A Mutually Beneficial Arrangement Pt 2

Beth spent her first night in Daryl’s tent alone and on edge. She stayed up, unable to sleep, until almost midnight, waiting for him to return from checking traps in the woods. She was sure that he would want more than dinner from her, in exchange for keeping her safe by giving her his token, but she was alone when she went to sleep.

When she awoke the next morning Daryl was sitting up, putting on his socks, ignoring her.

“Did I oversleep?”

He shook his head no.

“I waited up for you but you didn’t come home.”

Daryl shrugged. “What, do I have to report to you now, just because we share a tent?”

Mystified by his sour mood, Beth shook her head. “No. I didn’t mean it like that…”

Her voice trailed away and he finished tying his boots.

“How about some coffee?”

“I don’t drink coffee. I got you a box of instant oats. Eat that for breakfast.”

“Don’t you want--”

“I’ll be late again tonight, so don’t wait up,” he said, speaking over her, and then prepared to leave the tent.

“Have I upset you?”

“Oh, fuck,” he said, sighing in annoyance. “Are you one of those types? The kind who nags a man and has to be reassured he’s not mad at her all the damn time? I don’t need that shit in my life.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t ask again.”

“Whatever.”

He left the tent, and Beth felt tears stinging at her eyes. What the hell had she done to put him in such a bad mood? Why was he being such a dick? She’d hoped he’d turn out to be the quiet but nice type, but he was turning out to be a serious asshole.

Still, she didn’t care. She’d wash his clothes, cook when he wanted her to, and even let him fuck her when the mood took him, but she wasn’t going to try to play the doting little woman who was all smiles and honey-baby. If he wanted to be cold, she could be cold too. All that mattered was that she kept his mark.

Outside she saw Andrea stepping out of Shane’s RV. She had a token around her neck. Relief coursed through Beth as she approached.

“I spent all night worried about you,” she said, coming up on Andrea. “I kept listening to see if I could hear if you were in distress, even this far from your tent. So, you’re with Shane?”

Andrea didn’t have the smile on her face that Beth had hoped for. In fact, she looked exhausted, and she didn’t try to make eye contact.

“Are you okay?”

“I like my eggs scrambled, baby,” Shane said, opening the RV door. 

“You got it,” she said, smiling up at him. 

He nodded at Beth and then disappeared back inside.

She whispered to Beth, “I’m fine. We’ll talk later, when we go to the quary.”

Sensing that now wasn’t a good time to press the issue, Beth left Andrea and returned to the tent she shared with Daryl to make her own breakfast of instant oats and instant coffee.

*****

There was trouble brewing, Daryl could sense it, even though Merle never saw fit to fill him in on the inside track. That was fine by him. Daryl had always been more comfortable following someone else’s lead. He was a good soldier and didn’t care to try to move up the ranks, regardless of how much his brother encouraged him to do so.

Now, after a five day absence, the Governor’s third man in charge, Rick Grimes, had returned. Daryl liked Rick a lot better than Shane. He could sense that Rick was something Shane wasn’t: a man of honor. Shane was a cutthroat, like the Governor. Truth be told, though, Daryl missed the man Rick had been before his wife and son had been swarmed by the small herd of walkers that had overrun their first camp. Rick had lost his way for a long time after that. He’d sunk into madness and he was just now clawing all the way out of that dark and miserable pit.

“Rick,” Daryl said, offering his hand.

Rick gave it a firm shake and took a seat on the couch in the Governor’s RV. He’d requested Daryl’s presence at this meeting

“So, what have you to report, Rick?” asked the Governor. He was sipping tea and looking, in Daryl’s opinion, a little too prissy for his own good. Daryl didn’t trust the Governor as far as he could throw him. He thought that perhaps Rick felt the same way. There was a certain level of tension between him and Rick, and it was almost all down to ideology. They often disagreed on how to run things, and if it wasn’t for Shane’s constant interference, Daryl imagined Rick would attempt a coup, or the Governor would try to have Rick killed to simply get him out of the way.

If push came to shove, Daryl had long ago decided he'd side with Rick. He'd also have to make his brother do the same.

“There’s a town about twenty miles from here called Woodbury. It’s a settlement with about twenty-five survivors. They’ve built protective walls in a fairly substantial radius around the heart of the town. I think, should we approach it right, they would be willing to welcome us in.”

Shane snorted, and the Governor smiled indulgently before shaking his head at Rick.

“What’s so funny?” Rick asked, barely keeping the exasperation from his voice.

“Rick, you’re ever the dove, aren’t you?” said the Governor. “I’m a hawk. I take what I think is good for me and my people. This settlement you’ve found, Woodbury, well…they’re going to do more than welcome us in.”

“Brian, there’s no need to rush in there with guns blazing. Those are good people. Peaceful people. They have women, children, elderly folks--”

“Then I’m sure these good people will happily hand over the settlement for us to take over and improve upon. Am I right?”

Merle only nodded. He was uncharacteristically quiet, even considering he was with the Governor. Not a lot scared Merle Dixon, but Daryl knew he was shit-his-pants afraid of Brian Blake.

Shane took the boot licking a step further. Not out of fear, but out of genuine admiration. “Damn straight, Governor.”

“What do you think, Daryl?” Rick asked.

Suddenly on the spot, Daryl felt eight eyes bore into him, waiting for an answer.

“Daryl’s not on this council, Rick,” Shane pointed out.

“He should be. I value his opinion. Daryl, what do you think?”

“If it was up to me, I’d knock on the door. Give ‘em a choice.”

Merle shook his head, as though ashamed of his little brother’s answer. Daryl suspected Merle feared he would appear weak to the Governor and that could get them both killed, or worse, expelled from camp. “I didn’t know you were so damned soft, Daryl. Don't be such a fucking pussy. I taught you better than that.”

“Neither did I,” said the Governor. “Unfortunately for you, Daryl, it isn’t up to you, and, as Shane rightfully pointed out, you’re not on this council. You’re dismissed.”

With a shake of his head, Daryl grabbed his crossbow and headed out of the RV. He heard Rick make a comment about him not going too far. Whatever it was he wanted to discuss, Daryl wanted no part of it. He wasn’t trying to be dragged into the middle of a power play between Rick and the Governor. That kind of shit, he knew, could get you killed.

He saw his new woman, Beth, walking with Andrea toward the quarry with a trolley loaded with dirty clothes. He’d been rude to her that morning, and he regretted it, but he didn’t know how to deal with her. He’d never been good with women outside of action in the sheets. He could bed one, but talking to her, or trying to live with her? That was a whole other matter.

Daryl took a peep into the tent. It was completely unrecognizable now. Their sleeping bags were made up as proper beds and everything had been squared neatly away. Hell, it even smelled clean. She’d left a plate of scrambled eggs and bread sitting on his bed, covered with a cloth. Woman food, he thought, as he sat down on the cooler he used for a table or a chair interchangeably. He tasted the eggs and nodded approval to himself. She could cook on an open flame without burning everything.

His thoughts, unsurprisingly, turned to the woman herself. She was young, probably no older than eighteen, and she was cute. He’d stayed gone the night before, hoping to come in to find her asleep, not because he didn’t want to talk, but because he didn’t want to address the issue of sex. He knew that if she ever threw herself at him he wouldn’t be strong enough to say no. Hell, he’d come close to mounting her in the middle of the night as it was. It had been a long time since he’d sank balls deep into a woman, and that’s what he wanted now.

Still, the idea of it bothered him. He doubted she wanted him. She had, after all, proposed a ‘mutually beneficial’ arrangement, strictly to keep from being gang raped and passed around, not because she actually wanted to be with him. He knew sex as part of that arrangement, but he wasn’t sure how, or when, he would take advantage of that particular perk.

“Daryl?”

It was Rick Grimes. He peeped his head into the tent and Daryl motioned for him to come in.

“I've got something I need to talk to you about,” Rick said, and took a seat on the floor.

*****

“What’s wrong, Andrea?”

“Shane claimed me,” she said.

“That’s a bad thing?”

“It’s not bad, exactly,” she shrugged. “Let’s just say he didn’t waste time taking advantage of the sexual aspect of the arrangement. He was on me as soon as I set my things down. Pig.”

She looked over Beth, who was scrubbing Daryl’s underwear in a bucket of soapy water.

“How about Daryl?”

“He didn’t come in last night until after midnight, but I was asleep. He didn’t try anything. He probably will tonight. He’s mean.”

Andrea cocked a brow. “Mean, or just uncouth?”

Beth giggled and looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Uncouth, I guess. Rude. I don’t care. As long as he doesn’t hit me or rough me up too much.”

She stopped washing and glanced to the sky. It was clouding over and would probably rain before they could finish the laundry. A crow sailed across the sky with casual grace.

“How did this happen?”

“The turn?” asked Andrea, ringing Shane’s things out.

“No. Well, yes, I wonder that too but, I wonder how come all the progress women have made in this country has gone out the window so completely.”

Andrea cocked a brow. “Women have always been second class citizens, Beth. We always will be. The only difference now is that there’s no legal recourse for us. Men can do whatever they want to us and we can’t do shit about it unless we take matters into our own hands.”

They washed in silence, their thoughts turning to life in a camp where women were property, like the chickens and the guns and the knives. They’d just finished loading the trolley when the wind started to pick up.

“Have you seen Jacqui this morning?” Beth asked.

“I think she and Jim left in the middle of the night,” Andrea answered. “Their tent was gone this morning when I got up.”

“You don’t think the Governor--”

“Beth Greene.”

“Oh, God,” Andrea sighed under her breath.

A man was walking toward them. He was young, in his mid to late twenties, with cocoa colored eyes and mahogany colored hair. He was thin, stood about five ft. eight, but walked as though he was seven feet tall with his somewhat weak chin jutting forward. Despite the jeans and t-shirt he wore, he had a prep school boy air to him. There was a liberal dose of snobbery in the smirk on his face and the twist of his thin lips.

“Mark Rowley,” he said, but his expression soured when he saw the token around her neck. “Who gave you that?”

“I’m sorry, but how is that your business?” Beth asked. She remembered Merle Dixon saying he had thrown his girlfriend out with the intentions of taking her as his own.

He gripped the token and made a noise of angry disgust. There was a moment when she thought he would rip the chain from her neck.

“Daryl Dixon. A girl as beautiful as you can do better than that white trash piece of shit,” he said.

Beth tried to take the token back, but his grip remained firm. “Let go.”

“Or what?” he challenged. “You’ll tell Daryl on me?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, and looked past him, opening her mouth s though to speak.

Mark released the token at once and moved swiftly away from Beth. He spun around to find the path empty behind him.

“That’s what I thought,” Beth said, smirking along with Andrea. “I will be having a discussion with Daryl about this.”

“Don’t forget to mention Mark’s obnoxious Napoleon complex while you’re at it,” Andrea said. She and Beth broke into laughter.

“Bitch.” He all but snarled the word at Andrea, then looked down at the token around her neck. S.W. was burned into the wood. He may have been a woman-hating bully but he was not a complete fool. Mark made no attempt to grab at Andrea’s token. Nor did he move to say another word.

“I’ll let Shane know exactly what you think of me.”

“I was talking to her,” he said quickly, nodding at Beth. He must have figured Daryl as less of a threat than Shane. Either way, losing his temper and attempting to bully Beth was going to spell bad news for him, and all three of them knew it. He backed away.

“If you ever decide you want a real man, I’m only--”

“I won’t bother to call you, that’s for damn sure,” Beth said, and continued up the path with Andrea, just as the first of the raindrops began to fall.

*****

The storm that came in seemed determined to destroy every tent in the camp. It was late March and the weather had turned unexpectedly cold for Georgia. Beth wouldn’t have been surprised if snow started to mix with the rain. Shivering, she took the meat she’d cooked in the fire pit and put it on a plate, made sure the flames were extinguished, which wasn’t difficult considering how hard it rained, by leaving the cover off the pit, and entered the tent. Daryl came in just as she finished making two plates, his hair soaked and his jacket dripping. His eyes had a red quality to them. She watched as he lifted a bottle of rum to his lips before he offered it to her.

“Oh, no thanks,” she said.

“I’m not drunk if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, somewhat aggressively.

“I’m not thinking anything like that. Dinner’s ready.”

“I’ll eat later. I saw you talking to Mark Rowley earlier. What’d he want?”

Beth shrugged. “To bully me, I guess,” she said, spreading a little bit of the butter one of the women in camp had churned, onto a piece of bread. Suddenly Daryl gripped her arm and she dropped the bread.

“Ow!”

He released his grip but his eyes were on fire with anger. “Bully you how?”

“It was nothing--”

“I asked you a question, girl. How did he bully you?”

“He said I could do better than white trash like you. I told him I was going to have a word with you but he didn’t seem to care. He called Andrea a bitch but tried to make it out like he was talking to me. Look, Daryl, he’s a weak little piece of shit. He’s not worth it. I don’t want any trouble--”

“This ain’t about what you want,” Daryl told her. “This is about him disrespecting me. I can’t let him put his hands on what’s mine and not do anything. It’ll make me look weak.”

He corked his rum and got up.

“Daryl--”

“Stay here, you hear me? Don’t leave this tent.”

Beth sat down, wishing like hell he hadn’t seen anything, and that she’d lied about what had really happened with Mark, but she figured lying would only put her on dangerous ground with Daryl. She looked at the bottle of rum and thought that it was likely Daryl Dixon was a mean drunk. Sure, she didn’t like Mark Rowley, but she didn’t want to be responsible for getting someone hurt.

It seemed to take forever before Daryl returned. When he did, his knuckles were red and bloody, but it wasn’t his blood.

“I’ll get you a bandage,” she said nervously. “I’ve got a clean towel here too.”

“You scared of me?” he asked.

She turned back to him with the towel and she knew what was on his mind when she looked into his stormy blue eyes. She'd read romance novels where men wanted to fuck their women after they were in a fight. She'd always thought that was silly purple prose nonsense but now she was starting to think there may have been a grain of truth to it. Daryl seemed worked up, and not just with rage.

“No, of course not.”

She couldn’t quite hide the quiver in her voice, however. The truth of the matter was that she was a little bit frightened of Daryl Dixon. She was also aroused by him in a way she couldn’t understand. Why would a man who displayed violence and a bad attitude make her belly quiver? She assumed part of it was the intense look of lust in his eyes, and the fact that he was sexy in that redneck kind of way.

Seeing her nervousness made Daryl's dick harden even more than it already was. He'd kicked Mark's ass for crossing the line. He'd done his part in the arrangement, and he felt it was time she lived up to every single aspect of her part of the deal. His blood was pumping, and the sight of her, nervous and small in front of him, made him want her more than he wanted air to breathe. 

Daryl wrapped a hand behind Beth's head and pulled her roughly toward him, smothering her lips in a hard, breath stealing kiss. He turned her around and pulled her back against him. She could feel the hardened length of his cock pressing against her ass as he shoved a hand down her jeans and began to stroke her clit.

Beth’s head was spinning from the sudden onslaught of sensations. He reached under her bra and began to roll one of her nipples with surprising gentleness while he kept up a fast, circling motion with his fingers. His lips latched onto her neck, sucking hard, marking her for anyone to see that she wasn’t just living in his tent, she was sleeping in his bed.

He made quick work of her jeans, shoving them down. She heard the clink of his belt buckle and the zip of his pants just before he shoved her face first into the pillow of his sleeping bag. He entered her, gently at first, testing the water. Feeling she wasn’t a virgin, despite how tight she was, he began to thrust. He set up a hard, punishing rhythm that made her cry out with as much pain as pleasure. She had only had sex twice in her life and wasn’t used to being penetrated, especially by a long, heavy cock like Daryl's. The pace was moving quicker than Beth could keep up with. Her body wasn’t sure whether to scream in pleasure as he moved faster, or pain.

A shock wave of pleasure coursed through her, even as Daryl burned her with his rock hard length in an ever increasing pace. She felt tears sting at her eyes just before he cried out and she felt the hot lava flow of his climax fill her.

“Fuck!” he swore, and pulled out of her.

She turned to her side and pulled her pants up as he sat back, his cock going flaccid, slicked with her juices and her blood. They eyed one another in the waning light of the stormy evening, the rain beating against the tent as they looked at one another.

“I’ll have my dinner now,” he said, and picked up his bottle of rum.

When Daryl had eaten and drank his fill, he went to sleep. Beth lay on her side and listened to the storm. The thunder masked the sound of her hitching breath as she cried into her pillow, her body aching from the sex but also strangely sated. She didn’t know what to feel. She would have let him fuck her no matter what. It was just that she’d hoped he would be a gentle lover, even a boring one. That, apparently, was not going to be the case.

She wiped at her eyes and snuggled down into her sleeping bag, only to find that sleep evaded her. She longed for home. She longed for the feel of her father’s protective arms around her, and her sister’s smiling eyes. She would never see them again. She knew that now. She was just going to have to accept it. She was on her own. She was a woman and she would have to think like one. She wasn’t just any woman; she was Daryl Dixon’s woman. 

Now she knew, from firsthand experience, exactly what that entailed.  



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