Page 110 of Witch You Would
Gil grabbed my pencil and ducked his head to look me in the eye. “Penelope, that’s an incredibly bad idea.”
Was it? I guess it was. I struggled to care. My chest was a hole, and I was tossing in rocks that never hit the bottom.
“What’s going on?” Gil whispered. “Do you need more coffee? A banana? A few more minutes to finish waking up?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“You’re not.”
“I said I’m fine. Come on, we need to figure this out. We don’t have time to fuck around.”
Gil flinched like I’d slapped him. “Penelope, what is wrong? What happened?”
I almost snapped,You know what happened! You dumped me right before the finale! Did you develop amnesia between last night and this morning?
What did he even care? But he clearly did care. A lot. Unless he was faking?
Listen to your gut, my sister whispered in the back of my brain.
My gut said something was off. My gut said, I should have told Gil last night that I didn’t want to give up on us. It saidI should have fought instead of hiding my feelings behind my fake smile so they wouldn’t bother him, wouldn’t upset him, wouldn’tmake him think I was desperate and pathetic and a stalker instead of cool, normal cool, good cool.
I should have told him I did deserve better, that I deserved someone who would care less about how hard it would be to sneakaround, and more about not having to sneak in the first place. I deserved someone who was proud to be with me, not someonewho treated me like a dirty secret.
Too late. It was over, and I had to focus on getting through this round.
“We can talk about it later,” I lied, putting my pencil to the page. “I think the bubbles could work, actually. Remember thatbig floral enchantment on the cruise ship?”
Gil looked at the clock, then at the paper. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, in through his mouth, out through hisnose. Then he must have decided something, because he checked his posture, shoulders back, and faced me.
“No,” he said.
“No bubbles?”
“No, we’re not talking later. We’re talking now.”
“We don’t have time.”
“We need to make time. I don’t want to... to pretend everything is okay when it’s not, and have it get worse.”
“Fine.” I put the pencil down and stalked toward the exit. Gil followed. Tori raised an eyebrow at us, and I smiled and shrugged.Nothing to see here—everything’s fine.
We went past various crew sitting or standing outside, past cables and boxes and all the accumulated clutter of nearly twoweeks of filming. Isaac slumped in his fancy chair, three paper headache charms stuck to his forehead. Liam saw us and mimedturning off the transmitters.
Right, I thought as I flipped the switch, wouldn’t want anyone to record this. It would definitely make for a super-dramaticlast episode. The opposite of fake flirting: real arguing.
I yanked open the door to the private office we used for confessionals and turned on the soft lights. Gil followed me in,and I closed the door behind him. The two chairs waited next to each other against the far wall; I dragged one of them acrossthe floor so it was farther away and sat in it, crossing my arms.
Gil sat in the other chair, moving slowly, like his bones were tired. He stared at me in silence, and I let him. I couldn’tremember the last time I was this upset. Even getting fired, finding out my rent was going impossibly high—those problemsfelt manageable by comparison. They shouldn’t, because they weren’t, and yet.
I must love Gil, because nothing less than love could do this to a person. I still loved him, even though he’d dumped me,and it hurt that I couldn’t turn that off the way he apparently had.
Gil took off his safety glasses and rubbed his eyes. His mustachewas impossible to remove so easily, I knew, but the small gesture made it clear that I was talking to him and not Leandro Presto.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really bad at confrontations, and I know you don’t want to do this right now, and we’re wastingtime when we should be working on our spell, but...” He looked everywhere but at me: up at the ceiling, down at the floor,at his hands clenched together between his knees.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It’s not fine.” His voice was quiet, almost too quiet for me to hear. “Every time my mom says, ‘it’s fine,’ what she meansis, ‘I’m not going to tell you what’s wrong until I can use it to hurt you.’”
