Fighting to Stay (Fighting Madly Book 2)
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Authors: S.L. Ziegler
SL Ziegler
All rights reserved. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any form without prior permission from the author. Any unauthorized distribution, circulation or use of this text may be direct infringement of the author’s rights, and those responsible may be liable by law accordingly.
Copyright © 2015 S.L. Ziegler
Cover design by Sassy Steph Designs.
Cover Photography Copyright © 2015 by Kelly Embry Photography
Cover Models: Travis “Curly” Rockwell and Sandra King
Edited by Josie Cruz Edits
Proofread by Prim and Wild Proofreading
Formatted By Kristen Switzer
Fighting to Stay is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and events portrayed in this book are from the author’s imagination or author’s point of view. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events is entirely coincidental.
To Mom,
Words can never express how much I’m truly blessed for the life you
gave
me. The things you
showed
me. And lessons you
taught
me.
I wouldn’t have the courage to walk this path without you if you didn’t.
I love you so much.
“For as long as I’m living your baby I’ll be.”
Jon—My amazing husband and best friend! Thank you for all your support. I couldn’t do anything without it. I love you so very much.
Nene and Connor—My sweet babies, you are the best thing I’ve ever done. Thank you for enduring the meals of corndogs and Cup of Noodles so I could get this finished. Love you both to the moon.
Mom—Two words. THANK YOU!!!!
Sarah—Thank you for helping me expand what has always been there.
Courtney—#Wordsmith
Leddy— See, I’m a better friend than you are.
Stephanie—You, my dear, are one amazing lady. I don’t know what I would do without you asking me if I need anything! Your friendship means the world to me!
Chris, Angie, and Abigail—You ladies rock my socks off with the reads!!
Josie—Thanks for shinning this bad boy up!
Jill—You, buttercup, are one rock star and deserve a medal with dealing with me!!
Kelly—-For showing me it’s more than just snapping a picture to make it beautiful.
Curly and Sandra—Thanks for letting me use your bodies. (Totally sounded dirty.)
Thank you to all my readers and bloggers that are spreading the word! I wouldn’t be anything without you!
Prim and Wild Proofreading, you ladies rock my socks off!!
Last, but not least, Book Beauties Promotions—For all the hard work to get my name out!
The story of my life never really started till Reed “Riker” Collins walked in. He wasn’t just one or two chapters, either. No, he was the beginning, the middle, and the end. All mine.
I thought I knew what broken looked like, what it felt like.
I thought I’d mastered how to get better, how to just move on from those things I’d gone through.
I thought I would find a new type of strength in those moments of insane weakness.
But when Reed Collins became the only thing that mattered to me, I would never be able to find any strength, because I gave it to him willingly.
Years went by with him gone and I tried to replace him with other things, with other people, however it never helped ease his absence. Never lessened my love, my need, my want for him. Until Reed came back, and for an instant, one magical minute, I felt whole again, an insurmountable peace. It was too good to last, though, and it blew up in my face with hidden truths, with things we just never said to each other. So I broke once again, and this time it was final.
One foot in front of another, people told me. But my feet just wouldn’t move, no matter how hard I tried. They were cemented into the ground, leaving me stuck in the piles of my shattered past. Each mistake I ever made stared back at me, mocking my heartbreak.
The time came and went, and enough was enough.
My life changed.
I changed.
We
changed.
I ended up in a place I never truly belonged, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t inch myself one miniscule step at a time to where I needed to be. Where I was meant to be.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Right?
Easy? Nope.
But I sure as hell did it.
I pull my legs up to my chest and rest my chin on my knees, gazing out of the windows of our condo, the nightly rain blocking any of the incredible view of the hills deep in the distance. The sound of the rain hitting the glass never fails to remind me of
those
days,
those
nights,
those
weeks. Of all the wasted time I spent years ago in Ohio, drowning in my own misery, the times not too long ago when I didn’t know if I could breathe one more breath, all the times when my soul had died but my heart still beat.
At first, when my feet landed on this foreign soil two months ago, I was a shell of the person I once was, lost in the internal fire burning inside me, all of which I had caused. I couldn’t find the desire to live, to take the next step to helping myself, didn’t know how to become the person better than ever before.
But I knew something, the things I did wrong. I split myself down the middle, leaning on two different people. I turned to dust because I couldn’t stand up on my own, because I was
too
desperate being in love to accept my fate.
James and I traveled for the first couple of weeks, sightseeing all over South America before ending up in Medellin, Columbia. Those occasions when my mind darkened the most were when I didn’t want to go on, but I did. I spent the majority of my time in silent reflection and replaying all the moments where my decisions, my choices, went terribly wrong. The answer was simple to see once I stepped back and the fog cleared, evaluating it from the outside looking in.
I
had let Reed weaken my foundation,
I
allowed Bennett to beat on it with a sledgehammer, and somehow,
I’m
the one that imploded what had remained, leaving me nothing but ash and burnt debris.
It was up to me—
only me
—to build myself up again.
This crazy path.
The love.
The agonizing heartache.
My trust being severed from the ones around me—it all proved to be too much.
I used the people surrounding me; I chose drugs as a Band-Aid over my wounds and hoped like hell it stuck. But like everything else in life, nothing lasts forever; it was only a temporary fix, a fleeting high. A weakness I couldn’t resist in the past when things got tough, I wanted the mess covered. One that, when the Band-Aid was finally ripped off…everything crumbled in its wake.
I didn’t have a picture of what it would be like to come here, or what I would experience, but if I did, it sure wouldn’t be the high-rise condo in one of the most unique cities I have ever stepped foot in, and the most gorgeous views I have ever laid eyes on. But those are only the small pieces of what makes Medellin great. It’s their people, their stores, their joy for life that I love, that I so desperately needed when I came here. They see the best in all circumstances. You can try to fight it all you want, but it’s contagious, it starts to root itself deep down in your soul with each day you spend with them.
And that changes you.
I’m not who I was two months before. Who I was a year ago, she’s vanished. The girl six years prior is long extinct. And it soothes me, gives me a sense of peace, a taste of hope. I don’t want to be that girl, someone I never thought I would turn into. I was my own worst version of myself. I was given something most aren’t—a second chance, to learn from the things in my past, to make sure I don’t repeat them again. And I’ll try like hell not to.
I grow, learn, and build myself each morning I wake up alive, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still days I pretend that I’m okay. That I have to fake more smiles than not, and nights left in the darkness alone while I let my tears I’d been holding in, finally fall onto my pillow.
James drops down on the sofa, and my thoughts change when his body is anything but relaxed. “Liz is planning on coming down this weekend, so I’m going to try to get off.” He speaks with his face angled away from me, voice low with no energy behind his words. As if that’s not enough to show me how off his mood is, his slumped posture and fidgeting fingers certainly are.
I nod and bite the inside of my lip, wondering what shifts I can pick up to make myself scarce. To say Liz is certainly not my biggest fan puts it mildly. Not that I blame her for a minute about that.
“Is that another smoothie from your vendor? What is that, three today?” James’s talent for changing to a less strained topic once again comes in handy for him.
And I play along again. I know what it’s like to want the topics changed so if he wants it changed then consider it done. “Hey now, it’s only my second today, and this one isn’t a smoothie, it’s a juice. I went a different way home and found this new stand.” My love for anything fried quickly became replaced after the first sip of a true fresh-fruit drink.
“What flavor did you get today?”
“Mango-orange. You want to try?” I offer, but James simply shakes his head. For being in a career that saves lives, he couldn’t care less about his own and refuses to try anything remotely good for him.
James glances at me, his forehead creasing. I know the words coming out of his mouth next. “Not to change the topic, but…”
I raise my hands up to interrupt him, wishing I had the talent to sway topics like he does. “But you are, and I’ll finish it for you. Yes, I talked to my dad and Courtney today. And no, I still haven’t spoken to Reed.” James asks me the same thing every three days, just like clockwork. I haven’t figured out why he still does because every time, he gets the same response back. Zero contact with Reed on my end. The one thing I leave out, though, is that even after two months away from Reed, two months of no contact or no talking on my end, Reed still tries.
Always tries.
A month ago, I’d gotten a phone to forward all of Reed’s messages to, and it currently sits in the bottom of my drawer unused. But not untouched—I peek at it at least once a day to see what ways he tried and make sure it’s always fully charged. A habit I can’t seem to break. I have no need for it other than to devote it to Reed’s attempts at contact. It’s a weakness of mine.
Texts fill my inbox but have gone unread; messages are waiting for me on the voicemail, but are unheard; emails continue to sit in a folder, but remain unopened. Nothing has been deleted, but everything’s gone unreturned. That is where they are going to stay till I can read them without going into a tailspin, or until I have the courage to hit the delete button on them all. But if I read or listen to them now, I will question everything. I will lose my resolve, jump on the next flight, and head home. Sweep everything under the rug to be in his arms once again. I will become filled with regret over leaving, wonder why I’m back. Wonder. Regret. Words that will always be part of Reed and me. But if I delete them, that will mean I’ve closed the door on us.
Permanently.
I’m not ready for—or even capable of—either, so there they sit, waiting for me to make a decision on which road I want to take. And if the time comes when he throws in the towel and becomes radio silent, my finger will hover over the read and delete button, and wherever my finger lands, I’ll have my answer.
After I first left him, the number of times he’d tried to contact me became too many to count—they nearly suffocated me. But he seemed to rein it in the month that followed, only reaching out five or six times a day. Now, two months after leaving, it’s dwindling to only one message a day, and that’s perfectly fine with me. Because with each sunset, another day passes and I can see—I can
feel
—my need is no longer present to have Reed in my life in order to breathe. It doesn’t mean, though, that if he sat right here next to me instead of James, that my breaths wouldn’t come a little easier or deeper, or that my heart wouldn’t beat a little stronger.
“How’s Courtney doing? Still complaining about being pregnant without a ring from Lance?”
“Yep, I have no clue what’s taking him so long to ask. It’s killing me to keep that big of a secret from her, especially now that she’s getting so mad about not having something on her finger. And to top it off, today she was bugging me to be there for the birth.” My poor best friend. Every time I talk to her something else is wrong, and between that and the crazy train of pregnancy emotions, it leads to her being a basket case most of the time.
“You can—she’s due in July, right? Roberto should be back by then, and if he’s not, I can handle it for a couple of weeks without you.” Which I’m sure he can. I haven’t done any kind of real nursing work since I got here. James is covering Roberto’s practice for the time being, and once Roberto found out about what happened to me—or more likely, what I did to myself—he hasn’t trusted me to handle anything major. It doesn’t matter that he and James are friends, or even that James trusts me. Roberto can’t seem to see past my mistakes. So here I am a registered nurse playing candy striper. Thousands of miles away from home.
“I have plenty of time to think about it. Who knows, I like it here so much, I might just stay and not go home when you do.” This thought crosses my mind the longer I’m away from the things that I let break me. The longer I am away from the negativity I’ve allowed in my life. Maybe the “home” I’ve always known isn’t where I’m supposed to be at all. Maybe I need to learn to grow, blossom without my family close by. Maybe, just maybe, this place is it. But the only thing I know for sure is that I have more maybe’s in my life than ever before.
James studies my face with narrowed eyes for a slight moment before he grabs the remote off the table and turns the TV on to some guy show I have zero interest in.
“And on that note, I’m off to bed.” I stifle a yawn as I stand.
“Night, Hads,” James says with a head nod, his focus on the television.
I wave over my head to him as I walk toward my bathroom and wash my face, brush my teeth, and take my nightly sleeping pill. It’s the single thing I take now and I hate that I have to. In the hospital and those nights in rehab when I shut my eyes, Reed’s image was there. I saw his touch roaming over other women, heard his moans and his laughs, just like the ones from the video, and it stung. It gutted me having to witness it again and again each night. But I coped with it, because what else could I do?
But now that I had pushed Reed far out of my life and he’s miles and miles away, when I close my eyes, my visions have morphed into Bennett and Krystal. The two people that had such an unfathomable hatred for me, it was on a scale all its own.
The brutal things in the dreams are always how I endured them in reality. The repulsive things I went through play out in my own nightly terror show, true to how I experienced them with each hit and smack I feel. With each injection of the drugs they give me, my veins burn as it courses through me.
It’s the ending, where the real fight for my life deviates from the true path of what happened.
Two different endings, two different scenarios, and both give me two different perceptions on what happened that fateful night. Or what might have happened, since my unconscious mind plays tricks on me most nights. My pulse stopped, CPR was given. That I know. But my memory is fuzzy after the water was gone. So did I die? Or did I just cheat life?
I read somewhere if you die in a dream, then you die in real life. I can attest to that being false. The dream where I’m out of my body hovering over my corpse is gruesome, cold, and gritty. It’s the one where I die, where I take my last breath on this earth, where I feel my heart actually stop beating. When the coldness hits my lips, I jolt awake, my lungs heavy, and I gasp for the air. My fingers always reach for my pulse in my neck, if only to get the reminder that there is one. I spend hours with a brick on my chest that won’t ease up. The intensity of how close it was to becoming reality imprints on my soul. It causes sleep to evade me for days, those mornings, afternoons, and nights never let me forget what the true meaning of a zombie really is.