Ginger's Heart (A Modern Fairytale, #3)(83)
Never in a thousand years did he anticipate the stark, cold, knife-through-the-heart anguish it would cause him. The air wheezed from his lungs as he stared at her, as the plates of his world shifted, and he was forced to acknowledge what he’d always known but tried so desperately to ignore.
“Gin,” he said, holding her hand firmly as his heart splintered down the middle and broke in half. “In the entire time I’ve known you, there’ve been two times you ever asked me to make love to you. The first was the day Cain left Apple Valley, and the second was the day he came home.”
He watched her face—her beautiful face that he loved like no other—crumble. Her eyes widened to a heartbreaking deep brown before fluttering closed, her lips trembled into a terrible frown, and her neck fell forward, as though whatever was happening in her brain was too heavy for her to hold it up anymore.
She drew in a long, sobbing breath. “This has nothin’ to do with—”
“Cain,” he said. “Say his name.”
“C-Cain,” she murmured for the first time in three years.
“And you’re lyin’, darlin’,” he said gently. “It has everythin’ to do with Cain.”
When she didn’t answer, didn’t deny this, he closed his eyes and squeezed them shut, feeling an ache in his chest that surpassed anything he’d ever endured during his accident and rehab. She didn’t deny it, because she couldn’t.
Something in Ginger fed off something in Cain—it was palpable and overwhelming, and he’d known it the second he’d walked into that lobby and saw them together: there was more chemistry, more passion, in Cain and Ginger’s hate than there would ever be in Woodman and Ginger’s love. There was something in Ginger that cried out for Cain and something in Cain that answered that cry. Something about being with Cain turned her on like a light being plugged into a socket—he made her vibrant and alive, made her stop saying “fine,” made her feel, even if the feeling was fury. That was the way it was. That was the way it had always been. And that was the way it would always, always be.
And Woodman couldn’t deny it any longer either. Nor could he compete with it. Lord knows he’d tried.
At one point in time, he’d believed that having Ginger was worth the fact that she might not love him as much as he loved her. But the agonizing reality, he now understood, was that he’d been wrong. She didn’t belong with him. She belonged with someone who made her come alive. She belonged with Cain, and keeping her from Cain was wrong, no matter how much it would hurt him to give her up. He loved her way too much to stand in her way anymore.
“Please, Woodman,” she sobbed softly, looking up at him with pleading, desperate eyes. “I love you. So much.”
“And I love you,” he said, his voice breaking. “I will always love you, but I—”
Suddenly the alarm on his phone sounded, and, echoing it, the alarm from the tower of the fire department down the street, blaring out over the town, calling all members to the firehouse.
Woodman looked away from Ginger, fishing his phone out of his back pocket and staring at the message: 10-23 All hands 10-25 Laurel Ridge Farm Barn.
He looked up at her, part of him grateful for the reprieve from the terrible, painful conversation they were about to have. “I gotta go.”
“Where?”
“Laurel Ridge. I’m active again, remember?”
She took a ragged breath. “Woodman . . . ”
“Stay tonight, Gin. We need to talk when I get home.”
“Of course I’ll stay over. Where else would I stay?” she asked, the last words almost inaudible as her voice broke into sobs. “Woodman . . . you’re s-scarin’ me.”
He leaned forward and cupped her face, the pain in his chest so tight and terrible, he could barely breathe, but he managed to press his lips to her forehead, his eyes burning as he touched her sweet skin.
“I love you,” he whispered. I love you so much that I’ll let you go because I can’t make you happy, baby. “And I’m sorry.”
And then, before she could say another word, he turned and—for the first time in his life—Josiah Woodman walked away from Ginger McHuid.
***
When he got back to the firehouse, every bay was open, and there was organized chaos in the ready gear room, where every man who hadn’t been hitting the keg hard, including Cain, was suiting up.
“You comin’?” Woodman asked, taking a seat on the bench where Cain was pulling on some spare bunker pants.
“Hell, yes. First night back and I get to go to a big one! Chief said he could use an experienced pipeman.”
Cain waggled his eyebrows as he said this, but Woodman wasn’t in the mood to joke around with Cain. Frankly he didn’t know how the hell to feel about Cain. With the exception of that one time, when Ginger was fifteen and he kissed her, Woodman didn’t believe that Cain had ever betrayed him. In fact, looking at things in a certain light, he had to wonder if Cain had stayed away all these years out of respect for Woodman’s claim on Ginger. As the thought passed through his mind, he felt the truth in it, the yes of it, like a light bulb going off in his head. Cain had stayed away on purpose. It made it hard for Woodman to hate him.
“Why don’t you ask me ’bout Ginger?” asked Woodman, fastening his bunker pants and looking at Cain dead in the eyes.