And of course now he was thinking about kissing her. It would be so easy to step forward; she was pulling at his shirt anyway, all he needed to do was be pulled towards her, and kiss that mouth, and leave this conversation in the past.
Maybe if this conversation had happened last week, he would have. If they'd argued about something else, he could definitely see himself covering it up with a kiss. But this urge he had to talk, to try and put into words the feeling he got when he and Will were taking care of Tuck’s body, that feeling of the deep currents of closeness, and grief, and guilt, and anger. To explain to her that her words just a body negated those feelings.
Farck, he didn’t know where to start, with all of that. He definitely didn’t have words explain the closeness or the grief, but the anger and the guilt, maybe… He just wanted her to understand him.
"Tuck talked me out of killing the Sheriff, once," Much said, instead of kissing her. "The night I'd found out how bad he and Gisborne beat up Will. I was gonna do it, I was ready, but he talked me down. And then, Tuesday... his throat was open, Leila. He had these bruises, here, and here,” he was using his hands to explain – a clawed motion at his own throat to rip it open, his fingers drawing lines across her stomach and ribs where Tuck was bruised. “Bad ones. His arms had these marks on them, red marks, like something sharp had grated his skin back, but his palms were grated worse. His palms had little bits of black, bits of the alleyway ground into his skin. And his knuckles and his fingertips – you’ve seen what hands can be like, after a fight? He’d fought. He’d fought hard, and for long enough to realise he was fighting alone. He was so alone he had to pray for help from Francis, because none of the rest of us were there for him. We abandoned him to that death. We let the Sheriff run free after beating Will to within an inch of his life, after threatening the rest of us, we just let him, and now Tuck is dead. And if we hadn’t done something about it, Sheriff would have just moved on to the next victim, and I can’t Leila. Doesn’t matter what anyone said that night, I couldn’t let anyone else talk me out of it again, because I can’t let anyone else die by his hand, cos dying by his hand was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. D’you understand?”