Ginger's Heart (A Modern Fairytale, #3)(39)
Twenty seconds.
That’s how long it took for Woodman’s life to change forever.
He’d gone into shock fairly quickly, and he barely remembered the helicopter ride from Barcelona to Morón de la Frontera. By the time he was airlifted to Germany, he was so out of it on painkillers, he didn’t wake up until his leg had already undergone surgery.
He had hated relying on the help of others. He hated that he couldn’t take a piss in the hospital without calling a nurse to help him out of bed. He couldn’t drive. He was in a wheelchair for weeks, and now he was dependent on crutches. It was the helplessness that bothered him the most. Around everyone, that is, but Cain.
Something about Cain made it feel okay—maybe it was that Cain was family, and family is allowed to see you at your worst, at your most vulnerable. Or maybe his brashness—the way he continued to treat Woodman like his injury was temporary and anything was still possible, made him feel like the world hadn’t, actually, ended. But it was even more than that. After the abject horror of what had happened to his leg and foot, the trauma of the surgeries, and the slow but certain realization that his life would never, ever be the same again, he’d felt terrifyingly alone in the world. Until Cain walked into his room at the Landstuhl Medical Center.
The doctors and nurses had been clinically concerned about his treatment, of course. But Cain? The second he walked into Woodman’s room was the second Woodman finally felt comfort. Because despite their emotional estrangement throughout their adolescence, when the shit hit the fan, Cain showed up. And seeing Cain’s face felt like more than coming home. It felt like, well, it felt like undiluted comfort.
Lying in a hospital bed in terrible pain, Woodman had had some time to think about his relationship with his cousin, reframing it and making a conscious decision to be a better custodian of it. It was no wonder he’d often compared their relationship with that of brothers—as the sons of identical twin sisters, Woodman and Cain were, genetically speaking, half brothers. But the cruel reality of that comparison was that Sophie, Woodman’s mother, had married a banker, whose chief pleasure in life, aside from making money, was to please her. Sarah, on the other hand, had fallen for a dark-haired, blue-eyed foreigner who’d gotten her pregnant before they could decide if they even liked each other. Throw in the differences of culture, income, and language, and the marriages produced two very, very different children.
Life wasn’t a challenge for Woodman. He knew he was good-looking, decent grades came easy, and the entire community of Apple Valley seemed to regard him as some godlike golden boy. But Cain? From a young age, Cain had acted out, likely to get attention from his unhappy parents, and had been labeled a troublemaker by the third grade. And like a self-fulfilling prophesy, that’s exactly who Cain became for the good people of Apple Valley: their own little poisonous apple—beautiful on the outside but rotten to the core.
The Dub Twins. One light, one dark. One good, one bad.
Except that the good people of Apple Valley, who clearly loved the traditional fairy-tale roles of prince and villain, didn’t actually know Cain at all outside of the inflated stories of his antics. They didn’t know that there was nothing rotten, nothing poisonous at his core. They didn’t know that he’d jump in front of a train for someone he loved. They didn’t know that the risks he took were just a bid for the attention he’d missed from his folks. They didn’t know that the endless succession of women he bedded was likely an attempt to feel connected to, or loved by, someone. And they definitely didn’t know that the princess of their little kingdom had been in love with him since she was a little girl.
But Woodman knew all these things.
He knew them, and he mulled them over incessantly as he lay on his back for hours and hours on end, bleary from pain meds, unable to process the far-reaching, permanent consequences of his injuries and desperately missing home.
Was Cain the better man?
Woodman’s brain insisted that he wasn’t. He was uncouth, bad mannered, irreverent, impertinent, and irresponsible, with a mouth like a sailor before he’d become a sailor, and a dick that had seen so much indiscriminate action, it’s a wonder it still worked. But Woodman’s heart knew the truth: at his core, Cain’s impulsiveness meant that he wouldn’t consider his own safety before preserving that of someone he loved. And at his core, Woodman knew that he might make the same decision, but it wouldn’t come from the same visceral, instinctive place from which Cain’s actions were born. There would be a split second of thought, of weighing, of judgment. And it was that split second that gave Woodman his answer to the question. They were both good men, but Cain’s nature—the very nature that led him to make such bad decisions born from emotion instead of reason—also made him the purer hearted of the cousins, the better raw material, however crude in his present form.
But Woodman wasn’t accustomed to taking second place to Cain, so even though he acknowledged these thoughts, he guarded against them, far more comfortable in the traditional roles they’d come to embody throughout their lives: the golden boy and the blue-eyed devil. In fact, the only other person who seemed to recognize Cain’s true worth was the princess. Ginger.
In the rose garden of Woodman’s life, Ginger, of all people, was the unexpected thorn.
Because the golden boy, the fair-haired son, the prince, was supposed to win the princess. Not the villain. Not the devil. The prince, damn it. And yet, no matter how much he tried to be everything she wanted, it was Cain who owned her heart. Woodman was her second choice, though he longed, with every fiber of his being, to be her first.