"No
A/N: I accidentally deleted this story, so im just putting it back on. Not adding to it just yet, if I do at all.
"No!"
The word echoes around in your head. You jump awake from your nightmare. You don't know what makes you dream about that night, but most of the time you wished it would stop. And as if it's becoming a trend, you quietly slip out of bed so you don't wake Logan up and go to the library.
Immediately your eyes zero in on the book Jess wrote, but tonight you are looking for a different book. You walk to the second half of the dark library and pull out a thin book from the back shelf. You sit down on an uncomfortable chair and slowly turn Howl around in your hands. Flipping to the middle with out pausing to look at the handwriting that would make the pain start to mount, you pull out an envelope.
You pause before you open it, wanting to break the tradition of needing it like a drug. You wish you could stop thinking about him, but as you think that, a memory slips through the cracks and you see yourself in Jess's arms on the bridge reading a book. That memory compels you to pull out the object which is a picture from the envelope.
You look at it waiting for the rush of emotions to come to you as they always do. But tonight, for some reason, you don't feel your eyes prickle with tears, and you aren't shaking like you usually do when you think of him. You stare at the picture.
It was you and him eating dinner in Luke's apartment. You were watching him as he was talking about one of this books he had recently read. He made a joke about the author, and suddenly you were laughing and couldn't stop. Apparently your laughter became contagious and Jess started chuckling at you when you could no longer form coherent words. It was sometime during then when your mom had slipped in unnoticed and snapped the picture.
You stared at the happiness and warmth on your face. You looked at the way Jess was watching you with a caring smile. But most of all you could see the love. Even though it's invisible, the love and affection you had for each other was visible in your eyes. You compared it to the love you felt for Logan. You loved him, but there was something missing.
Maybe it was because Logan's brown eyes weren't really real like Jess's. Maybe it was because when she thought of Jess she thought of the place where she grew up. She thought of Mom, and Luke, and how everything was so colorful there. Here in the world much like the one your mom ran away from, everything was a million shades of grey. There was no warmth in the world you lived in now. It was populated with fake smiles and lies. You look around the huge estate in which you and Logan live in. You know that there is more love in that single picture than there is in the multi-million dollar home.
But you know in the back of your mind, you can't call this house, this place, home, because deep in your heart, you know where home is.
You put the picture back in the envelope and place it back into its hiding place in the middle of Howl. You pull your legs to your chest and cry. As you're sobbing, you can hear your voice so many years ago crying "No!" to a face you're trying so hard to forget. You cry for what could have been, for loosing that one true love and family, for your life now and how you wish so much that it could be different, but mostly for saying No, and because it became the biggest regret of your life.