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Amelia had anticipated for lesser.

When Tyler had begun explaining the silent, stifled reverence he held for this woman, she had hoped, or more expected, for a simpler cause for it.

After all, he seemed the type to claim an infatuation for anything mildly attractive that never went beyond the superficial. With how he acted, how he chose to depict himself, he was the absolute caricature for such an impression.

But time and time again, through simple words and even simpler actions, Amelia was shown a much deeper side to him that she continued to miss over and over again.

“Jeniffer, you say her name was?” Amelia fell her gaze to a little smidge of black stuck to the corner of his mouth, the silent puckering of his cheeks as he slowly chewed the remaining leftovers of her gift to him. “She does not seem to bear any lingering resentment against you.”

“Resentment. That’s like – hate, right?” Tyler plucked the tiny crumb with his fingers, disappearing into narrowed, flat lips. “Nah, no, she doesn’t hate me. Just the way she is like that… even when she really shouldn’t be.”

Amelia thought back to the most recent afternoon interaction. From what she has heard and seen, lurking and learning within the eminent shadows of daylight, she found it impossible to find any fault with his claim. Jennifer had addressed him, met him in his quiet despondent, with patience, kindness… and even a bag of delicacies made specifically in aid for his recovery.

Even after being wronged, even after being ignored, offered herself whole and all to be reciprocated with so much less than that – she could still heartily wave him goodbye, bearing a smile that harbored only an unrelenting tenderness. A tenderness that she noticed Tyler quickly averted himself from.

.....

“Have you apologized?” Amelia asked.

“Not at first, I was pissed at first,” Tyler shook his head in a fervent despair. “Thought I did everything right, thought it was absolute bullshit. And when people noticed she wasn’t with me no more, people began to talk – all horseshit, of course. She cheated on me, she was in it for the money, because apparently I can do no wrong, right? She got harassed, people called her names, and meanwhile I just…”

He slowly fell his head back into a slump, shielding his eyes away with his arm from seeing, from reliving, and suddenly no more could Amelia see the simple, shallow man she thought him to be.

“Let’s just say it took me a few days to set the record straight with everyone. You know… payback.”

Amelia just huffed. “Despite her doing absolutely nothing wrong?”

“Ain’t proud of myself for that, believe me. One day, I just looked in the mirror – felt sick to my stomach, seriously disgusted – and then I realized just how much I fucked up so badly. After that I tried to fix things as much as I could. Fast forward a couple of years, Christmas Day… and here she comes bringing me brownies, checking up on me, talking, joking, laughing… just like old times again… but she’s not staying, she’s never staying… nah, lost my chance to have that.”

It was rather hard for her to empathize with something she never had personally undergone. Besides Adalia, Amelia held no interest to love and care for someone else so strongly, so dearly like he had.

Yet to hurt, to feel so lost and forlorn upon losing them forever – that… that, if nothing else, she knew the feeling, the gaunt look of his expression all too well.

“How do you know you’ve lost it?” She quietly asked him, pausing, meeting his eyes again as he lifted his arm ever so slightly. “If she is so benevolent, would she not also spare you another chance?”

Instantly, Tyler sprang forward toward her, eyes unblinking, breathing deep and heavy.

“Fuck. That.”

“You don’t believe yourself deserving of one…” Amelia said, understanding at once.

“Fuckin’ ‘course not!” He exclaimed, his bed emitting a tight squeak as he threw himself back. “Girl like her, guy like me? You think she deserves me? Think I deserve her?”

“So you’ll just continue to just wallow in regret? Knowing and thinking only of her in yearning and remorse. If you truly wish an answer to that question, then you should ask her yourself. You will never know until -”

A flash of light quietly landed at the very bottom of her gaze. Amelia blinked, and with a brief sinking glance, a bright rectangular slab stared up at her in a glowing white, and within its luminosity glimmered an image – too lifelike to be a mere illustration – of that woman, Jennifer, smiling wide and drenched in the warm orange of sundown, and beside her, a stranger, a man, a bliss equivalent in his expression as the both of them held up their fingers, showing a glister of a pair of silver rings caught in the dazzling ray of the sun.

“I do know…” Tyler said in a little more than a whisper, dragging and dimming the small, rectangular slab back to his side. “And apparently, yeah, she does think she deserved better, that she could do better. Fuckin’ shocker…”

Amelia chose to let her words die away in silence. Instead, she sat and allowed everything she had to simmer. Confusion. Complete and utter confusion. That was all that filled her mind to the brim. He loved, he hurt, he grieved, and still grieves as it was quickly becoming apparent, and yet…

Yet…

“So then why do you persist, why do you want this?” Amelia asked, bewilderment expelling all her thoughts into voice. “Look at you – a pathetic shell of yourself. Lamenting and moaning and teeming with only regrets. And this is what guilt, what love has done to you, this is the result, the consequence of it… yet you do not steer away in spite of it all, so why?”

The tips of claws burrowed into the sides of her seat, taken quite off-guard by a whizzing firework that echoed a little too loudly, shone a little too brightly, but she bore with it. Just as she had always bore with him.

“Why did you still choose to fall in love with me?”

She looked at him, more intensely than ever before now – this man, this breathing, living mess of infuriating contradictions. So simple yet so complex. So inconsiderate, but never malicious. The most insufferable being she’s ever encountered, and yet standing opposite and parallel, the closest and longest she’s ever been with one.

Here he sat before her, at arm’s reach, and culminating, epitomizing all that he was to her, in the face of gloom, drowning in the suffocating air of despair, Tyler cracked a smile, and chuckled.

“Fucking finally, a question I can actually answer,” He quickly stifled his laughter, wincing and clutching his gut, and simply said, “Because I think you’re hot.”

Amelia blinked once, slow and hard, and when she fluttered open her eyelids again, responding back, she did so with the greatest patience she could muster.

“Explain.”

“Ain’t nothing much to it, Amelia,” Tyler shrugged. “I just think you’re absolutely fine and dandy.”

“And of all the women in the world—”

“All the women in the world ain’t you.”

“And just what I am, truly?” She raised her voice, more exasperated than outraged. “To you, callous, unsympathetic. A person that explicitly expressed no desire of being with you. A waste of time, a waste of effort – of love. And this is who you fell for?”

Another contradiction, she just realized. Just another to add to an infinitely swelling pile.

“That woman was the kindest, most generous, you fell for her… and now you desire me? The polar opposite. Her very antithesis. And you would… you would still dare to… especially with me—”

“It’s ’cause it’s you that I still dare to, alright?” He interjected, snorting in amusement at the disbelief breezing through her expression. “Sure, I got crushes. I think a lotta girls are hot and pretty. But with you, it’s different, you know? I look at you, the more I know you… the more I’m sure about it. I can love you. I want to love you. And I do.”

Here it rippled through again, erupting, emerging out of her lips in a blast, a demand, seeking for sense in the senseless, for clarity in the midst of all the contraries.

“Why?”

“Because you’re kinda like Jen to me. It’s as I said, I think you’re both beautiful,” Tyler simply said. “And when I say beautiful I don’t mean that in a kinda general sense – nah. What I mean is… like… to me, personally… everything about you, everything I see… to me, my eyes… it’s all just simply beautiful, you know?”

“That makes no logical sense.”

He flashed a quick smirk. “No shit.”

“What kind of beauty do you find in someone like me?” Amelia asked. “I am not kind, I am not patient. In my presence, you’ve known only pain and begrudgement.”

“Bullshit.”

She gaped her lips, incredulity overriding everything else. “Bullshit?”

“Not kind? You don’t care?” Tyler raised a brow. “Why am I here? More importantly, why are you here then?”

Amelia immediately closed her lips, finding and scouring to her surprise, absolutely nothing to say.

“You’re rude. You really can’t be bothered with manners – that’s your whole shtick, I get it. That’s you in a nutshell, awesome,” slowly, and with even greater amusement he shook his head at her. “But why the hell should that mean you don’t care or you ain’t kind? You’re kind. I know you’re kind. Maybe not so obviously… maybe not to me… but in some way or another, I know you are… and I know you care. And is in those little itty-bitty hints I see every now and then that I just can’t get enough of. Yeah, when you’re kind, when you care… that’s really when you are, to me, the most beautiful that you can possibly be.”

Tyler was smiling at her, a puffy, distorted smile of red and purple – and it slightly, suddenly, it was as if something inside her hitched. A feeling, an urge, wanting to look away, but she couldn’t. She could only sit there, stare at him, and like a firework exploding bright, had to just simply bear with it.

That strange feeling inside of her grew stronger as that smile disappeared with a sigh.

“Hopefully, one day,” He continued to say, continued to hope, continued to love. “You’ll let me see more of that side of you.