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>Surely the hug will go normal this time
Gil's hands are in his pockets and his eyebrows are raised. He doesn't sound disappointed by your response, but he doesn't sound totally impassive either, as if he didn't care about talking to you. He cares about you, but not too much. Not to a weird extent, an extent that'd bother you: not like Richard, who's always too much or too little. Gil sounds like a sensible person. He sounds mature. He sounds normal.
You had missed him before— of course you had— but you look at him now and fiercely, fervently miss him in retrospect. Would you have opened up a stupid pit and fallen down it and got shot in the head and let Ellery escape if Gil were there? Would you have been eaten by alligators if he wasn't? Look at him, not a scratch on him, because he makes good decisions, and he can handle himself, and—
You want to hear what he has to say. It's not that you don't. You screw your mouth up. "I— I mean— we can— if you can talk, um, quick, and quiet, while we're going, then you can— I mean, maybe if you could stick to the most important, um—"
"Sure," Gil says. "If you don't think that'd cause too much trouble. I don't want to get us caught, or—"
"Or let him get away," Anthea says.
"Or that. Yeah. It's up to you, Lottie. I trust you."
It's up to you. He <span class="mu-i">trusts</span> you. Who else trusts you? Richard has never trusted you, and still doesn't. Maybe he loves you (he thinks he loves you), but he doesn't trust you. Ellery sure doesn't. Teddy doesn't. Pat didn't. Madrigal, barely. Eloise, as a joke. Earl doesn't count. The dead pagan god you never talked to said you were headed toward your own doom, which was a real jerk thing to say, plus not very trusting. God took you to little pieces and spat you out again without a how-do-you-do, so you don't think there's much trust there, either. Also, it keeps trying to get you to murder people. It's really just Gil. It's only Gil.
You don't have a good name for what you're feeling. You're not good at that kind of thing. All you know is that you clench your hands and curl your toes and strain and it doesn't go away, not even a little. Gil is frowning. "Um, are you alright?"
Yes. Maybe. Yes. Now that he's here, yes. You can't say that; it sounds so dumb. And needy. You don't need him, same as how you didn't need Richard, but you really, really like him here, and isn't that almost the same? You feel like you want to give him a hug. Is that its own feeling? Should you ask him? No, that's dumb too. He liked it the other times. Positive thinking. You should just go for it.
You step forward and reach out your arms and Gil's eyes go big, big enough for you to see what <span class="mu-i">is</span> wrong with them— they're blue. They have big blue rings in them. And he recoils a bit and says something like "Wait, Lottie, I—"
(1/2)
