Regret (part 1)

Like a butterfly emerges from its cocoons, this would be the summer that Sara would blossom into womanhood. She was seventeen and felt as though her life was draining in her small rural town. She was in a relationship that was going nowhere, but she didn’t know how to end something that had become her life over the past two years. She had also made a new friend, and she truly believed that her life would be changing for the better very soon.

School had finally ended and Sara and Rebecca were finally on their way to have some fun. Sara was a year younger than Rebecca, but she was the only one of the two that had a drivers license, and so she drove. They were meeting a friend of Rebecca’s who was bringing a friend of his along as well. Everyone was set to meet at the park, but the girls got there a little before the guys did. Swinging on the swings and catching up on the latest gossip, they didn’t notice the guys pull up. Sara had been under the impression that Rebecca’s friend, Chris, would be the one that she would be ‘hooking up’ with, but Rebecca couldn’t stand for someone else stealing the spotlight from her, and she ended up throwing herself, quite shamelessly, at him. After talking a while and playing around, they decided to head back to Rebecca’s house where no one would be home. On the drive over, both girls knew what was about to happen, and they started giggling nervously and then Sara began to think about her boyfriend. She knew that if she went through with what she was about to do that she would no longer have that boyfriend that was playing so heavily on her mind.

Without much hesitation Rebecca and Chris started fooling around, leaving Sara and Chris’ friend Mark in an awkward silence in the livingroom. They joked around a little, easing the tension, and then Mark started feeling left out, and began to scoot closer to Sara on the couch. Soon they were merely laying together, innocently enough. ‘It isn’t too late to end this,’ she thought, ‘you can end this and go back to your life now.’ But before she knew it, she was suddenly doing something she never thought she would do. She was here, on a couch with a complete stranger, cheating on her boyfriend.

Everything seemed so surreal to her right now. It was like she wasn’t really there, she wasn’t really on a couch with some strange guy while her friend was moaning in the background. No matter how she tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, she had to come to grips with what she was doing. Here she was having sex with this boy, while her friend was just a few feet away doing the same thing with another boy. After a little while it was all over. It really happened, and there was no taking it back now.

Rebecca informed everyone that there would be a party the next day, and that everyone was welcome to come. So they all agreed to meet up at the party, with the unspoken understanding that it would really be nothing more than a repeat of that night, except alcohol would be involved this time. The next night they all met up as planned, and as Sara was hoping, the alcohol did make the night go easier than the previous. While giving Rebecca and Chris some privacy, Sara and Mark had a chance to talk. They talked about their parents and about their lives, and Sara felt like they really connected. After Chris and Rebecca were done with their private time, Mark and Sara then proceeded to make the same mistake that they had made the night before. That night Sara slept with a boy for the first time in her life, and she started to feel like this could be the beginning of what she had been waiting for.

The party ended and the weeks to follow weren’t quite what Sara had anticipated. After telling her then boyfriend what happened, and a dramatic break up that followed shortly after, she was hoping to date Mark and share more nights like the one of the party where they had talked so much. She called him at first everyday, and then after she got little to no response, she tried every other day, which after about couple of weeks turned into giving up hope all together. Heart broken over something she never had, she managed to pull herself together for another girl’s night out. Little did she know that she was about to start a pattern that would affect the rest of her life.