Book #2 in the Medley series
JENNIFER RUE:
I thought I had my life all mapped out.
But nothing throws a wrench in your plans like finding your fiancé in bed with another woman.
Untangling myself from the damage Darren did is hard, but the more I...
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I push myself forward, my lungs burning as I do sharp, strong pulls through the water. My arms tingle with exhaustion, but I keep going until my hands slam against the edge of the pool.
Coming up for a breath of air, I rip my goggles off my face.
"No, Davis!" an exasperated voice sounds above me. "Come on, you can do better than this."
Considering dunking my head back under the surface until I suffocate, I pull myself out of the water, coming face to face with Coach Lewis, and she is fuming.
Shit.
"Your time is worse than when you qualified for the Olympics, and it just keeps going up. What's going on?"
Oh, I don't know. Maybe the fact that I'm being buried in schoolwork and my girlfriend - if I can even still call her that - suddenly decided to move across the country, leaving me behind.
I keep those reasons to myself, though. "I don't know, Coach."
Lewis sighs. "I thought we'd worked through this in the spring. This cannot become a half-yearly occurrence."
We didn't work through it as much as Jen showed up at Nationals and asked me to kiss her, and somehow, my body remembered how to swim again. And it's not lost on me that my struggling again coincides with her being gone.
"Is it school?" she asks, raking a hand through her short, honey-gold hair.
No. Yes.
"How are your grades faring this semester?"
Ouch. I flinch as I recall just how close I've come to failing several of my classes. I have never failed a class before. Lewis catches the expression on my face, and hers soften.
"I know you want to do both, but if that means you can't do either well, are you really willing to lose it all?"
It's not that any of this is new. I stood in this exact dilemma earlier this year when my grades kept slipping, and I thought I might not pass my exams and simultaneously throw the National's final for us.
I guess I just never saw it this way. The idea that by pushing through, digging myself deeper into this hole where I kill myself to do it all, I'd somehow end up sacrificing both careers.
"I... I hadn't thought of it like that," I admit.
Lewis steps closer, nudging my shoulder so I look back towards the pool where Jayden and Mitch are trying to follow Saltz's speed at back crawl and failing miserably. "You have to choose. And if you can't fully commit yourself to this, your team deserves to know."
Lead descends into my stomach, and for a second, I fear I'll sink to the bottom as I jump back into the water, finishing practice.
And the entire way through, I try to decide which part of myself to give up before I fuck it all up.
