’s saying. It’s been well over an hour. In the time since they’ve started practicing, Maggie left early, seeking her own dinner before her shift. Hershel went quietly to his part of the house, probably doing his PT exercises or reading a book. There’s no one paying attention to them, no one keeping them in check.
Beth has never brought a man—never mind one she knew so little—to her room, and the idea of it makes her stomach swoop with dread and excitement. She swallows. “Do you, um,” she stumbles, then makes a split-second decision. “Would you stay longer?”
He looks at her for a second before bobbing his head. “Could stay,” he agrees.
She has a moment to think, and Maggie’s words from earlier rush through her mind, reminding her that Daryl has obligations. “You don’t gotta check on your brother?” she asks, making sure.
He shakes his head. “He can take care of himself for one evening,” Daryl says hoarsely, and his eyes are trained on her mouth now.
Beth’s lips part—with surprise, with wanting, with excitement. She thinks about kissing him right then, but the idea of her father wandering in to say hi quickly crushes that idea. Instead, she takes his hand. “Upstairs,” she says, pulling him up.
He follows obediently, nearly tripping over the stairs when she pulls him too eagerly. When he enters her room, seeing the old band posters and motivational quotes, he smiles a little, not in a way that suggests he’s making fun of her. “S’very you,” he says genuinely.
She thinks back to the Beth of the past who had picked these posters. Usually, she divides herself firmly in terms of pre- and post-fire. The Beth who had hoped for everything, and the one that doesn’t dare to hope for anything.
But there’s something about this man, she thinks with disbelief and joy. Something about this man makes her want to keep hoping. Makes her think that maybe she does still have that optimist somewhere inside her, after all.
She tugs him gently by the wrist to sit on her bed, and he flops back and looks up at her ceiling. She nestles in next to him, pleased with their wordless descent into this kind of intimacy.
“I decorated this room years ago,” she admits quietly. “Dunno how different it would look if I redid it now. I’m pretty different now.”
He must hear the deprecation in her words—the implication that the difference in her is bad—because he looks at her and cups a hand around her elbow, a little awkwardly. “I only know the you now,” he says, “and I kinda like her.”
It’s exactly the right thing to say.
She kisses him. And kisses him, and kisses him.
He may not talk a lot, she thinks, reaching for his vest, but when he does he says the most genuine, kind, unbelievable things. She goes to ease the vest off, and Daryl’s shoulders tighten. He doesn’t push her away, but she feels it, and she breaks the kiss and rests her face against his. “Do you not want to—?” she starts uncertainly.
Daryl groans and cups her face in his hands. “I want to,” he tells her, then looks down. “S’just… you ain’t the only one that’s got scars.”
She thinks of the scars that stripe up and down her Daddy’s back, from the grandfather she’s spitefully glad that she never met. The edges of scars that she’d seen today, riding the motorcycle… She lifts her head and presses a gentle, chaste kiss to Daryl’s waiting mouth. “I only know the you now,” she echoes him. “And I wanna get to know you. The good, and the bad.”
He gazes at her, as if measuring her sincerity, for a long moment. Then, he must decide something, because he kisses her, hard, and shrugs off his vest. She does her best to distract him from the process, slipping her tongue in his mouth and running her hands up and down those smooth, muscled arms.
He breaks away for a moment, which makes her scared that he’s changed his mind, only for her to realize that he’s tearing off his tank top, leaving him stripped bare to the waist. “Your turn,” he tells her, more of a growl.
But she grins at him, all to happy to comply, and fairly rips off her t-shirt. Underneath, she doesn’t wear a bra—she’s never needed to—and she can see how his eyes widen with surprise, and darken with lust. “Now we’re even,” she murmurs.
He shakes his head. “Not by a long shot,” he says roughly, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her into his lap. They kiss for several long moments, and she runs her hands up and down his arms, chest, and waist.
Eventually, her hands drift to his shoulders and back, and she only stutters to a halt for a brief second when she feels the raised scars that she’d suspected would be there. He doesn’t stop kissing her, but he does suck in an inhale, conveying his agitation.
She resolves to kiss him harder, then pushes him down to the bed. Once he’s flat on his back and looking up at her, she leans down, straddling his waist, and starts pressing a long line of open-mouthed kisses down his throat. “I have never wanted anyone like this,” she says truthfully.
Daryl groans and fists a hand in her hair, though he doesn’t pull. “Girl, you can’t go around saying that to just anybody,” he says on an exhale, looking into her eyes. His lips are kiss-swollen, and there’s a hickey rising on his throat. He looks thoroughly debauched, and she’s sure that she must look the same.
“Ain’t saying it to just anybody,” she says. “M’saying it to you.”
The look he gives her is startled and touched and joyful and afraid all at the same time, and she suddenly realizes that every single overwhelming emotion she’s feeling about this unexpected bond between them, he’s feeling too. But he lets her kiss him some more, and he lets her unbutton his jeans and tug off his socks. He watches as she strips off her own pants and socks, and then as she strips all the way down.
He holds her close as she rolls a condom on and sinks down onto him, and breathes evenly when she needs a minute to adjust. He flips her over, onto her back, once she’s ready, and then slowly, deliberately thrusts into her, careful to never go too fast or too hard. He goes slow, slow, slow, and his fingers reach down to pleasure her throughout, until she’s throwing her head back against the pillows of her childhood bed and crying out his name. And then he’s coming, too, groaning out her name and burying his face into the crook of her shoulder.
Her scarred hands come up, touching his scarred back, and she wonders if this was always in the cards. Maybe God’s still looking out for her after all. Maybe He chose this good, good man for her, and laid him in her path for her to find. For her to take him to the creek, and divulge her secrets, and learn his. For her to teach piano, and him to teach tracking.
For her to have, and to hold.
And maybe that last thought, that vow-like thought, is moving too fast. Maybe if she said it out loud, Daryl would freak. But their breathing slows and softens in the post-orgasmic quiet, and she curls a little closer into him. And it’s okay if she can’t say it out loud yet. This is good enough, by far.
*
That night, after another round of kissing and fumbling and laughing at each other in the best way possible, Daryl sleeps. She watches him in the moonlight after her nightmare wakes her, how peaceful and soft he looks against the pillows, and it puts her back to sleep faster than anything else ever has.
She wakes in the morning again, cuddled into him, starving. They never had dinner last night, after all. She wakes him, and they sneak outside, with him in yesterday’s clothes, to clamber back onto the bike. He buys her breakfast at the diner, despite her insistence that she can pay for herself, and tells her stories about the places he’s been.
Beth eats her pancakes and laughs and teases him, and doesn’t even notice the eyes of the townspeople on her. Once, she’d hated it for the pity it meant. Then, she’d liked it, for the thrill it gave her when people watched her and Daryl together.
Now, she thinks it doesn’t really matter what other people think, or whether they look at the two of them together. What really matters is how Daryl’s eyes crinkle together when he smiles, really smiles, and how he holds her hand over the table, and how he seems like he doesn’t even notice people’s eyes on them.
He runs his thumb against her palm, at the spot where she can feel the least, and nonetheless it’s electrifying against her skin, because it’s him doing it. “Take you tracking tomorrow?” he asks.
She grins at him. Doesn’t matter whether people stare. Doesn’t matter if Maggie doesn’t like him—she’ll warm up, once she sees how happy Beth is. Doesn’t matter, any of it, because she’s happier than she’s been in a long, long time.
“It’s a deal.”