Nevermore

Prologue

A/N: This is my first story on Wattpad! Please let me know what you think and I'm open to any feedback, negative or positive. Thanks so much for reading.
--aeather

            Dawn breaks, but it's not the violent sunrise that I've come to expect. The hues of red and orange are dimmed today, muted into soft yellows and sweet pinks that I greet with the familiarity of an old lover. They don't capture my attention the way they did when I was young and naïve, but there's a sweet pleasure about them all the same. A reminder, I guess, of a life that I used to live. Now? I just exist.

Sometimes I ask myself, what's the point of living if you're dead inside? If the feelings that I once felt, as powerful as tsunamis and just as deadly, have all turned to ash? I would rather not feel than feel too much. He proved that, time and time again, when he ripped my heart like it was putty, and then stitched it back together again. But you can still see the cracks. Once something's broken, it's broken forever.

I try now to be more than I was. I try to be strong, brave, the kind of girl I always envied and the girl I always wanted to be. It was hard for me to step out the background and firmly establish myself in the foreground, but now I have become used to it. This world has changed me. For the better? I can't say.

"You ready to go?" Jacob asks me, trailing a hand over my arm, hugging my waist from behind.

Three Months Ago

"Eleanor," Tom says with a deep sigh on his lips and a voice that is dampened by anger.

"No," I whisper, refusing to meet his eyes or the scene in front of me, clutching my purse to me like it's some sort of fucking lifeline, hoping that when I look up I won't see my boyfriend literally inside another girl. Hoping that the girl on the bed doesn't have blonde hair and twinkling hazel eyes that have glimmered at me since we were children – since the day she was born – hoping that the cheekbones don't mirror mine and the curve of her lip doesn't look so goddamn similar because no matter where we go, people always mistake us for each other, being that we are identical twins...

He shoves himself off the bed and I wince at the sound, needing my feet to move, to take me far away. I hear rather than see as he yanks on a pair of jeans and throws a t-shirt at Rosemary who bites her lip and winces at the expression on my face. No crying, I think, so afraid to show my weakness but knowing that I am weak, I am a shell of my former self and all it took was one image. How could I not have suspected? He was always so close to her, they joked like two best friends... and what is that saying? From friendship comes true love? Lies, of course, all of it because he can't love her. If he does, then everything I've ever existed for is a lie, it's pointless, but I know that it already is because I can see the future begin to crumble in front of me, dropping like stones into water, stirring up the glassy surface of a pond that I always thought represented me to a T, because I was calm and gentle like water. That goddamn pond that is now murky and cloudy at the revelation of hatred that I harbor for both of them, goddamnit.

For her sake I hope he really loves her. I hope he does. Because she has just betrayed her own blood – which was supposed to be lifelong bond – for the dick of a dick. I can get a new boyfriend but she can never get a new twin. She's thrown away nineteen years over what? A shot of vodka and the seduction of a frat boy?

She's stupid. She's damn stupid, but I'm even more stupid; I loved them both. Now look where it's got me. Nowhere.

"Get out," I say emotionlessly. They glance at each other, passing a look that only those in an intimate relationship can share.

"Which one?" Tom asks.

"The uglier one," I say. Rosemary begins to chuckle, thinking I'm making a joke, but I'm not. I'm dead serious.

"Elle," Tom says softly.

"Don't fucking call me that," I grit out. "Both of you. Get your shit and get out of here by six."

"It's six-fifteen," Rosemary says.

"Then you're fifteen minutes late, aren't you?" I release the death grip on my purse and run out of the townhouse, my head aching with unshed tears. It's not until I come to the old playground, the last vestiges of light glimmering through the trees, that I allow myself to break down and cry. Only then do I call the only person who could actually have empathy for my situation.

"Jacob," I say and then begin crying.

"I'm there," he says. "I'm there."