Title: Compared to Him

Words: 606

Reasons: Another point of view, this from the guy who wishes he could have left that mark.

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After a whirlwind – a half an hour of doing mad calculations and scribbling down answers with that intense look on her face – she yawned. Yawned. After all that. We were only half-way through the practice test for the final, but she pushed the paper across the table toward me, along with a pencil, her silver-sharpie decorated calculator, and the thick packet of the test itself. "You finish," she said to me, her eyes falling closed as her head hit her arms gently and she blocked out the rest of the world.

I protested. "But I have no idea..."

"Shh," she hushed, eyes still closed, those perfect chestnut curls falling over barely tanned skin and her snowy pale face. "I'm tired."

And it was really just like that – from a thousand miles an hour to zero in the snap of a finger, from a brain whirling with numbers and chemical formulas to the depth of sleep. That was part of the thing that was so unbearably perfect about her. She was unbelievable. She was a tornado and an easy lake at the same time – a whirlwind and calm all at once. Something about the silent, brilliant sparkle of dark intelligence in her hazel eyes – glowing brighter green in the sun, murky in the fluorescent lights of the chem. lab – just made her so incredible.

I was so not.

I was nothing to her from the beginning. We sat next to each other for the first time a few weeks into her relationship with that guy back east. Nothing compared to him. I was a spec of sand for all she cared – and she hated sand. But she was beautiful. She was perfect. So fiercely intelligent and so damn loyal to him. She loved him. The only person I ever heard her say aloud that she loved. The only subject she didn't treat with scorn and spite. The only time I ever saw a real smile on her face was when she read a text message he sent her or walked in from lunch still talking to him on the phone, right up until the bell rang, and then whispered an "I love you" before hanging up.

Even in her dark moments she was radiant. Even when she was madly, insanely lost in the angst of one of those days of solid writing, she was incredible. She was beautiful – that snowy skin, the perfect blush, the murky eyes full of such ambiguity, her energy astonishing and her calm overwhelming. And just like that, she was asleep, mind shutting down and her lip twitched up into a smile. Dreaming of him. Always.

I could never compare. I would never be larger than the smallest atom in her eyes while he was in her life, and I knew with a sinking feeling that he always would be. I knew her when the scar was still prominent. Watched her grit her teeth and nurse it through the scabbing and the bleeding and finally watch it heal, a mark that would remain there always. Now, automatically, my eyes found it again. The mark that tied her to him. The only person she'd ever loved with all the passion that filled her up. The only person she would ever love with that much passion.

He must have been pretty damn amazing to end up with her. To scar her and her not to care. Pretty damn amazing. All the things that I would never be. All the marks I would never leave on her. And I would vanish into her memory, another grain of sand, another person that was nothing compared to him.