Introspective Strangers [h.s.]

Epilogue

***This was another triple update. If you haven't read the part titled 'Jane Eyre' right before this, please go back! Mayday, mayday! LOL!***

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Fine Line - Harry Styles
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Epilogue

The boy blew out a breath and tipped his head back, bored with the day. Bored with his life. Bored with the world around him. Nothing seemed good anymore.

The warm mist of the evening sea pressed hard against his skin as the shoreline mounted, water crawling upward toward the tips of his toes. It was the only thing recently making him feel something. That and the two people he'd been so casually spying on for the better part of an hour.

The boy watched them from afar, the couple on the beach.

Or at least the man and woman that he assumed were a couple.

He'd arrived when the sun was setting, around the same time as them, pulling out his journal and placing his towel neatly on the sand. An evening for reflection – that's what this had been. An evening for the boy to write down his thoughts, to try and make sense of what was going on in his head.

But much as he always did, he had become easily distracted. He was a few hundred meters away, gnawing on the end of his pencil – the point of which hadn't dulled even a fraction since he'd arrived – as he surveyed the scene.

It was a bright evening, despite the sun having dipped below the waterline, casting a deep, yellow glow amongst the sparkling waves. It had grown windy, closing time drawing nearer, but neither the man nor the woman seemed to be making any move to leave. Neither was the boy though, he supposed.

The man looked young enough, but his face was weathered and beat with a sort of age that led the boy to believe he was at least in his early thirties, despite the youth he exhumed. The youth that encapsulated all of his features, light up his very being to the point that he almost glowed when he looked at her.

The woman. The woman opposite the man, holding his hand, laughed with an unrestrained glee as he spun her around, the two of them dancing even though there was no music. They held onto each other tightly, grinning broadly and pressing their chests against one another.

The man dipped her every so often, the tips of her hair grazing the bank of the beach, and he'd never once take his eyes off her. Not as she tilted her head back to laugh, not as he drew a hand up her back, holding her as close as possible, not as she held onto his shoulder for support – gasping as he flicked a bit of sand into her face.

She had apparently only seen it as some sort of challenge, the boy noticed, watching as she drew up and tried to get him back. He loved it, the man did. The boy could read it on his face. He loved the way she had half-heartedly shoved him away before shimmying out of his grip and grabbing her own handful of sand, until the two of them were blinding throwing mounds of it at each other.

The boy had never seen such a type of love.

Must be a mess to clean up, the boy thought, shaking his head incredulously. Not practical at all. That sand will be falling out of their shoes for weeks to come.

Though he couldn't help but watch, whether he agreed with their antics or not, enthralled for some reason. Enthralled in the way these two people seemed to know each other, backwards and forwards, reading one another's expressions and body language well enough to be able to anticipate what was coming next.

It was a sort of love that seemed so full and incomparable, like the ones the boy had seen in the films his mother had forced him to sit down and watch. They acted like it was just the two of them in the entire world, paying the rest of this ugly reality no heed. It seemed like the two had known each other forever, based on the way their cheeks were flush with emotion and neither of them could seem to grab at enough of each other, as if they were only now basking in the full extent of what truly lay between them.