"Only you can control your future." –Dr. Seuss
He loved her.
He really did.
But sometimes, he just sat down and thought about what would happen if he had chosen someone else. Because his whole life would change.
Destiny was a strange thing; sometimes you got to choose your own, sometimes the Fates had planned out the road of your life since before you were born.
He accepted the path that Fate had given him, and the girl he was meant to spend his life with.
He loved her, after all.
But at the end of a too-perfect night he spent with her, wrapped up in their serene little fantasy of happiness, a voice in the back of his mind flared. It whispered unpredictable things–wishes that he didn't even know lived in the shadowy corners of his mind. But they were there.
The voice was soft and slit through his thoughts like flashes of quicksilver, saying things, dangerous things, like "what if" and "maybe". Things he would never say on his own.
The voice spoke up, conjured thoughts he would be too scared to dream. It asked him questions, questions he didn't know the answers to and wasn't sure if he ever wanted to find out. The little voice questioned his life, his choices, everything he had ever done.
"What if," if whispered. "What if you didn't love her?"
"What if you never did?"
He tried to deny it, to bury it, but the voice smothered his own. It flashed a memory of dancing and spinning in the last rays of sunlight with a girl that wasn't the one from his perfect bubble of life. The image was from so long ago, he could barely remember it, but he held on tight, just to have it slip away again.
"What if," it began again. "What if you found love… with someone else?"
He could see it now–the life he never lived, never chose. The other path, the other option, the danger, the risk. The ideas he didn't allow to even enter his mind, because he was a safe person and change was hard.
"What if you picked someone else?"
The girl that shimmered into his vision didn't have choppy hair or eyes that spun like kaleidoscopes or a beauty that was simply given. Instead, her hair was long, tossed over her back in a braid that never seemed to come undone. Her eyes were as dark as the cruelty that she had forced herself to adapt to since she was only a little girl, robbed of her innocence. Her face had a different beauty to it that sometimes he wondered if only he could see.
But the voice, no matter how bitter, was right: Reyna was Jason's biggest "what if". He never had time to figure out if he loved her or not, but it didn't matter. Time had spun its web and his fate was ensnared; he could never go back.