*Tonight's game was super intense but we still won! WE'RE ON A FREAKING ROLL, MAN*

“I can’t believe they did that,” Mia says with a burst of laughter as we’re sitting on the couch watching one of those stupid Jackass movies. “That’s so stupid.”

“That’s the whole point of the movie,” Desiree points out, laughing at what had just happened. “They just do really stupid and painful stuff and then they get paid for it. It’s stupid but it’s funny as hell.”

“Have you ever seen this, Ana?” Mia asks me, pretty much asking me to get behind her on this subject and it’s mostly because she would rather watch a romance than this but Desiree had talked to her into it.

I shake my head at her. “No, I haven’t. I like it though, it is pretty funny.”

“Next time, I get to choose the movie,” Mia huffs but then, the next stunt happens and she laughs at it, obviously finding it funnier than she feels like admitting.

“Shut up, you’re laughing,” Desiree says, laughing herself.

It’s Friday now and I just got out of my session with Dr. Lombardi, which is why we’re ending our week with a nice movie night. She talked to me again about getting rid of my ghosts and everything by telling somebody about what happened. At first, it seemed kind of ridiculous to me because it’s not like it’s a total secret. It was a pretty public ordeal in our town. My whole family knows about what happened and so do my friends from back then and so does Renée. However, after I thought about it for a while, I realized that even though people know what happened, I’ve never actually told anybody before. The closest thing I’ve ever gotten to telling somebody what happened is when I had a nightmare and I kind of let the broad idea of everything slip when I was talking to Niles.

Even if I did decide to tell somebody about that night, I’m not sure who I would even tell. Not Dr. Lombardi because although I’m sure that she really does sincerely care about me, but she still only gets paid to listen to me and I don’t know… it just doesn’t feel as genuine as my other conversations because I know that she has to listen to me. It’s literally her job. I don’t want to tell Mia or Renée either, because they obviously have their own problems to deal with and they don’t need to hear about mine although Renée obviously already knows.

I could tell Penn or somebody but there’s so many reasons why that’s a bad idea. For one, he’s family. He’s my brother. How weird would that be? Me describing that attack to my brother considering the nature of it all and besides, he already knows the story. He was the first one to the hospital when the doctors had to brief him on what was going on.

“Okay, that’s not even funny, that’s just incredibly disgusting,” Mia cringes, looking away from the TV screen as both me and Desiree start to laugh because, while it was gross, what just happened was pretty funny as well and Mia’s reaction just made it even better.

“You’re such a wimp,” I tease her, nudging her with my shoulder.

“Oh, shut up, that is so gross,” She defends herself. “I’m allowed to not want to watch that.”

“Sure, whatever you say,” I sing with another laugh.

“Hey,” A new voice enters the conversation from behind the couch and all three of us turn around to see Niles standing behind the couch with a charming half-smile on his face.

“Oh, hey,” I chirp, remembering that he has practices on Fridays and he usually stops by then because he walks over here from the ice rink to get a ride home with his sister. “What’s up?”

He shrugs. “Sophie’s pulling a few extra hours so I guess you’re stuck with me for a while longer than normal.”

“Bummer,” I reply teasingly. “Well, come have a seat. You can watch the movie with us.”

“But not if you’re squeamish because it’s seriously so gross,” Mia warns him as he squeezes onto the couch beside me. I scoot closer to Mia but my legs are still pressed tightly against his because of the small couch. Instead of having my legs being squished between Mia’s and Niles, I lift my legs up and lay them across Niles’ lap. I don’t really think about it at all while I’m doing it but after it’s done, I freeze because I’m not sure why I did that. I’m pretty against any extra bodily contact with other people, which is why I’m so surprised that I just draped my legs over top of Niles’ like it’s nothing.

They’re already there, though, so I don’t make a move to take them off and he doesn’t seem to mind, he just offers me a slight smile and then turns to face the TV.

“Have you ever watched these before?” I ask him after clearing my throat to get rid of the tiny awkward bubble that may have formed fleetingly.

He nods. “Yeah, I’ve seen them. They’re pretty funny.”

“Mia’s just a baby,” I say, loud enough for her to hear.

“No, you’re just a jerk,” She fires back, shoving my shoulder lightly, causing me to laugh and when I look over at her, I realize that she glances down at my legs laying over Niles’ lap and she grins and looks away, reading too far into my sitting position.

“Well anyway, this almost over. When this ends, we can go take a walk outside or something,” I suggest to all three of the people sitting around me.

“You guys go ahead and do that,” Mia says quickly. “I have a bone to pick with Desiree.”

“Wait, what? What did I do?” Desiree wonders on the other side of Mia, who shoots the girl a ‘shut up and go along with it’ look that she thinks looks discreet but obviously, it isn’t as discreet as she was thinking it was because I still see it.

“Just that thing,” Mia supplies vaguely.

Rolling my eyes, I turn to Niles and give him a ‘See what I mean?’ look, referring to how I told him that my friends think that we should be romantically involved, and he just laughs, turning his head back to the TV as if not to get involved in the discussion.

“You’re ridiculous,” I mumble in Mia’s direction, mostly paying attention to the movie though.

“Oh, you love me,” She concedes with a laugh.

For the rest of the movie, we just watch it and laugh when it’s funny or when Mia overreacts about a gross scene. I even think I see Niles flinch at a couple of things but when I look over at him to tease him about it, he’s acting normal and I know that he’ll deny it. When it’s over, Mia is quick to drag Desiree away to leave me alone with Niles, as if that’s going to move along her agenda or anything. I’m not even sure what her agenda is, honestly.

“So, let’s go outside,” I say, standing up and turning the TV off before I walk with Niles outside. “I’m sorry about Mia. I told you that she’s kinda… weird.”

“It’s okay, Ana. She’s nice,” He assures me with a small laugh. “A little forward and obvious, but she’s nice nonetheless.”

“Right,” I sigh. “Anyway, how was practice?”

“Exhausting. Just like I knew it would be,” Niles tells me. “But it was fine, I guess. The season starts in two weeks so practices are getting pretty intense now.”

“I really need to see whose nose I need to pull around here to get allowed to go to one of your games,” I tell him, determined to go to at least one of his hockey games.

“Are you sure that you’d want to go?” He wonders with raised eyebrows and he says it in a way that I can tell that he’s not trying to be offensive but I know that he is really asking me if I can handle a situation like that. Especially after what happened at his house, and that was only with a few people around.

“Yeah,” I say as we sit down on one of the park benches that’s open. I was going to take a walk but since Niles is probably tired from his practice today, I guess he probably doesn’t want to start walking around. “I mean, not right now but maybe in a few months or something when I’m better.”

“I think that’d be really cool,” He smiles at me.

“And Dr. Lombardi says that she has a sure fire way for me to start moving on so I don’t know, maybe it’ll be sooner than that. If I can work up the courage to go ghost hunting,” I mutter.

“She wants you to start hunting ghosts?” Niles wonders curiously with a small laugh.

“Well, just one ghost in particular. Mine,” I can see that he’s still curious, so I elaborate on that. “She thinks that if I verbally go through what happened that night then I’ll be able to force the ghost inside of my head to materialize and then, when I recognize that it’s a real thing, I can destroy it. It doesn’t make any sense when I say it, but Dr. Lombardi explains it really well.”

“It kind of makes sense,” He nods.

“Yeah. I don’t really want to do it because it’d just be… really hard, I guess, to recognize it all as real instead of just a bad dream. But she thinks that if I can destroy this metaphorical ghost then I’ll be able to move on and get on with my life and that sounds so nice. Getting out of here, making actual friends, falling in love or something. I could find myself again,” I explain to him, really excited about all of the things that I could do if I could just move on from this one thing that happened three years ago.

“Well, if you wanted, you could tell me,” Niles suggests softly. “I’m a good listener.”

“I know that you are,” I nod. “And that’s a nice offer, really, but if I told you everything… I don’t think you’d ever look at me the same.”

“Then you clearly don’t know me well enough yet,” He counters. “If it can help you get better then it’s worth a shot, right?”

He is right, and I know that, but I’m still not sure if I’m willing to risk our friendship just so that I can get better. I mean, I guess he’s right on that other part too, because it’s probably ridiculous of me to think that it’d scare him away considering Niles is so incredibly stubborn. And he’s already seen a lot- he already knows a lot. I just have to go through the details a little bit more and I think that Dr. Lombardi really would be able to help me out of this dark hole that I’ve been swirling through for three whole years. I mean, last year, while I was at home, I wasn’t swirling in the hole as bad as I had been, but it never fully got better. But here, I honestly feel like Dr. Lombardi is pulling me out of this hole once and for all, day by day, and if she thinks that this will help me then I think that it’s worth a shot.

“Are you sure that you don’t mind me possibly ruining your faith in humanity?” I ask him shakily, feeling my heart start to beat faster in my chest but it’s tolerable and I don’t think that I’m going to go into a panic attack. Yet. It feels like I’m about to get on a terrifying roller coaster that I can’t back out of.

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Can I ask you a question really quickly though?”

He nods. “You can ask me anything.”

I clear my throat and wipe my palms on my legs. “Do you remember that day in the park? What I said about the alternate universe?”

He nods again. “I do.”

“Well, I was just wondering if you think that if I got better, if that could be a reality. You can say no, that’s alright. I won’t be mad, I was just curious because I’ve been thinking about it,” I confess to him, wondering how those annoyingly dazzling blue eyes are making me tell him everything.

He’s quiet for a long moment as he thinks, and then he responds, “I’m not sure, Ana. Maybe. You’ve been thinking about it?”

I nod with a blush creeping onto my cheeks. “More than I probably should.”

“That’s alright,” He assures me, a side smile growing on his lips. “So have I. But you’re stalling.”

“I am,” I breathe, looking down at my lap. “I’m so scared.”

Niles slowly, unsurely, moves his hand towards mine. His fingertips run down the back of my hand as if waiting for me to pull my hand away, but I don’t. I find comfort in his hand holding mine, and he pulls my hand completely into his, wrapping his long fingers around my bony pale hand. “It’s okay. I’m here. Everything’s fine.”

I even find comfort in his words and I have no idea how that’s even possible. No matter what though, I close my eyes, lean back on the bench, squeeze his hand in mine, and then I begin at the beginning, wanting to get it over with. Just rip it off like a Band-Aid and everything will get better.

*This part gets a little gruesome. If you don’t want to read the gruesome part, I’ll tell you where you can start reading again, just look for the next bolded part*

“I was walking home from a party that I was at. I was walking with my friend and her guy friend who had offered me a cigarette and I took it because I thought that it’d make me look cool. I looked at the time and it was past my curfew and I wasn’t even supposed to be out that night because I was grounded, so I had to hightail it home before my parents got back. I usually wouldn’t have done it, but I went through the park because I needed the shortcut to get back to my house before my parents did. I was really afraid of getting yelled at again. I used to kind of be a rebel child, really. Anyway, I was walking through the park at 12:30 at night and then this guy pops out of the dark and he says, ‘You’re too pretty to be out here by yourself, darling.’ And I immediately know something is wrong so I turn to walk the other way but there’s somebody there too.

“The first thing that I think to do is run, but I turn to my left and there’s somebody there. I’m surrounded. There’s five of them in total, looming around me like predators zoning in on their prey. I beg them not to hurt me, I tell them that I don’t want any trouble. All of the typical things that a girl in my situation would probably say. I said, ‘I don’t have any money,’ and then one of them said, ‘Oh no, darling. We want something way better from you.’ And I started to cry because I knew what he meant.”

Niles squeezes my hand in his for comfort and I take a few deep breaths. I open my eyes to remember where I am. In the daylight, in the courtyard with bright green grass and a bright blue sky. Everything is fine. I’m with Niles. I’m safe. I take a few more deep breaths and then close my eyes and continue.

“So they start grabbing me and I fight back as much as a 5’5” girl can against five six-foot tall guys that had at least a hundred pounds on me each. I didn’t even have any long nails to scratch with. One of them was holding my arms so I kicked with my left foot and I got one of the guys in his man parts, and I was wearing heels so I got him good but it really made him mad so he grabbed me by my hair and I screamed and then he punched me, keeping me in place with his fist in my hair, and then he threw me into the grass. He kept cussing at me and they were all laughing and calling me really mean names and they kept making fun of me for crying and trying to fight my way out. But I didn’t stop fighting until the guy closest to my face pulled out a switch blade and held it to my throat. I kept crying, but I stopped fighting back because I was so scared. I was absolutely terrified. I thought that they were going to kill me.

“Everything that happened next is kind of a blur. They were hitting me a lot and ripping off all of my clothes and they were laughing the whole time. But I do remember that the knife never left my throat- I reminder of what would happen if I screamed or tried to put up a fight. I kept pleading with them to stop but it just fueled their laughter and so I stopped. Anyway, when they started to… you know, it hurt really bad. I was a virgin and it hurt really bad. So, I screamed and then the guy with the knife said, ‘That was a big mistake, bitch.’ And then he did this,”

I say, pulling my blue scrubs down far enough to show Niles the scar that lies right under my collar bone on the left side of my chest. My hands are shaking now and there’s tears running down my face but Niles’ hand is protecting mine and I open my eyes again to remind myself where I am. I’m safe. Just breathe. I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m safe. For a moment, I imagine Niles jumping into the scene and beating the crap out of all five of those guys and that makes me feel a little bit better.

“So I screamed again because, I mean, everything just hurt. After all of the hitting and the scratching and grabbing that they’d done, my whole body just hurt so bad. I couldn’t take it. I was barely conscious but I could still feel it as they took turns doing it to me and then if I screamed too loud, the guy with the knife would make a new cut and every time, he’d go lower, but even though I knew it was going to happen, I couldn’t stop myself from screaming. It hurt so bad. They’d beat the crap out of me, took turns with the knife, I think they were playing some sort of game. They never stopped laughing, it was all just so fun for them. I remember that, when they were done and they were walking away from me, I remember seeing all of the blood on their clothes and I was convinced that I was going to die.

“However, a midnight jogger found me and apparently, he’d found me just in time too, because I was bleeding out and broken. I passed out after that and I didn’t wake up for a few days because they’d put me in a medically induced coma. My brother was sitting beside me and he was crying. I looked like I’d gotten ran over by a double decker bus. Five times. It was the most gruesome thing that I’d ever seen. That anybody had ever seen. My brother, Peter, had gotten sick multiple times while he was in the room with me. My other brother, Penn, I think that he’d gotten sick too but he’d never admit to it. Whenever he came to see me though, he’d smell like vomit. My mother couldn’t even look at me.”

By this time, I was sobbing but after every few sentences, I’d look up and open my eyes and remember where I was and who I was with and I’d remind myself that I’m safe. It’s over now, but it did happen. It really was real. I was attacked in a park three years ago. I can feel that ghost materializing in my head. I can feel it becoming real to me.

“My whole face was cut and swollen but nothing that wouldn’t heal on its own. I’d gotten a countless amount of stitches and I had a few surgeries to rearrange things that had been punctured, and my rib was fractured. They’d burned me with the cigarette that I was smoking,” I tell him, pointing to the mark that’s on the side of my neck but it’s usually hidden by my hair. My hands are so incredibly shaky that I just let them flop back down onto my lap because they’re basically useless. “And my leg was broken and my private parts were torn to shreds. It was really bad. Not to mention all of the swollen bruises that covered my body. The only good part about it was that in the coma, I had lost all memory of the incident happening at all. However, It took me a few months to start moving again and once I was physically recovered enough to go home, I was home for a month, going to therapy where they gave me these sleeping pills.

“They made me remember. I’d start having nightmares, waking up screaming and crying and at first, I thought that they were just nightmares but they were repetitive to the point where I started piecing the puzzle together in my head. The memories had eaten me up inside and when I tried to escape the memories by slicing my wrists, Peter found me in my bathroom and I was shipped off to Alaska. I was there for a year before I returned and I’d started my recovery process at home. I was doing well until I saw this thing on the news that one of the attackers was up for parole. So that’s why I’m here. Because I relapsed after hearing that.”

*Okay, if you weren’t reading the gruesome part, it’s over now.*

Because I’m still crying after telling him all of that, Niles doesn’t speak at all, he just lets me cry for a while. I fall into his side, crying hysterically with my face in his shoulder but I find it fortunate that I’m not actually having a panic attack, I’m just crying. I’m remembering. This is real. I know that it sucks, but it happened. That’s life. I know that maybe I’d like to tell myself that these scars aren’t real. That this night in the park never happened and, living inside of my head for so long, I’d been able to tell myself that it really was fake but that’s not healthy. I can’t just live inside of my head like this for the rest of my life.

“Thank you,” I whisper to Niles, his arms now wrapped around me as I cry into his side and a few nurses come to my aid, to see if I’m okay and I wave them off. I’m exhausted and I feel like my insides were just thrown through a tornado but I think that I’ll be able to get a grip on it. I think that I can make it through this on my own. “I can’t believe I just told you that.”

“Did it help?” Niles mumbles softly.

I sniffle but I’m not even close to being done with my crying today. Perhaps I can sober up just enough to say goodbye to Niles and then go cry my eyes out in the privacy of my own room though. I still don’t like crying in front of people. “I’m not sure yet. But thank you. I know that I just said that but I’m saying it again. You’re such an amazing person and I lied when I told you that you smell like feet. You really smell like soap and sometimes cologne too.”

He chuckles and it sounds like a wonderful melody to my ears, despite the heavy mood and pulls me even tighter into him. “You cannot imagine what a relief that is to hear.”

--------------------------------------------------

Song: Slow it Down by The Lumineers
Picture: Just a banner I made

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

Title: Before It's All Gone
Author: Bubblegumbubble97
Genre: Mystery/ Thriller
Summary: Meet Natalie Grace. An aspiring investigative journalist with her first real case, a murder mystery. She thought it would be simple but when old friends begin showing up and old memories begin to resurface can she bring herself to convict someone she cares about or is it possible that despite the evidence they're still innocent?

With a serial killer on the lose, everyone she cares about now being a suspect, and a limited amount of time her life just got a lot more complicated.