Disclaimer: I don't own any of these wonderful characters, I just like to borrow them every now and again!
A/N: I'm not sure if I've hit this on the head but I decided to post it anyway to see what you all thought. I'm not sure whether Gillian might have been a little angry at what Cal said. I didn't want to go that far in this fic but I did want to make her frustration clear.
Her foot was placed awkwardly in front of her other, positioned as if she was ready to turn in the other direction. But she wasn't moving and, now, wasn't planning on it. Or at least, she wasn't quite sure how to make her brain function in order to get her feet to move.
She couldn't get her brain to move past what he had just said; couldn't figure out what it had meant.
"So anyone that wants to compete for my loyalty with Terry Marsh...not really in a fair fight"
It wasn't that it was complicated, far from it. She understood the loyalty that Cal felt for Terry, had seen it in his eyes over the past day or two. She knew that part of him owed where he was today to the sacrifice that Terry had made all of those years ago. She would even go so far as to say that she owed a part of where she was today to Terry, not intellectually but certainly the fact that she could count Cal as her partner, her friend.
So she understood his loyalty. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was that what he had said had caused her heart to drop painfully to somewhere in the region of her toes and it was that she was struggling to understand.
She was nothing like Terry, her friendship with Cal was drastically different. They hadn't known each other as long, they had met at entirely different stages in their lives. Terry had known Cal when, she made the assumption, he was a younger, wilder, less focused man. She knew him as he was now: perhaps just a little less wild, older and at least a little more responsible for the consequences of his actions. So why did it matter that he had questioned anyone else's loyalty in relation to Terry's?
Why did...
And then she finally moved, her foot pointed forward, she straightened her stance, and she realised why her heart had only just begun to beat again. He was questioning her loyalty, whether implicitly or not, he was somehow suggesting that it was her who was competing with Terry and, by implication, that she still didn't match up. That was what hurt.
Not only that, by saying what he had said, he had somehow failed to understand what she would do for him, what she would be willing to sacrifice for his life.
He had, once again, shut her out a little bit more. And she had absolutely no idea what to do about that.
***