Let Me In ( Anne with an E fanfic)

Chapter 28

 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4q9ZPwXI3kx4U6Gdu1SCaL?si=qNJhJBBQQq6whAyzNhBHvA

The next day passed quickly. Bash and Gilbert had taken advantage of the visit and had scheduled many appointments. All boring business, he assured Anne, but things that needed to be done at some point anyway. So he was locked in the office most of the day. When he wasn't working with Bash, he was reading the paperwork dr. Yang had sent him and texting Fred about his doubts and concerns, including how to tell Anne and how she might feel about the whole thing.

Anne had an appointment with Patel and they tried to go deeper into the insecurity she felt about the future when Anne commented on it, and how it trailed all the way back to the orphanage days. They reviewed the nightmares she'd had over the past few days, looking for a meaning behind the pattern that Anne could correlate with her current worries.

They also talked about trust. Not only her worries about trusting herself to let go with Gilbert (she was increasingly comfortable with that), but also about the trust she shared with those closest to her. How was trust present in all the relations she considered the closest ones. How it was different with each person, and how that was good.

With Diana, she had always had an inherent fear of somehow being less, even if she knew it was irrational, even when she was the dearest bosom friend anyone in the world could ever even imagine. She loved her so, but she could never be with her who she was with Gilbert. Unapologetically herself.

With Cole, it was pure desperation and the fear of being alone in their own weirdness that had brought them together as kindred spirits, a closeness out of everything they trusted they could be for each other, and it had grown and grown from there. But still, even after all these years, the knowledge of their own fragility laid a base not of reserve, but of sheer worry of losing each other. But she would trust him, as well as Diana, with her life. Jerry as well.

With Jerry... He was there, because they were siblings out of their hearts, an understanding that was beyond liking each other. One didn't choose family, even when you already had one or were an orphan, and they were like that: harsh truths without embellishments, sarcasm and pure love. An exasperated trust that the other was going to be direct and honest, whether one liked it or not.

But Gilbert? He was always expansion, hope, the realm of possibilities combined into one person. The possibilities not only to be her quirky self, or her orphan, I'm from a tiny farm with the best of weird families self, but everything she could become. He saw her for what she had been, yes, but also for what she could become, and it had always helped her to be ever so lighter and grounded. To find herself, even.

This kind of trust was beyond anything she could ever imagine having with anyone else. It was just there, pulsating, waiting for her. He was both her best friend, but... also so much more than that, if she allowed herself to accept it. If she decided what she wanted in life, and how he fit in it, as she had talked with Mary the previous day.

She tried not to dwell on the session after it was over, instead spending the day quietly with Mary and Delly. Mainly with Delly, playing and telling her stories, seeing her practice on her new skates as she read a book, accepting when she proposed they danced together a choreography she had to study for her dance class.

"But, fairy Anne, you're doing it all wrong!" Delly protested, going to the ipad to put on the song from the beginning. "You move your arms to the right and then to the front!"

"I'm so sorry, Delly," Anne said, stifling a laugh.

She had always been a lost hope for choreographies. Acting? Bring it on. She could learn all the lines. Be as histrionic as needed. Choreographies? She messed right with left. Delly, however, seemed to be a master of organized dancing. Mary had given her a heads up when Delly had insisted on taking Anne to the upstairs playroom to practice the steps she had been learning in her zoom dance class.