He doesn't hear all the things her voice tells him. He's not a native speaker. He can't hear the things her voice cries without words, even when they err towards desperate and just beg to be understood. They're subtle, these slick little peals of emotion buried beneath the premise of innocuous syllables. It's just a little shift of her intonation that she doesn't know how to even out although her skill is enormous. Some days, she doesn't even think she would want to if she could. She doesn't like to lie and her tone is the barest of truths, stripped naked and on display. He just doesn't speak her language well enough to hear it. He doesn't hear the nuance, the little changes she can't control.
It's in the way her voice wobbles sometimes, just as she begins a conversation with him. It's in the bamboo bending of her tone, soft and stretching toward whatever he wants of her. It's in the way her concern shrieks shrill even in its hushed potency. It's in everything she says. It's just hiding under verbalisation.
It's not like no one else can hear it. Some people are better at listening than others. Some can see the depth of love she feels for him just by listening to her speak, just by being more attentive to the things no one else really tends to, to the things some wouldn't even be able to hear if it were pointed out to them.
Emily hears it. She hears it best as Gillian is faced with some sort of distress, like when she was so afraid for him after he'd gotten himself admitted to a mental institution. She knew it was there, though she couldn't connect it on her features. She had heard it in the tiny shift in pitch, nearly inaudible to the human ear. She hears it on her dad, too, obvious as he speaks about her or to her or even just has the thought of her on his mind.
Alec hears it. He hears it in the way her voice warms soft in feigned apology every time she tells him she has to work late or do something for her friend and business partner. He hears it on Cal, too. He can hear it in the way his voice sort of chokes on her name, even as his face hardens to unreadable stone, in the way his goodbye drags on so many extra beats like it's difficult for him. It's why he looks at Cal with so much disgust.
Cal's made it his job to understand people and he should know she has layers just like everyone else. But after eight years of knowing each other, Cal still can't decode the flushed heat behind her words, can't understand the underlying tensions and pitches and tones. Subtext is a language, too, and there's so much she's been saying in riddles her mouth speaks before her brain can stop them. It's a language he's well practiced in. It's just not his first. So, he can squint at her and listen all he wants, but he won't hear. He won't understand the subtleties.
That's why she won't say the words with her voice. Hearing the words won't be enough to explain to him all that she's really saying. It's more than love (that word that feels so much like a lie with the freedom of its usage when it's meant to mean so much more). Gillian can hardly fathom the truth of it. She more than loves him, more than wants him, even more than needs him to survive. She would give anything, anything (even the things she most desires like genuine romantic love and a child and a home; a family) just to have him in her life at all. To truly have him, to have him as hers, well she doesn't know what she wouldn't give, wouldn't do.
She feels so much for him that words don't make a worthy attempt at explaining it. The optimist in her thinks one day he'll find fluency, hear the verity of the emotions in her voice and be able to name every one. So, she'll wait. She'll wait for him to hear it (and she lets herself believe that it will happen one day even with the realisation that no one's ever become fluent in her own special brand of vocality, even knowing somewhere deep inside that it's so unlikely he ever really will). After all, there aren't words she can say that make this particular truth apparent. There isn't anything she could say to let him know. At least, not with words. She'll let the sounds that leave her mouth do that. She'll just have to wait for him to hear them.