“You two were screamin’ at each other when I walked in. What the heck were y’all so worked up about?”
A small sobbing sound escaped from her throat so her voice was thin when she answered, “Like Cain said . . . we were just catchin’ up.”
Woodman started walking again, this time at a slower pace, though his ankle protested with each step.
“That wasn’t catchin’ up. Don’t lie to me.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she sobbed, walking beside him.
“Baby,” said Woodman as his heart clenched with a huge and growing worry, “we talk to each other. That’s what we do. We don’t lie to each other. We may not have the most romantic relationship in the world, but I know how much our friendship means to both of us. It’s solid. It’s true. I can’t think of anythin’—not one thing—in my life that I couldn’t talk about with you. Why can’t you—”
She stopped walking and squeezed his hand, and he paused midsentence, looking back at her curiously. “Gin?”
“We could be more romantic,” she whispered. They were stopped in front of the white picket fence that surrounded Woodman’s house. Ginger looked at it, then back at him. “Make love to me? Right now?”
He’d imagined her saying these words to him a million times. Every morning. Every night. Every time he saw her. And he’d always imagined that when she did, they’d finally be in a place in their relationship where their love for each other—their romantic love—had been fully realized.
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.”