Work Text:
Daryl was done for the day, just finishing up by putting his tools away. Most of the other guys had already gone home but he wasn't alone since T-Dog, who had the bay next to Daryl’s, was still wrenching away on something underneath a gnarly looking van. The radio was humming along on the classic rock station in the background and Daryl was trying to remember if he had any food in his refrigerator, when suddenly T-Dog stopped working and sighed heavily.
“Damn it.”
Daryl looked over at T-Dog’s boots sticking out from under the frame of the vehicle. It hadn't sounded like the type of swearing someone did when they got hurt, so Daryl just asked
“What?”
“Just remembered that I forgot to mention that shitty serpentine belt on the ticket for the last car. That one we did the shocks on.” T-Dog started to roll the crawler out from under the van.
“I got it.” Daryl said as he put down the last of his tools in the drawer, slid it shut with a click. “I'll go tell the desk, see if they checked out yet.
“Really?” T-Dog said, and Daryl could hear the cranking of the socket wrench resume from under the van. “Thanks, man.”
Daryl shrugged it off, didn't remember until he was halfway across the garage that T-Dog wouldn't have been able to see it. Great. Now he was probably going to think Daryl was blowing him off.
Daryl had his coveralls zipped halfway down so that the arms were tied around his waist, and he fished a rag out of his back pocket to try and clean his hands. He was still trying to wipe the grease off when he shouldered through the door that led into the little waiting room of the mechanic shop.
“Has that green Civic got picked up yet?” Daryl asked Jim as the door swung shut behind him, blocking out the low noise from the radio.
Jim was behind the counter checking out a customer, and he just tilted his head towards the guy with the wallet in his hands. The guy had been in the process of swiping his card, but he looked up and towards Daryl and -. Oh.
“Yeah, that's my car.” Said the customer. “Is something wrong?”
He wasn't in uniform, but Daryl knew right away that he was a cop. Daryl couldn't remember his name, but seeing the man’s face was like a lightning strike of memory that rooted Daryl to the spot, froze him in his tracks. Even though Daryl had only met the guy before one time in his life, some six years ago now, and hadn’t thought about him at all for about half that time.
But Daryl had certainly, well, thought about him often enough back when he had been a constantly horny teenager.
Daryl swallowed as the cop looked at him.
“Your serpentine belt is startin’ to look a little worn. We, uh. We forgot to put it on the sheet.” Daryl felt his face heat up for no reason as he spoke, and he found himself twisting the rag tightly between his filthy hands “You're gonna want to get it replaced soon. So it don't give out when you're drivin’ somewhere.”
“Thanks.” said the cop, his face holding no sign of recognition. Unsurprising. Why would he have remembered.
“Thanks, Daryl.” Jim nodded to him, tapping something in the keyboard before he returned his attention to the cop “Do you want to get a quote for that today then?”
But Daryl didn't hear what the cop said, retreated back through the swinging door to the safety of the workshop.
---
It was true, that Daryl hadn’t thought about the cop in years. Daryl had plenty of lies he told himself, but that wasn't one of them. All of Daryl’s pathetic little fantasies about that cop had faded eventually, after Daryl had realized how foolish they had really been.
Back when he was sixteen Daryl had thought that, maybe, he could find someone who would want to kiss him. It made Daryl's shoulders curl in embarrassment now. To think about how badly he had wanted something so simple and basic. How he had just wanted a guy who wouldn't laugh at him, who would be patient with Daryl’s inexperience, gentle with him even though they didn't have to be. Daryl had thought that, maybe, the cop he had developed a useless crush on would be like that.
Really, Daryl shouldn't have hoped in the first place. It had only made it harder when he’d discovered that no one was like that. Or, at least, no one was like that when it came to Daryl specifically.
Daryl had gone to Atlanta once, parked his truck and walked a couple of blocks to a bar. He hadn't been old enough to drink legally then, but he had looked it and no one had hassled him. In the bar the music wasn't as overwhelming as he had feared, no crazy flashing neon or bright colors or anything that word have caused Daryl to turn on his heel and walk away.
He had still felt awkward and out of place but all the guys seemed average enough and Daryl had downed a couple of beers even though he wasn't much of a drinker. There were a few obvious couples that Daryl watched enviously from the corner of his eye as they held hands and laughed together, playing darts or putting money in the jukebox.
It had looked nice. Really nice. So when a guy in a red flannel shirt put a hand on his shoulder, offered to buy him a beer, Daryl had forced himself to relax and say yes past the nervous lump in his throat. Because some small part of him thought that maybe someday someone would want to hold his hand or dance with him.
The guy in the red flannel ended up buying Daryl few beers and chatting easily with him for a while before he hooked a finger through one of Daryl’s belt loops and led him out to the gravel alley behind the bar. Daryl didn't have a lot of experience when it came sucking dick, so he did a pretty bad job at it until the guy got fed up and just fucked the head of his cock into Daryl’s mouth until he finally came.
Daryl had already finished himself off by then, so the guy had just gone back into the bar without saying anything else, and Daryl had wiped his face on the hem of his shirt. His knees popped when he stood up, sore from the sharp gravel as he trudged back under the buzzing streetlights to sleep it off in his truck.
Daryl had woken up the next morning with a crick in his neck and a nasty taste in his mouth that left him feeling empty the whole drive home from Atlanta. What had he thought would happen, anyways? That the guy would give Daryl his phone number? Want to be his boyfriend or some shit? Stupid. Just because they had talked for a while before Daryl made a fool of himself hadn’t meant that it would be any different from the other couple of times.
---
The green Civic with the dent in the bumper came in back to the shop the next week, and Daryl ended up being the one to replace the belt on it. Once he had finished with the job, he took the keys and the ticket up front to hand them over to Jim, the cop was sitting there. Waiting.
Daryl had, maybe, checked the name on the Civic’s work ticket before he even started on the serpentine belt job. So he knew that the cop’s name was Rick Grimes, even though it made Daryl feel like a bit of a creep. And he also, maybe, looked at the cop's big hands where they held the curled up pages of the magazine.
The cop had his legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, and he was reading one of the tattered old hunting magazines that had been in the shop forever. Grimes hadn't looked up when Daryl had come into the room, and Daryl didn't know if he was disappointed or relieved. It should have been relief, the end to his meaningless infatuation, so Daryl told himself that was what it had to be. Then he grabbed the set of keys for the next car off the hook board and got back to work.
It didn’t fucking matter, he thought to himself as he rotated the tires on an old Buick. It didn’t fucking matter, so he needed to put it out of his head. There was no way that that Rick Grimes, cop, would ever take an interest in Daryl. He clearly didn't have any clue who Daryl was, but he probably wouldn't have cared even if he did. It didn’t make sense for Daryl to spend time thinking about what he would do, in an alternate dimension where the cop took an interest in Daryl that wasn't arresting him for poaching.
It didn’t bear worrying over, in part, because it would never, ever happen. The definition of the word impossible. Daryl's life just didnt work like that. But it was also a waste of time to think about since, as far as Daryl was concerned, the result of anyone taking an interest in him was a pretty much foregone conclusion. Because on the rare occasion that Daryl ended up in a position where someone wanted to mess around with him, he always said yes.
A couple guys had said that Daryl was easy for it , and. Whether that was a good thing or not, Daryl didn't know. But he still supposed that it was true.
What was the point in Daryl being any other way? He so rarely was able to overcome the crawling shame in his gut and attempted anything with anyone that it didn't seem worth it to beat around the bush and risk messing things up. It wasn't like Daryl was some type of prize, someone that was really worth pursuing. He knew that he was lucky to be noticed at all, even if he knew that no one would ever want anything to do with him after they were done and inevitably disappointed.
Daryl didn't like to take his clothes off and he didn't like to be touched. Or, more accurately, he just didn't know how to let himself be touched. There had been a handful of hookups in his life, but Daryl still felt like he had no idea what he was doing when things got heated. He had never been a fast learner and he was too tense all the time, his lanky body tight all over whenever someone got close.
It wasn't that he was scared of sex. It could be unpleasant, sometimes, but no worse than anything else. And Daryl had always gotten off regardless, so he figured he didn't have any room to complain. But Daryl always felt bad afterwards, guilty and twisted up inside. He always felt like he had just wasted people's time - Daryl wasn't very good at being around people to start with, much less at having sex with them.
The awakening of his stupid, long dormant crush on the cop that had been inexplicably nice to him when Daryl had been a snot nosed kid wasn't going to change the basic facts of reality. So it didn’t fucking matter, and Daryl did his best to put it out of his head.
Then, two weeks later, Daryl saw the familiar green Civic parked in front of a bar that was about halfway between the garage and where Daryl lived.
The place was a dive that Daryl did his best to avoid. Which made it all the more surprising to Daryl that he changed his course and walked right through the door of the bar. He slouched down on a stool with hands in his pockets and the feeling of being about to step out into nothing, beating in his heart.