dark places - jb & ag {completed}

{one}

Always trust your first gut instincts, they say. If you genuinely feel in your heart and soul that something is wrong, it usually is. A lesson that life taught me. The very hard way. But sometimes, it just wasn't that easy to listen.

I always believed in following those niggling feelings you get when you're exposed to something new to you. Where you would find the options, know them and understand them, knowing deep inside that there is only one option that you should follow.

I wish that I had been able to listen to those niggling feelings that Halloween night, when everything in me told me not to go along with it, to stop it as soon as it started, to go back and just let it go. Because not a day has passed since then where I didn't ask myself 'What if...?' and wonder if the horrible things that happened that night would still have happened if I had only gone with my gut and hadn't gone there.

Halloween 2014

Giving up wasn't something that she could do. Her favorite saying was, 'If I want something, I get it.' And get it she did. She had a strong, powerful talent in convincing people of whatever she wanted them to be convinced of. It was crazy. Almost like magic. Crazy magic.

"Ari, please?" Sophie begged. "It's going to be fun, I promise."

"I don't like parties, you know I don't," I said, throwing myself back on my bed and rubbing my temple with my thumb and pointer-finger. My best friend's pleas were giving me a headache. A horrible one.

"I know, but this one is different. It's not a bunch of hormonal teenagers who just want to get laid–they're college boys, dude!"

"Sophie, it's a Halloween party! Costumes and stuff! That's even worse!" I complained. The last thing I wanted do was to go to a crowded house, where the smell of alcohol mixed with sweat and puke was everywhere, while wearing a stupid costume that made me all itchy–and probably look like a prostitute. Oh no, thank you very much.

"We'll keep it low key, just bunny ears and a little tail?" Sophie tried.

"No way!" Freaking bunny.

"Hmm...devil horns and a red tail?"

"What's up with you and tails? Forget it, Sophie, I'm not going."

"Oh, wait!" She jumped off of the bed excitedly and ran to my closet. I groaned. She stayed in there for a good five minutes digging for God only knows what, then came out sporting a huge grin.

"Ta-da!" she sang.

I sat up on my elbows and took one look at what she held in her hands. "Not gonna happen!"

"Oh, c'mon! Please!"

"I haven't worn those for like two hundred years–I was a kid."

"You were fourteen!" she corrected. "And we celebrated your eighteenth birthday last week, remember? It wasn't one hundred and ninety-six years ago."

"I wouldn't know anyone. I'll be bored out of my mind!" I tried one more time.

"You'll know me!" she protested with a pout, then she did this thing with her head that she's always used as her trump card where she tilts it to the side and shoots me those puppy-dog eyes, and BANG, I'm a goner.

I sighed. She squealed...because she just won.

"Now, c'mon, let's go down and have breakfast."

A ball of energy, that's what the sister I never had was. She was always full of life, always excited about everything. She was the kind of girl who threw smiles all around and stopped to play with a little puppy or a kitten. She was the one who went out of her way to give a homeless person her lunch on her way to school. She was the girl everyone fell in love with: boys wanted her and girls wanted to be her. And she had been my best friend for as long as I could remember.