Try, and succeed! One moment Gabe had been hollering and reeling William in, the next he was blowing bubbles, the party muted through the water, and some distant corner of his brain was thinking that he'd really expected there to be at least one dinner before he achieved this much bodily contact with the spindly librarian.
Well, he could adapt. If by "adapt", you meant "wriggle one arm free until he could get it into the right sort of position to dig fingers into William's delicate side".
And Gabe did. Hey, William had started this. Somehow.