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The trip goes by quickly. Despite the hours it takes to make it back into the city, her thoughts are no more sorted than when she boarded. By the time the overhead voice is announcing their landing Kate swears that she can still feel the buzz of lingering warmth on her lips. It’s been a while since she’s kissed someone. Five years since she’s kissed someone on purpose. Two since it was done by accident amidst the shrouded darkness of a bar her coworkers dragged her out to.
She’d drank maybe more than she should have that night, letting herself feel the numbness of the alcohol like the type of kindness she rarely allowed herself. The guy had been fine, if a bit eager. Tall with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A banker or an analyst of some kind and he’d apologized profusely when Kate had frozen under the press of his lips. “I’m so so sorry, totally misread the situation”
join the club , she’d wanted to say, but he wouldn’t have understood the weight of the offhand remark, the violent wind, the fading shriek of the people she cared about. Plus, she’d promised herself she would try to be better about the whole morbid and self-loathing thoughts thing so she’d just nodded and reassured him even though she herself wasn’t even sure what to call the emotion clawing up her throat. She’d paid her tab and hadn’t told any of her coworkers she was leaving, slipping out unnoticed, looking up at the light polluted sky
She’d walked home, it was still early, and she’d padded around her empty apartment, no longer numb from the alcohol, the ache in her chest sharp and apparent. She hadn’t bothered fixing herself anything to eat, had only fallen into a fitful sleep, dreaming of clear eyes and dark skies and of kissing strangers in lightless bars. She had wondered then if the grief of it all would ever leave her. If it would ever feel any less crippling than it did then, immediately hating herself for hoping for it, for hoping she could forget. How could she hope for that when her horrified face had been the last thing Jeb had seen before—
She thinks of it now too, after everything, after coming back to what she said she wouldn’t, after nearly failing again, after getting it right . She thinks of the grief, living and breathing and blinking up at her from that place inside of her where it’s made its home in. She blinks back at it and holds on to it in the light of finally letting herself want something other than to feel normal again—what she wants now simple yet complicated.
And Tyler is— well, the thing is, she’d wanted him to kiss her
Even as she’d turned, pulling her suitcase along, thinking he probably wouldn’t, she had wanted him to. And as groundbreaking as that isn't. Well, it is
It’s been a while since Kate has kissed someone– kissed someone on purpose
But she does
There, in the crowded terminal surrounded by disgruntled travelers who have just had their flights delayed. Kate smiles into the warm coax of Tyler’s mouth–and she lets herself want
She wants him when he pulls away, megawatt smile probably visible from space. When he whispers some one liner about how she’s not getting rid of him so easily. When he pulls her along and sheepishly explains the mess they’re about to walk into, his truck screwed into the ground, the airport worker ready to have a proper conniption about it.
She wants him when he kisses her again, carefully pressing her into the side of his shiny truck after dinner, once reality has caught up to them and it’s time to board her flight. Is this-is this alright? He looks almost nervous, the tornado wrangler himself, his eyes seem to glow in the darkness and he looks down at her like she's something worth holding on to, like she’s not just the rubble left standing after the storm, like she’s whole, in a way
She wants him when she lands in New York, when the presentation goes well and he sends her a concerning amount of fire and cowboy smiley emojis. When he lands there too and confesses that he hates big cities because the sky is never quite clear, the air never quite free enough to move how it wants. When she confesses that that’s maybe why she’d run away to one, scared to face the turning of the winds. When he pulls her in and tells her it’s okay to be scared, it doesn’t make her less of anything
She wants him when they make their way back to Oklahoma, to her mother’s house who looks at them with an amused knowing look in her eye.
“Don’t” Kate warns lightly when Tyler ducks back to the truck to get the rest of their things “we’re not-we’re just-“
Her mother raises her hands in surrender “I didn’t say a thing honey”
Kate scoffs “Sure, but you thought it”
She just laughs, her dark eyes sparking with mirth, her laugh echoing as she moves around the kitchen fixing them a late lunch
Kate wants Tyler when his laugh booms at seeing her mother wearing his ridiculous shirt, even if she confesses that she only wears it to sleep. I do have a reputation to uphold around here
When she pointedly informs them that she’s made up the guest room for Tyler, this being the decent respectable home that it is and all. When Tyler sneaks across the squeaky floorboards anyways, tiptoeing in the hallway like a mine littered field. When he dives into the covers and she tries to muffle the yelp at his freezing feet. When he kisses her into the mattress, fingertips skidding over her cheekbone, honey warm voice in her ear—“You’re a thing of wonder, country girl ”
When she wakes and sees him through her window, laughing and helping her mom tend to the farm
See, despite what her battered heart may have once led her to believe, the wanting Tyler never wavers, and her grief, it doesn’t become something fixed, it becomes something carried, something she holds up with Tyler’s steady hands holding her too
When the project goes through and they become partners
When he asks her to be his girlfriend with a cheesy hand written sign and then a livestream announcement that she begrudgingly agrees to
When the storms come and they face them together
When the sky clouds over and they tilt their faces up and smile