This week's chapter is dedicated to Head Cheerleader, the lovely and ever-wonderful DrinkThemIn. We are all blessed to have her engaging with our stories x
I hope you all enjoy this one!
Love,
MrsVonTrapp x
Chapter Seven
Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!
"Heads or tails, Miss Shirley?" Gilbert asked solemnly, though his hazel eyes were alight with merriment.
Anne bit her shell-pink bottom lip, pausing to give due consideration to this important and weighty question. In light of the fact they were unable to agree on a course of action upon leaving Redmond, they had spent the afternoon and into the evening allowing luck - and the law of averages – to dictate their decisions.
That had been behind their impromptu lunch in the park rather than a bite at a tea room; their afternoon stroll took them meandering along the shore rather than back around the town; their coin toss had even determined their topic of conversation when things between them occasionally lapsed into an embarrassed, searching silence.
Though admittedly… their conversation had not strayed to that other conversation of the night before…
It had been quite the adventure to find the little guest house close to the station, after having first tried a locked and sadly deserted Patty's Place (her toss) and then the ever-patient cab driver's three other recommendations (his toss)… and then it had taken all their joint powers of persuasion to convince their rather grumpy hostess to rent them her one remaining room during the height of summer at short notice if she would not to pry into their affairs, and if they promised to forgo breakfast and be away first thing in the morning.
"Tails," Anne now declared with confidence.
Gilbert tossed high and caught the coin neatly, smacking it into his large brown hand with a satisfying thwack. Peering at the exposed side, his mouth frowned in consternation.
"Best of three," he declared.
"No, Gil!" Anne placed a restraining hand on his arm. "A deal is a deal!"
"Not in this instance, Anne. I can't in all conscience…" he felt his cheeks heating. "It's not right or gentlemanly, and what's more my parents – and I mean both of them – would skin me."
She gifted him the sweetest of smiles.
"Gilbert, we tossed for who takes the couch tonight, not naming rights to our firstborn."
It took him a beat to process her slip; our. That little pronoun returning to circle them as a carousel, and around and around they rode with it. And further, his little inside joke… naming a child… even, dare he ever think it, their child…
Something in his reaction to her compromising quip must have betrayed him, for those grey orbs widened in understanding and then her face flooded with corresponding color. She opened her mouth, seemingly to correct herself, and then thought better of it, instead retreating from him, attempting a diversion by capitulating regarding the couch if he insisted upon chivalry over chance, and then going to great lengths in order to make it up properly for him.
Gilbert stood awkwardly, hands in pockets, contemplating her, unreasonably diverted by seeing Anne perform this mundane domestic task for him, and tempted to press her regarding her slip but also loathe to disrupt their truly and unexpectedly wonderful day.
"This is a lot of effort for an older brother," he instead joked.
She turned around with a relieved smile, pushing away a stray wisp of hair.
"Well, siblings need to look out for one another."
In desperation they had posed, incongruously, as brother and sister, travelling back from a mutual friend's wedding, and finding they had just missed their onward connection. This had been met with pursed lips and a disbelieving air, thankfully not acted upon. In truth, without the landlady already overworked and harassed and looking the other way, clearly leaving their evident moral dissipation to themselves, they may have had to camp out in the flower beds.
Instead they were, scandal of scandals, sharing a room, flipping a coin for the couch and avoiding discussion of meaningful pronouns.
They exchanged a heated gaze growing warmer by the minute, enflamed further by the still, stifling air in the room.
"Anne…" Gilbert now hesitated, feeling he might well be about to poke himself with a red-hot iron, branding himself as a fool forever, "could we take a moment… to talk?"
She had been re-plumping a pillow, and now paused, hugging it to herself as if a shield.
"Talk…?" she echoed uncertainly, attempting a wavering smile. "Haven't we spent the entire day talking?"
"Yes, and most engagingly…" his brow darkened. "But you know that's not what I mean."
The heightened color again tinged her cheeks.
He felt himself inching forward towards that invisible fire, holding his hand above it, hovering much, much too close.
"You said ours, Anne."
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. "Well, of course that was a slip of the tongue, Gil!"
He paused, and then plunged his hand in, feeling the shooting flames scorch his flesh.
"And was… last night?"
Anne stilled, taking a great breath, and indeed it felt like all the air had been suddenly sucked out of the room.
"Gilbert, I… I…" she stammered, flushing so beautifully he wanted to have the image of her preserved forever, as if under glass. And then, in the next moment, as fleeting as the beat of a butterfly's wings, her image shifted, and her great grey eyes darkened as if haunted by something she couldn't quite see but was still afraid of regardless.
She tossed the pillow on the couch.
"It's incredibly stuffy in here – I'm going to open a window."
Anne stalked over to the windowsill, beginning to push against the pane and then tug at the stubborn latch ineffectually.
"For… goodness… sake!" she muttered through clenched teeth, starting to pummel her palm in frustration against the glass.
"Here, Carrots…" he leaned over her, rescuing her hand and taking it in his own for a too-brief moment, having to ignore her burning face and his galloping heart whilst he tried to address the window himself. It refused to budge, even when, in desperation, he put his shoulder to it.
"Glad to see those years of football have paid off," Anne heard herself offering waspishly, evidently feeling too unsettled by his nearness and his line of questioning to be civil.
He chuckled darkly, giving her a twisted smile that melted her from within.
"Spoken like a true sister," he answered dryly, and then, looking back to the window, "stupid latch is fused tight. Nothing will budge it, I'm afraid."
She huffed, but the flare of annoyance had subsided, leaving behind only the smoking embers of her own mortification.
She tried not to turn her eyes back to Gilbert, too discombobulated by the sight of his strong, tanned forearms in his relaxed, rolled-up shirt sleeves… of the muscles of his taut torso straining against his shirtfront and vest as if threatening to pop his buttons with the next sudden movement… and then, the dark curls falling across his forehead, and that straight nose and splendid chin and full lips and the shadow studding his strong jaw…
But then his eyes caught hers, and the spark in their hazel depths threatened to unravel her. She felt her fingers by their own volition might at any moment stray to that jaw, tracing a wondering path, and had to grasp the tips herself lest she lose all possible sense and decorum, tenuous as both concepts currently were.
"Anne…" Gilbert offered huskily, throat tightening. "That was wrong of me, just now, and unfair. To ask you about last night. I'm sorry. This is clearly not the time and certainly not the place…" he glanced around at their too-intimate surrounds, "for that sort of discussion."
He did not await her reply, instead moving absently back towards the couch. What he wouldn't give now for some air himself, or even a bucket of cold water thrown over him… anything to quench this fire in the pit of his belly when he so much as looked at her.
"Thank you for seeing to the couch," he continued, for at least if he was talking he wasn't just standing there gormlessly, too ready to overturn every gentlemanly principle he cherished. "I thought if I turned it around to face the wall then that would ensure your privacy…" he swiftly did just that, hauling the protesting piece into its new position and trying to safeguard her handiwork with the spare bedclothes.
She looked up to him gravely.
"And if I turn my back and you use the little washroom first, I can do so after you are in the bed and have turned down the lamp," he continued, at speed, in a race to end this endless temptation. "We will never even glimpse one another and can truly be…"
"As brother and sister," she ascertained, flustered now.
"Yes," he expelled an anxious breath.
What did it matter? His dreams of her were at least equal to any flash of her form he might glimpse, and were already augmented by that disappearing angel on the stairs of Patty's Place, hair aflame and nightgown billowing.
Only… only… he wanted something tangible and real, now, not some fevered fantasy or his half-baked imaginings. She was here before him right now at this moment, alone with him in this moment… so close he could reach out and touch her – touch that pink-tinged cheek and that wisp of wonderous hair and that proud, stubborn, oft-tilted chin and those luscious shell-pink lips and that glorious freckled nose and to stare into those eyes he could lose himself in…
He clenched the jaw he had no idea she so admired. He had never felt less fraternal in his life.
As brother and sister…
Anne shook her head despairingly at the overwrought image of herself in the washroom… eyes overbright and cheeks too flushed and nerve endings obviously too aware of Gilbert waiting for her to complete her toilette, because she could barely manage her own buttons and fumbled so with her hairpins she would have to search out half of them on the floor in the morning.
In the morning… the dawn felt days away, because she already knew this night would be endless.
In all her years alongside Gilbert Blythe she had never really stopped to consider him as countless other women saw him… She of course appreciated his looks and his intelligence and his decency and goodness, and the humour she had sorely missed in her years with Roy… but they had almost been abstract concepts, to approve and admire as if an academic exercise… or dismissed firmly as the markers of mere friendship. She was wholly unprepared to have all these wonderful traits packaged together into the persona of the man who might have been her husband by now, and to have him here the other side of the door, and yet unable to articulate any of her overwhelming feelings, was a horrible irony. And she could barely breathe when he was near… her body had become her betrayer, because it ached at the thought he might touch her, and her awareness of him was something she could no longer ignore or intellectualize.
She dashed at her miserable, mocking tears.
You are a mess, Anne Shirley, she chastised herself.
Gilbert paced the worn carpet of their small room, hoping it wasn't obvious that he was a complete mess.
It had all seemed such a simple plan at first… leave Anne and Pris at the train station once they had reached Kingsport, quickly double-back to the college for his books, and rendezvous with them both for the return journey to the Island.
But as their train from Bolingbroke set off late and only continued to lose time, it was increasingly obvious that their arrival in Kingsport was going to be inevitably delayed, and he knew they were all in danger of losing their connection as it was. Anne's last-minute decision to accompany him, and boat train be damned, was as surprising and gratifying as it was mildly terrifying…
It would be fine, he had reasoned, because they had his accommodation, one of the perks of the Cooper Prize; a grace-and-favour suite of rooms within the medical students' boarding house, and he could put Anne up in style, whilst he bunkered down in one of the empty dorms.
But all wasn't fine… and so they had eventually landed here in this overpriced, overrun death trap, posing as brother and sister, whilst his hormones and his tortured conscience waged a war and Anne for all intents and purposes had barricaded herself in the washroom.
He sighed deeply, and then passed a hand through his curls, mussing them in his agitation. How the blazes could he give her his letter now? Anne was probably this very minute regretting her talk of ours in any context, and currently plotting her escape out of whichever unlocked window she was able to find. He felt responsibility for their present predicament keenly, no matter how lovely their stolen day together had been.
There was a rattle of the doorknob; their signal that she was ready. Gilbert turned away from the bed to face the couch, squaring his shoulders against the inevitability of a long, restless night.
Anne was trembling as she arranged the covers around her, darting a daring glimpse at Gilbert's long, shapely back and impossibly broad shoulders, not even able to linger on the fetching nape dusted by his brown curls before she felt compelled to turn down the lamp.
He was a swift shadow moving with fluid ease towards the washroom, and her heart thundered loudly in her ears to think that in different circumstances she may have been waiting for him in their marriage bed, and he about to join her, instead of holding her breath until he re-emerged and then knowing how he tried to settle himself on the couch as silently as possible. If that ours she had whispered last night – already feeling like centuries ago – had been acted upon in the orchard at Patty's Place he would not be as her brother now…
Ridiculous, unreasonable musings, given she had made it impossible to discuss anything meaningful today… not her surprising words or her unpredictable feelings… her surprising feelings and her unpredictable words… not what to do about the position in Summerside or what his plans were beyond his medical degree… had she become such a craven, coward soul * that she couldn't even talk to Gilbert anymore?
Could we take a moment… to talk?
She owed him a moment.
"Gil?" she called out tentatively into the void.
She felt him shuffle about, as if angling his body in her direction.
"Yes, Anne?"
"Are you awake?"
His warm, throaty chuckle made her toes curl.
"Noting that I've just answered you, I'm positive you can take that as affirmative."
She huffed extravagantly, which made him chuckle all the more.
"I will talk if you want to," she offered hesitatingly, in a reedy voice that didn't even sound like her own.
There was such a scrambling from him at that point she thought he'd fallen off his impromptu bed, neat covers and all.
"Gilbert?"
"Talk?" he echoed, his resonant baritone sounding a little strangled.
"Ah… yes."
"Anne, I'm sorry, I just can't hear you very well – you're slightly muffled because you're under the covers and I'm facing the wall," she could imagine him roll those hazel eyes to the ceiling.
She gnawed her lip, contemplating. "Well… if we keep the light off, could you not move the couch back again?"
"You want to talk under cover of darkness?"
This question heated her already warm cheeks.
"If you don't think…"
"No, Anne, it's an inspired idea! Just give me a moment…"
Gilbert threw off the carefully arranged covers and pivoted the deceptively heavy couch yet again, facing the vague outline of the bed and flopping down gratefully. If Anne wanted to talk underwater he would agree, and gladly. There would be no moving on for either of them if they couldn't address this properly. It was crowded enough without the elephant in the room as well.
And he was through the looking glass ** now and no mistake.
"I'm here and ready, Anne. To talk. To listen. Whatever you need me to do."
There was a silence so long in reply if he hadn't known better he would have presumed she'd drifted off to sleep, but no, there was her soft sigh, and the rustling of the covers, and he could almost imagine her determined, pointed little chin thrust out defiantly.
"Yes, Gil. Yes, I said ours. And… I meant it. But what I meant by it… I'm still trying to figure that out."
His eyes were out on stalks, and he was forever grateful she couldn't see them. He was amazed at her forthright honesty… and her courage.
"I see…" he answered, with unintentional irony. "Thank you for trusting me with that, Anne. It means a great deal to me that you have."
Anne was forever grateful he couldn't see her newly-flaming cheeks.
"Of course, this never happens to you, Gil. You always mean what you say." ***
He laughed amusedly, relaxing somewhat, turning on his side and resting his head on his hand. "But sadly I don't always say what I mean…" ***
"How so?"
"With you for instance, Anne." The least he could do was to meet her honesty with his own.
"Why? When?" she tried not to yelp, and there was a great commotion as she seemed to half sit up in bed.
He groaned audibly. "Anne, that is a great can of worms, and you know it!"
"True enough," she acknowledged after a moment, emitting a breathy, self-deprecating little laugh, enough to stir his nerve endings.
He paused, smiling to himself, considering.
"All I can say, Anne-girl, is there were a thousand occasions when I wanted to say something complimentary to you, or a little more personal, and I ended up saying something bland and uninspired instead. Or worse… I didn't say anything at all."
"Oh, Gil… you are not the only one with regrets, here. I've said completely the wrong thing to you so many times… or I've said just too much and haven't known when to stop my runaway mouth…"
"I…" he gulped. "I have rather a fondness for that runaway mouth of yours."
He blushed himself at his words, and goodness knows how Anne had taken them. Unbeknownst to him, the lady in question grinned to herself and hugged the pillow tightly to her.
"I didn't realize how important it was… that you didn't want to change me. That you accepted me for who I am…" her voice dropped, low and halting. "Roy… he didn't want to change me overtly… but I realized, after a time, there were all these little corrections and suggestions… I think he was trying to mold me, as if he were the sculptor and I the clay…"
"Gardner was a damned fool, Anne!" Gilbert offered tersely. "He didn't appreciate what he had."
"Thank you, Gil…" she breathed, and if surprised by his sudden outburst she didn't indicate so.
He expelled a long breath, attempting to calm himself. "Anne… you must know…" he paused.
"Yes?"
"I like you – very much. Just as you are." ****
There.
He had run bodily into the fire now, dancing around in the flames.
He couldn't tell what Anne was doing, and he couldn't hear anything above his heart hammering loudly in his chest.
"I… I like you too, Gil. Very, very much. Just as you are and just as you've always been. I'm sorry… I feel I didn't properly appreciate you either… till it was too late."
Anne buried herself under the covers, unable to even face him in the darkness. She felt so hot and heady she might self-combust.
"It's never too late, Anne," he answered quietly.
She flipped the covers back off her. "Pardon me?"
"I said, Anne…" he found his backbone, sitting up properly and straightening with the words, "it's never too late."
Anne felt as if she was still in her corset, the laces tightening ever so slowly, constricting her breath by breath.
"Is it possible, Anne… that's perhaps why you were thinking of weddings and what might have beens, last night?"
The suggestion hung heavy in the cloying air, the weight of it something he could almost hold in his hands.
"Because…" he took a plosive breath, "I got to thinking about that, too – which is why I wrote a five page letter to you last night."
"You wrote to me… last night?" she squeaked.
"Yes…"
"What… did you write about?" she asked, tentatively.
"Before. Ours. Us."
Perhaps he shouldn't have said… perhaps he'd gone too far, but the darkness had drawn all his secrets from him, and some of Anne's too, as if some sort of sacred confessional.
"Ours…" she echoed. "Oh, Gil!"
"Anne?"
She whimpered something unintelligible.
"Anne?"
"I'm alright, Gilbert… really…" she sniffed loudly.
"I've upset you!"
"No you haven't!" she sobbed, "I've upset myself!"
"Anne!" he felt desperate to hear her distress, "I don't understand!"
"I've… been…such…an idiot!" she pummelled her fist, this time on the mattress, as if to punctuate her words.
"Anne, darling, please!" the endearment broke away from him, unbidden. "I can't bear this! Turn up the damn lamp!"
He was off the couch and stumbling about in the dark, which was as accurate a metaphor for his current state as it was an actuality. A moment later the room was flooded with soft light, Anne standing by the bedside table, mouth fallen open, depthless eyes tearstained above flushed cheeks.
Time slowed as he saw her, reality scrambling his senses, so he was momentarily unsure if she had sprung from one of his dreams. She was almost lost in the voluminous fabric of her nightgown, but her lithe, lovely form was still traced by his seeking eyes, from slender neck to delicate decolletage, falling away and down before rising again to her beautiful face, flaming as her hair, which rippled as a river in a braid over one shoulder.
Anne blinked and took a shuddering breath. She was standing before Gilbert, as he stood before her… in low-slung trousers and loose suspenders, only an undershirt covering the muscled expanse of his darkly dusted chest, the shoulders she had admired allowed full inspection, and the corded, sinewy strength of his arms… she stuttered in her appraisal before sweeping her amazed gaze back to his handsome, beloved face of smooth honey and dark shadow, and those blazing hazel eyes.
"D…D…Darling?" she now gasped.
His breath was heavy and tight in his chest, and he began to deny it, but then scowled to himself. Let propriety hang.
"Darling," he asserted, gravel-voiced. "Or maybe you'd prefer sweetheart? I've called you both names, Anne, and more besides. Name any lover-like sentiment and I've used it. Just because you've never heard it doesn't mean I've never said it."
"You… you mean it?" her bottom lip trembled.
"On my life."
"Even after… all this time? And all my mistakes?"
"Oh, Anne… any mistakes you made, I matched you. We can't change our past and you know, I wouldn't want to. Those Before times are precious to me. They inform our After."
There was a beat as she processed these thoughts, staring at him all the while, as if his very presence could provide the answers she sought.
"I'm… quite attached to the After as well, though…" she demurred, with the hint of a flustered smile.
"The After has certainly been… surprising…" he gifted the glimpse of a grin.
Anne wiped away the final trace of her tears, Gilbert tracking the movement with a sorrowful expression.
"Anne, I… I so want to comfort you now, but to do so… to be any closer to you… would be… inadvisable. And definitely…" he paused, "idiotic."
From across the room Anne could see the flash of pain in his eyes, but also something else, something smouldering beneath the surface, making his eyes darken and his chest heave. It encouraged her own breath to quicken and her stomach muscles, taut as violin strings, quivered in response.
"I wouldn't want… your parents to skin you," she offered, balancing on the very edge of flirtation.
Gilbert gave a slow and utterly beguiling smile. "It would probably be Miss Cuthbert and Mrs Lynde I'd be more worried about, in this instance." He stared at her for long moments, his look blistering and not remotely brotherly.
"Gil… would you… that is, might I… still have your letter?"
The letter was for her, and she should have it, but he hadn't anticipated watching her read it before him, much less propped up in bed in a strange guest house when they were both only in their bedclothes.
"I won't read it now, of course!" she explained throatily, reddening.
"That's alright, Anne…" he answered carefully. "It will be yours to read when and how you want to… it's just… well, the letter might… change things. There will be no coming back from it."
"You think there's any way to come back from this?" she gave a chagrined, despairing smile, indicating the pair of them in their various states of half-dress with a sweep of her arm.
"You have a point…" he chuckled darkly, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets.
Slowly he walked to his jacket folded over the chair, long fingers withdrawing the thick, creamy envelope safeguarded in his breast pocket. Rather than wearing his heart on his sleeve it instead pulsed in every line, and he worried not, now, that Anne was ready for its contents to be revealed, but whether he was. Wasn't the very definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? ***** To know that in those pages he was declaring himself, as loudly and resolutely as ever he had in that orchard on that miserable day… or even, sprinting up the steps of the pavilion here in Kingsport, accompanied by dread fear and desperation.
He turned back to Anne, radiant in her billowing white, inching as close to her as he dared. She held out her small, pale hand, showing her delicate wrist and, above it, the white lace of her cuff, leading to a filmy, fluted sleeve. He had long fixated on that wrist, as it made her flowing, looping script in the schoolroom, and years later, when he had occasion to take her hand… but now, they both reached across the divide, and the knowing pads of his fingers brushed across and lingered on her strumming pulse, and as the envelope shifted ownership their fingers clasped and clung.
Intertwined for a moment, heated by warm air and wonder, he felt their past and future… their Before and After… collide sensationally in the Now.
And these feelings surging through him – that he could feel surging through her – meant there was, undeniably and irrefutably, an Us.
Only through sheer force of will did Gilbert find himself back on the couch, having watched Anne tuck his letter into the pocket of her skirt, giving him a look, before she again turned down the lamp, that melted him where he stood.
Now I can do no more, whatever happens. ******
He sighed into sleep, which claimed him quickly, after the extraordinary events of the past few days... let alone the past few hours.
The thumping and shouting from outside in the hallway felt like a sudden tremor that shook their stillness, and, startled awake, he leapt back onto his feet, disorientated and unsure if this was still part of his dream.
"Anne?" he called.
She responded sleepily, but soon bolted upright in the bed as a fist now hammered on their own door.
"What the blazes?" Gilbert looked to her as she fiddled with the lamp, trying not to fall over his feet, sliding up his loose suspenders, not having risked complete undress lest Anne decided to prompt further midnight confessionals.
He wrenched open the door, greeted by the sights and sounds of panicked pandemonium, and the gut-churning smell of smoke.
Chapter Notes
My very famous chapter title is courtesy of The Duchess in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Ch 9 'The Mock Turtle's Story'.
*a glancing reference to the poem No Coward Soul is Mine by Emily Bronte
**of course, referencing the sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass
***an astute exchange between Alice and the March Hare in Ch 7 'A Mad Tea-Party'
****hello and thank you Mark Darcy! See Colin Firth and Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary to remind yourself. Or, just because.
*****attributed to Albert Einstein, probably inaccurately, but it sounds true!
******Alice in Ch 4 'The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill'
A number of you, lovely readers, have been very kind to follow me over to a story I have begun in The Proposal (2009) movie fandom. Many thanks if you have! For anyone familiar with the film, there is a very important – and fun! – scene where the two protagonists are in separate beds and conduct their conversation unseen by the other. That idea was definitely in my mind when writing elements of this chapter!
And some VERY overdue correspondence…
Chapter Four:
AnneNGil: thank you for stopping by this story as well! I'm very glad the humour is landing for you!
Guest of Dec 1st: thank you for your lovely review! I am completely in agreement regarding the possibility that Anne may have 'sleepwalked' into a marriage with Roy, and woke herself up just in time. I am having great fun 'reassembling' these two having thrown out so many canon happenings! And I really appreciated your note about ancillary characters – I am thrilled you have found them to be believable, as that is very important to me x
Guests of Dec 21st and Jan 29th: hopefully since your comments the updates have come a little more frequently! Thank you for enduring such a long wait!
Guest of Jan 26th: thank you for your lovely comments! "Funny, awkward, embarrassing" are all things I am hoping come into play with this slightly loopy story! I hope you have been able to read on since this last long-ago update x
Guest of Jan 30th: I am thrilled that a response from me (overdue as they so often are) was a nice moment for you! I have struggled with a way to reach guests without accounts and am glad this here is a way to do so. I was so happy you noted the idea of Anne and Gilbert turning the corner in this chapter. I really wanted there to be a delineation between the wash up of Convocation/the non-engagement to Roy and them moving forward as friends again first x
Guest of Feb 4th: thank you!
DrinkThemIn: Darlingest, if I make you smile, you make me grin! So glad you like THIS John Blythe as well! He is always so fun and enjoyable for me to write x Meanwhile, I had to come up with my own reason why Gilbert, incomprehensibly, wasn't initially invited to Phil and Jo's wedding – another classic canon oops moment! Of course, it gave me an excellent opportunity to right some wrongs x
Chapter Five:
Astrakelly: thank you for your lovely note and for stopping by another of my stories!
Guest of April 17th: I am so sorry about your grandmother! You have a very sad anniversary there. My Nana passed away in April (a few years ago now) as well. I wish I had had the chance to have watched AoGG with her – I think she would have loved it x
Guest of April 23rd: thank you for your kind comment! I had so much fun with Gil impersonating Roy – it seemed to be a tailor-made opportunity for this kind of story!
Guest of May 2nd: thank you for checking in with this story! I hope the updates are coming a little faster now!
Bright Promise: thank you for your lovely note!
Chapter Six:
DrinkThemIn: "chaotic evening of face punching" was a glorious description of that silly evening! I really love Sliding Doors moments, and wondered if in changing up some things in this version it would then shift others… and I'm VERY glad this Gilbert doesn't have to worry about any typhoid vaccines :(
geekloverlz: awww! Thank you for being such a kind and invested reader x
Astrakelly: indeed, a near miss! I really wanted some explanation as to why typhoid didn't happen in THIS story! I hope it was slightly plausible!
Bright Promise: thank you - a few have commented about the typhoid/transmission/Covid allusion - not one I overtly intended but a sad sign of our times that our thoughts stray to the link.