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“Why’d ya think they built it so high?” Daryl asks, squinting up at the ten foot cyclone fence encircling the picturesque little cabin and the surrounding woods.
“Either to keep something in or keep something out,” you muse, peering into a grove of pines beyond the cabin. All is quiet, save for a few songbirds and the sound of running water. “I guess we’ll see which.” You spot movement between the trees. You give a sharp whistle and point to a lone roamer stumbling out of the brush, but Daryl’s already on it, sending a bolt through one of the gaps in the fence and between the roamer’s milky eyes.
Once you pick the lock and close the gate behind you, the two of you split, pacing the fence’s perimeter with silent steps. It’s a small property, an acre or so if you had to guess, with a thin creek no deeper than bathwater cutting through its center. You find no more roamers.
Inside, the cabin is abandoned but homey. While Daryl cases the kitchen for a possible meal besides the last of the venison jerky or a squirrel from the trees outside, you rifle through the living room for anything useful or interesting.
The furniture is nice—a quasi-Victorian couch, a wingback chair upholstered in a rich chestnut leather, thick Persian rugs overlapping like a dropped deck of cards across the floor—but your truck is too packed with food and medicine after a week on the road to fit any of it. This was supposed to be a recruitment run, the first since the madmen with machetes and a horde of roamers tore through Alexandria, but you haven’t found anyone worth bringing back. After the recent encounters with outside groups, though, you feel perfectly fine with a truckload of supplies instead of people.
You weren’t supposed to be a recruiter. This trek has been your first time outside the walls in months. But Eric is still unsteady on his ankle, Aaron’s nursing some bruised ribs, Rick wanted a longer term resident to join Daryl on this run—whether to better represent the community to strangers or to keep more of his own people close, you couldn’t say—and your name came up. You were skeptical at first but now, a day’s drive from home, despite the danger and hardship, you’re glad for it.
A framed photograph on the mantelpiece catches your eye. It shows a middle-aged woman, the roamer before it became one, and a brown and tan cattle dog, maybe a Kelpie if you had to guess, posed on the cabin’s rustic porch. You take the photo with you and find Daryl in the pantry stacking cans of beans and soup into metal milk crates.
“I think I found the reason for the high fence,” you tell him, tapping the frame. He glances down and his face takes on a rare sweetness. It’s something you’ve noticed about him, his soft spot for animals.
“Good thing that pup was a high jumper. Means we’ll be safe tonight.”
“As safe as we can be,” you qualify. You know you can never be truly safe, though this cabin, with its remote locale and secure fence, is about as safe as it gets for a stop on the road.
“Think it’s safe enough to break into this?” Daryl hefts a case of Bud Light down from a high shelf. A ghost of a smirk plays on his lips.
It’s not smart to drink, even with the fence, even with the remote locale, even though you and Daryl dead drunk would still be probably twice as lethal in a fight as most other people you know sober. But it’s been a long day. A detour to a roadside family farm with the promise of volunteer produce and seeds for Maggie’s garden turned into a fight for your lives against a small army of ex-farmhands hidden in the cornstalks. It’s been an even longer week. You’re sweaty and grimy and dead tired. You could use a beer.
“Yeah.” Daryl’s rough fingers brush yours as he hands you a can, and you try not to read much into it. “We deserve it.”
You weren’t any kind of survivalist before the turn, aside from some wilderness backpacking trips as a teenager, but you lived solo on the road long enough for it to change you: long enough to get good with your blade, long enough to see and do things that still haunt you, long enough for constant terror to become mundane. When you stumbled up to the walls of Alexandria eight months ago, when Eric beckoned you through the opened gate like some starving stray, you were too wild-eyed and shell-shocked for the Alexandrians to readily accept you as a neighbor. These days you can almost pass among them, but not quite.
Maybe that’s why you immediately recognized a kind of kindred spirit in Daryl, the one member of Rick’s group who seemed to have no interest in acting polite or cleaning up to fit in with the yuppies. You hoped he recognized something similar in you, that he could see through your costume of cardigans and nice slacks to the semi-feral creature underneath.
You had never even spoken to each other before this run. There were mutual furtive glances when you walked past the Grimes’ porch and saw him skinning some small animal with a buck knife, bolder stares when you were on guard duty and opened the gate for that rebuilt motorcycle of his. You couldn’t help but feel like there was a weight to the way his eyes followed you.
After a week as each other’s sole company, you wouldn’t say you’re friends, but there’s a camaraderie; the beginnings of trust, maybe. As you could have guessed, he’s more than competent beyond the walls and stealthy as hell. You’ve held your own, too. You saved each other’s asses a couple of times. He’s been mostly quiet, only speaking when necessary. It’s nice. You’ve always been on the quiet side yourself, moreso since the turn. It’s a relief to not feel the need to fill a comfortable silence with chatter.
But now you’re each finishing your third lukewarm Bud Light and the chatter feels easy. You may be physically smaller than he is, but it’s a point of pride for you to match him beer for beer. He pours the last drips into his mouth, sets the can on the floor and stomps it flat under his heavy boot.
“No, you’ve gotta do it like this,” you insist with a laugh. You karate chop your empty at an angle on three sides and crumple it against your forehead. “See? Way more badass.”
“Yer somethin’ else,” he chuckles, shaking his head.
For all his steely terseness on this run, the buzz seems to be loosening him up a little. You aren’t sure if you’ve seen him smile before tonight.
“Hey, Dar—mmmph!” His name comes out sounding like dare when you’re interrupted by your next beer overflowing over when you crack it open. You suck at the sour metallic opening, catching as much foam as you can in your mouth.
“Does anyone ever call you Dare?” You ask, shaking stray liquid from your fingers.
“Used to. Brother n’ his friends, sometimes.” He digs another can out of the flimsy cardboard box. “Hung out at this bar, used t’ pay me t’ drink whatever gross shit they’d come up with. Never said no ‘less it was bleach or somethin’. Started callin’ me Dare once it got around I’d drink whatever anyone’d put in front a me.”
“Sounds dangerous.” You raise an eyebrow. Maybe you’re trying to fluff his ego a little. It’s a bit silly, how you want him to like you.
“Made a lotta cash,” he says, flicking a short-bitten thumbnail against the dusty aluminum of his can.
“What’s the grossest thing you ever drank?”
He blushes to the tips of his ears where they peek out of that dark curtain of hair. His line of sight flits down to his crotch for a half-second. You almost miss it. He shifts in his chair, shrugs, and pops open his beer. He could only mean one thing.
“Really?” It’s more of a statement than a question.
“Weren’t much different ‘n this shit,” he growls before taking a long swig.
You’re a little stunned, less at his answer and more that he gave it. You search his face. His gaze darts up to meet yours, but he looks away once he realizes you’re looking at him too. He starts fiddling with the tab on the top of the can, nervously. You make a guess.
“You liked it, didn’t you?” You say, drawing out the words, teasing. He gives another noncommittal shrug and crosses his arms. God, those arms. You know you’re right, though, about him liking it. You can’t help but laugh. “I’m impressed. That’s some Berghain-level filth, man.”
“Fuck’s that mean?” He spits back. Apparently you’re buzzed enough to drop a reference to an infamous Berlin nightclub into a conversation where it doesn’t belong. You can be a pretentious drunk. You rephrase, letting your voice go a little sultry.
“You’re kind of a freak, aren’t you?”
“Shut up,” he grumbles. He’s getting uncomfortable, hunching in on himself, like you’ve hit a nerve. You strike verbal humiliation from the list of kinks you might share. You drop the teasing tone and raise your palms in surrender.
“Hey, I just mean—I guess, game recognize game, as far as…”
Daryl eyes you warily. That cutting blue glare is enough to make you shy away from putting a name to it, this thing he apparently likes, that you both like.
You had a boyfriend once, before the turn, who was into it. It was never your main thing, or his, but it was fun, once in a while. In your mind’s eye you can still see him kneeling below you in that narrow shower stall in your old apartment, mouth open, tongue out, waiting. You wonder if he’s still alive.
“Look—I’m sorry. Let’s forget the last few minutes ever happened.” Daryl’s still staring you down with narrowed eyes. If you didn’t know better—if the word didn’t clash against everything you know about him—you would say he was pouting. It’s probably best to change the subject. “Hey, did I tell you where I learned that beer can crushing thing?”
You launch into an anecdote about your old roommate—about the camping trip where she taught you to crush cans against your forehead, her meek little rescue mutt who somehow found all the ticks in the whole forest and brought them into your tent, how you and your roommate and her crew of metalhead friends and the mutt sang Black Sabbath around the campfire instead of Kumbaya. You get Daryl smiling and chuckling again.
Even as you’re telling the story, half your brain is elsewhere. You’re thinking of Daryl, Daryl but younger, clean shaven maybe, a little slimmer, a little prettier, slamming an empty pint glass on table in the back of some dive bar, scrunching his cute nose in a performance of disgust, and grabbing his wad of bills from some scuzzy biker, a smirk on his lips like he got away with murder. You revise the image. Maybe he licked those thin lips after, chasing the taste of it. You think of how his Adam’s apple would have bobbed as he chugged it down. Did it turn him on in the moment, or only later? Did he have to hide how hard he was under the table from the barflies and spectators? Was it at a table in the bar at all, or in the bathroom? The alley behind the bar? Was it a pint glass he drank from? Was it straight from the source?
What is even gross, these days? There are much grosser things than that. Just today you slashed your kukri through two dozen undead skulls, sticky violet gore dripping down its blade like spent motor oil, and you didn’t flinch. You’ve done more disgusting things to survive, eaten and drunk more disgusting things to survive, and been glad for them. Getting off on drinking piss is hardly a blip in the radar.
Your eyes drift over Daryl’s body as you talk, and as he starts chatting back. You try not to be too obvious, but the way he’s sitting with his muscular legs splayed out over the worn leather armchair, framing his crotch and the clear outline of his cock so perfectly—you can’t not look. You notice too late that you’re staring. You turn away from him, resting your head on the dingy fabric of the couch armrest and staring at the ceiling, to keep yourself from getting distracted.
By the time you’re each five cans deep, he lets out a big sigh.
“Ugh. Need t’ get up.” He makes no move to do so.
“So get up.”
“Chair’s too comfy.” You can hear him squirming in his seat, the squeak of leather on leather.
“Then stay. It’s not like we have anywhere to be.”
“Nah. Need t’ go outside.”
“You can smoke in here if you want. I don’t mind.”
“Nah, it’s…” You wait, but he doesn’t finish his sentence. You glance over your shoulder, see the rumpled beauty of him. He’s gnawing his thumbnail like he does sometimes.
“What do you need, bud?”
“Gotta piss, okay?” He says it with a bit of venom, like he’s self-conscious, like he’s been thinking about your earlier exchange. Like he thinks you’re going to tease him again. That bashful flush in his cheeks is so endearing.
You rock yourself up off the couch and saunter over to him. He raises a hand like he’s expecting you to pull him up, but you take it and rest it on his inner thigh instead, your own hand looking small atop his. His gaze jumps up to meet yours. It’s that same feral, kindred look that’s kept you intrigued since you first saw him.
You fall to your knees in front of him. It feels natural, automatic. You’re buzzed, sure, but it’s only given you courage, maybe a little recklessness—you’ve been wanting to be on your knees for him, one way or another, for a while.
“You wouldn’t have to get up,” you purr. His eyes go wide. You slowly move a hand to his belt, giving him plenty of time to push you off or say no. He gnaws at his lip and grunts, thrusting into your touch as you unbuckle the buckle. You smirk. “You wouldn’t even have to dare me to.”
He makes another gruff moan, and then his hands are brushing yours aside to unzip his pants and push them halfway down his thighs. He’s not wearing underwear. His cock is a fucking beast, even half hard. You kneel there, salivating.
“Could I?”
“Fuckin’ a.” He shudders, cock in hand. “Y’sure?”
“Yeah, I want it.”
“Mmm.” It’s a hum of assent. He scooches his ass to the edge of the chair and gives you a nod. In a rumble so low it’s barely audible, he says, “Go on, then.”
You wrap gentle lips around the head of his cock. There’s a few seconds before he starts where he lets out what’s not even a gasp, just a sharp, quiet inhale, at the feeling of your mouth on him, of your tongue teasing his slit like you could delve in and find what you want all on your own.
“Goddamn,” he huffs in a whisper. He runs gentle fingers across your scalp and lets go with a sigh.
You drink it down. The ferocity of the stream as it hits the roof of your mouth startles a moan out of you. It’s a bit sour, mostly bland—the several beers have watered down the intensity of the taste, but the taste is the last thing on your mind. You’re too caught up in the musky, sweaty smell of Daryl’s junk, unwashed aside from creeks and ponds for the past week. Your hands grip his thighs, your stubby nails catching in the dirty black denim, pressing your palms against the powerful muscles beneath. Even hotter is the filth of the act, the total wrongness, the shredding of the social contract, the fact that you were bold enough to ask for this, and the fact that he’s letting you.
You catch his gaze again, half-hooded, somewhere between dazed and reverent. His mouth hangs open. His hand drifts from the top of your head to your neck, not to grip or choke but to run his fingers along your swallowing throat, his fingertips callused, his touch feather light. You moan at the feeling, pushing the sound toward the front of your mouth so it buzzes along the seal your lips make.
“Y’ like that, huh?”
“Mmmhmm,” you hum back.
“Fuckin’ thirsty for it.”
Those words make your hips buck forward. Maybe he meant to rest it there, or maybe it’s just how you landed when you fell to your knees, but his right leg has found its way between your legs. The friction is delicious. You keep gulping, lips locked around his meaty head, letting your cheeks fill when you pause for quick breaths, determined to not spill any in his lap. You grind your cunt against his shin like you’re desperate. Maybe you are.
Another huffed breath and Daryl pulls at his cock a couple times, squeezing it like he’s trying to give you every last drop.
“Think ‘m tapped out.”
He seems to be. You rest your head on his thigh, chest heaving, looking up at him with a crooked grin. That awestruck haze hasn’t left his deep blue eyes. He smudges the head of his cock against your cheek, dabbing the last few drips against the peak of your cheekbone, rubbing it into your skin like blush with a blunt thumb. You take his hand in yours and nuzzle against it.
“Thanks.” It’s funny, how casual the word sounds, but what else can you say? You’re still panting, your cunt still moving with a mind of its own, seeking more than it can get through the rough fabric of your jeans. He groans. He rubs his stiff cock against your cheek again but this time the dribble is slick, viscous.
“Y’ got me hard.”
You get to your feet and kick your pants off. You’re not shy about it. Why would you be, after what you just did? You take his free hand and guide it below the elastic of your underwear. He dips a finger into your wet cunt and his eyelids flutter, oddly delicate on his otherwise rugged face.
You shimmy out of your underwear as his finger slides in and out of you, slow, maddeningly so, the powerful strength in that one fingertip pulling you closer toward him every time it drags against the one spot that makes you whine, high and needy in a way you’d hate yourself for if it didn’t feel so fucking good. He still looks mesmerized, drunk less on the stale beers and more on this weird dream you’ve both stumbled into. On you.
You lean in close. You don’t kiss him but you linger, swaying, for a second, face to face, just long enough for him to wonder if you might, to catch the scent on your breath. You dodge and brush your lips to the tip of his ear.
“I want you to bend me over the back of this chair and fuck me.”
“Yeah?”
“And use me however you want to.”
His responding moan is low and ragged, truck tires on gravel.
You stand up straight and circle behind him. You bend forward over the chair’s high back, ass in the air. You play with his greasy hair, caress his shoulders, suddenly struggling to go a second without touching him. He sucks on his finger, the finger that was in you, the way you’ve seen him do a dozen times beside a campfire, savoring a taste he can’t get enough of.
After what feels like ages, he gets up and shucks off his pants. He leaves his leather vest and his ratty black shirt with the ripped sleeves on. You keep your shirt on too. You have some scars he doesn’t need to see.
Those massive hands on your ass make you melt into the buttery, dusty leather of the armchair. He slips two thick fingers into you, pushing hard and quick against your g spot like it’s a tricky button on a vending machine. You shudder and cry out though you try not to. The slick sound of him hitting it, blunt and clumsy and right where you need him to, only makes your cunt wetter.
“Come on, Daryl.” You’re not sure if you’re encouraging or commanding or begging him and it doesn’t matter. You gasp, almost squeal, as the thick head of his cock breaches you. He stops.
“Y’ good?” He rubs his thumbs into the meat of your hips.
“Just—start slow.” You’re twitching and squirming against the way he’s stretching you out. It’s been ages since you last got fucked. You’ve never needed it more.
“Can tell me if y’ wanna stop,” he murmurs.
“I will. You, too,” you assure him. “I don’t think I’ll need to, though, you feel so…god, you’re so big.” You try to bounce back against him but his broad hands have you immobilized. He’s following your request for a slow start to the letter. Once he’s in you to the hilt, straining the limits of what you feel like you can take, you let out a rocky, animal sigh of a breath from somewhere deep and forgotten inside you. He stays still, letting you get used to the feeling, moving his hands over your ass, pinning you in place with his cock, a mounted butterfly.
“Please, fuck me,” you whine. You’re definitely begging now. You repeat it. “Please.”
He nudges your feet further apart, spreading your legs wider. He grunts his approval and starts moving. It’s almost agonizing, how phenomenal it feels, the thick ridge of his head dragging against your walls, suction-tight, as he pulls nearly out, the sharp, powerful thrust back in, the bruising thud in the pit of your gut mixing with the wild pleasure singing through your body.
He gains momentum as the juices seeping out of you let him fuck you faster. His grunts and growls occasionally morph into words, vulgar and guttural: yer real tight and y’ like that? and takin’ me so good. Through the moans flooding out of your mouth you make stilted responses, waves of so thick and fucking love it and an echoed so good washing past your lips.
Just as you’re getting there, just as the impossible tension between your legs has you trembling toward release, he slows down, then pauses, still half inside you. He lays his chest against your back, gnawing at your shoulder blade.
“Kinda gotta piss again,” he growls with a chuckle. You grind back against him.
“Go ahead,” you moan. He huffs a hot, hitched breath against your spine.
“Y’ mean like—”
“Yeah, and then keep—when you’re done—” You can’t form a coherent sentence through the storm in your brain, can’t manage to articulate the sick way you want him to use you.
“Shh, I got you.” Daryl wraps his arms around you—those fucking arms—one hand clutching your chest, the other rubbing slow circles against your hood. “Piss in yer pussy n’ fuck it outta you. That what you want?”
“Uh huh.”
“Yer a fuckin’ freak too, huh?” That rumble of a voice like distant thunder. You could almost just come at the sound of it.
He groans a string of curses that you barely register, and then it’s a heat, a pressure, filling your belly, crushing against all the muscles that are already strung so tight. You let out some cracked sobbing sounds you can’t hold in.
It’s when he starts fucking you again that you really lose control. The way he’s fucking you, staying deep enough in to keep it from spilling but shallow enough to not plunge it out, means he’s hitting your g spot dead on, and that and the pressure and the filth and the shame has you shaking in his arms, convulsing around his cock, trying to murmur holy shit as you come hard for a minute straight, but somehow it just comes out as a repeated holy, holy, holy, a raspy wail like a wild dog howling at the moon. Somewhere in the electrified fog of it the clutch of your cunt pushes his cock out of you, his cock and all the piss that splashes down your thighs and his, hitting the rug below you like a tidal wave of raw heat.
“Holy hell,” he mutters, awed, it sounds like. “Wanna keep fuckin’ you.” You whimper something that’s supposed to sound like yes, and he does, hard and fast this time, hammering into you, thumb stroking your clit in time with his thrusts, coaxing more climaxes out of you until you’re not sure where one ends and the next begins. You ride it all out, grateful for Daryl’s fierce grip and the sturdiness of the armchair under you.
His deep grunts make a sharp change to a skittering, loping whine, vulnerable, almost pitiful, and in a second you feel his come splash in lashes across your ass. With a firm hand he spreads it across your cheeks. He’s panting so heavy you can feel it in your own body. Raindrops of his sweat drip from his hair onto your bare skin. The storm is over.
Once you feel more or less sure your legs won’t collapse under you, you stand. Daryl’s red-faced and still breathing hard. He leans down to snag the ever-present shop rag he keeps in the back pocket of his pants, swipes it over his hands and dick, and offers it to you wordlessly. You could swear his face gets even pinker as he does. You’re sure you’re blushing, too. You bat the rag away.
“I’m good. I think I’ll just take a dip in that creek once I drag this rug outside.” You feel a little bad. It was a beautiful rug.
“You go on, I‘ll take care a the rug. ‘S my mess anyway.”
The moon is high and full and blazing white in the clear black sky. The water in the shallow creek feels like an ice cold jolt of reality when you strip and lay down in its gentle flow. You wonder if this was all a mistake. At worst, you’re just a day’s drive from Alexandria, and awkward silence can’t be much worse than the comfortable kind you’ve enjoyed so far.
You hear footsteps, too heavy and even to be a roamer—Daryl must want you to hear him approaching, which you guess is a good sign. You look up and see him, still naked from the waist down, skin pale in the moonlight, what must be clothes in one hand and his buck knife in the other. He waves the clothes over his head like a white flag.
“Y’ left yer pants inside.” His voice is quiet, quieter than it needs to be. “Thought you might want ‘em.”
“You’re not wearing any,” you observe. He almost laughs.
“Brought mine, too.” He sets the pants on a rock and crouches at the creekside. You prop yourself up on his elbows and watch as he splashes water on his face, in his hair, on his junk and his legs. The icy droplets evaporating from your shoulders into the night air make you shiver, either that or the sight of him there. Even after the sobering cool of the creek water, you find him beautiful.
You step gingerly across the creek’s rocky bed and make your way over to him. You pluck your pants from the rock beside him, grab your own knife from where you left it on the silty shore, and turn to make your way back through the wooded yard.
“Y’ ain’t gonna put ‘em on?”
“Well I’m going to, but…” The relative irony makes you stop and smile. “I kind of need to pee first,” you whisper, unsure how embarrassed you should be.
He wraps a hand around your calf to stay you.
“Hey.” He shifts onto his knees, pets the backs of your thighs. “Lemme.”
“Yeah?” You toss your knife aside and set your pants back down on the rock. You comb your fingers through his damp hair, pushing it out of his face. The moon glints in his irises. You couldn’t resist him if you wanted to.
“Mmm.” He rests his forehead against your unruly thatch of pubes, nuzzling against you. “Wanna taste you.”
You tilt his head back gently, threading your fingers deeper in his hair, and when his lips meet your cunt, already slick again since the second he touched your calf, when his tongue licks a tentative stripe up its center, you idle on the edge of letting the incessant pressure in your bladder go, not from nervousness but from the thrill of teetering on the precipice, of the moment, of Daryl sucking your soft, tender folds into his furrowing, needy mouth.
“Drink up, baby,” you whisper with a sigh of relief. You close your eyes briefly, the better to focus on the sound of his sloppy, frantic tongue lapping you up, of the desperate whimpers vibrating through his lips. You look down to see your piss ribboning through his scruffy beard, his eyes brimming with gratitude.