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The doctor who had come to give Kate her discharge papers had been very clear: until she was fully recovered — four weeks at minimum — she was to do very little physical activity, lift nothing over five pounds, and she was expressly forbidden from even thinking about chasing a tornado.
“Well that seems alright. Chasing’s right out, but she didn’t say a word about wrangling. That’s more like…catching.”
The hospital should have added phone calls with Tyler Owens to the list. She had just gotten the hang of taking deep breaths without aggravating her cracked ribs; she certainly wasn’t ready to laugh.
But Tyler’s voice through the speaker was the only thing that helped on nights like this, when the wind was silent outside but loud in her dreams. She had woken in a cold sweat, heart pounding in her ears and leg aching with remembered hurt.
At least she hadn’t screamed this time. Her mother had been generous, cleaning out her old room and bringing her all of the food and painkillers she could ever need despite the years of distance that Kate had erected between them. The last thing Cathy Carter deserved was to have her sleep ruined, night after night after night.
So Kate would trade one ache for another. At least this one came with the memory of Tyler’s smile.
“So where are you at now?” she asked, changing the subject before he could do something reckless like ask her how she was feeling.
“Little motel in Kansas.”
“Is it nice?”
“Well, they let Boone check in, so…”
She laughed again, pressing a hand to her side to brace against the pain, and eased back down into the mattress. If she closed her eyes and laid the phone on the pillow next to her, it almost felt like they were in the same room. “Explains why you were up to answer my call. How can a man like you get a good night’s sleep in a fancy place like that?”
“Yeah, about that. You should be sleeping, Sapulpa.”
“Maybe your lifestyle is rubbing off on me.” Absentmindedly, her hand drifted down to rub idly at the scar on her thigh.
“Or maybe you’re less okay than you led me to believe when I dropped you off at your mama’s place.”
The only thing that stung more than the words was the way that he said them: frank and to the point, completely devoid of judgment. He could have been remarking on the speed of the wind — that’s how obvious she was to him.
“I’m fine,” she said. The scar felt rigid under her fingers. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
It was his turn to laugh, though there was a sadness to it that pressed on her. “Okay, okay. I guess we’ll do it your way.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But seriously,” he said. “If you need me, all you have to do is call. I’m only an hour away.”
She wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Even if you were just across the border, it’s at least 75 miles from Sapulpa to Kansas. That would take—”
“An hour and a half, but that’s with you driving. You’ve gotta put the pedal to the metal more often, Kate.”
She let him tease her about one thing and another until her eyes felt heavy and she had nearly forgotten about the weight of the wind and the rain.
When she finally fell asleep, her hand was tucked comfortably under the pillow. She couldn’t remember when she had stopped fussing with the scar.
***
One week of enforced rest slowly rolled over into two, and Kate started to think that she was losing her mind.
You didn’t become the kind of person to chase storms by accident. It was in your bones, the need to look upon something greater than yourself with your own eyes and find something in the immensity staring back at you. Even after—
Even after. She couldn’t bear the stillness, the slow pace of everyday life in Sapulpa. There was too much room for her to think here, too much silence to swallow her up. Her grief was inescapable. She saw it reflected in the knowing looks of her neighbors, felt it dogging her feet with every limping step she took. And the one thing that could have served as a distraction…
Well. It took months for her to stop flinching at the first peal of thunder, but once the adrenaline wore off it left her with a emptiness she didn’t want to name.
What kind of person was she, to miss the thing that had taken her friends?
So she moved to New York City, where tornadoes were rare and it was never quiet, and told herself that she was content with this new kind of noise.
And the thing was, with time, she had been. Not content, not really, but — adjusted. She had grown used to the background chaos of the city, learned to find comfort in its uniquely human sounds.
Now there was nothing but the drone of the cicadas and the whisper of the wind. It was idyllic and it was peaceful and it was everything she couldn’t tolerate, not when her hands kept shaking and her heart was always a beat away from pounding in her ears.
In pitiful, stupid irony, she made her way to the living room and its 40 inch television, and she turned on the weather.
She was midway through an insultingly inaccurate forecast on the likelihood of midweek storm formation when the front door opened quietly behind her.
“Need any help?” she asked automatically, eyes still tracking the low pressure front stretching across the panhandle.
“You got the weather on, Sapulpa?”
Kate turned so quickly that she felt it in her spine; this must have been the kind of physical activity they had been talking about at the hospital. “Tyler?”
He couldn’t be here. Not now, not when he should be tracking this low pressure system, not when she was nested on the couch in the rattiest pair of pajamas she owned. Oh god, when had she showered last? She couldn’t even wash her hair without help right now.
But he was smiling at her like none of that mattered. “Hey, Kate. You miss me?”
“How did you get in here?”
He raised a hand, showing off a key ring that dangled from his middle finger. She would have recognized it anywhere – only Cathy Carter was so obsessed with cows that she had crocheted a tiny one for her house keys. “Ran into your mama on the way into town. She gave me her keys and told me to head on over.”
“She did?” She pulled the blanket covering her lap up to her shoulders; he would clock the movement, but it was better than letting him see her in her Science Fair shirt from the tenth grade. “I suppose that means she invited you for dinner.”
“As a matter of fact, she did.” He placed her mom’s keys in the little dish next to the door (how did he know that that’s where they went?) before sinking down into the armchair across from the couch. “And I tossed her some cash and a shopping list so I could make you my famous peach cobbler.”
“You chase storms, you befriend my mom, you bake…seems there’s very little Tyler Owens can’t do.”
Her stomach swooped at his smile. “That last one’s a secret. Some things a man needs to keep for himself.”
Just like the first time he had shown up at her home unexpectedly, she was surprised at the ease at which he fit in. It was like the armchair in the living room had just been waiting for him to walk through the front door, hang his hat on the hook, and kick off his boots before welcoming him in for the evening. The house was as happy to see him as she was. And still, she couldn’t stop herself from asking: “Tyler, what are you doing here?”
“Maybe I just missed your mama’s cooking.” But his voice was soft and sincere, and his eyes crinkled at the edges like he was holding back a smile.
Kate let the blanket drop, just a bit. “Well, in that case. Do you need help in the kitchen?”
***
She knew it was a dream, in that distant way that she always did – as if she was living the experience and observing it at the same time. She felt her hands uncurl from the steering wheel, and watched in wonder as she stretched her fingers out over her knees: steady and sure, completely accepting of whatever might come next.
But she also knew that the storm approaching Tyler’s truck wasn’t the same one that had picked her up and tossed her around outside El Reno. This sky was a different shade of green, familiar and ominous and–
“No!” she tried to cry, straining her voice in effort. She knew this storm, knew what it could do, knew that it had picked up Praveen and Addy and Jeb as if the years of friendship and love between them weighed nothing at all. “Stop!”
She reached for the trigger that would deploy the truck’s augers; she reached for Addy and watched her get pulled away. She watched, she reached, she watched–
Kate opened her eyes to the black of her room, tears already drying on her cheeks. It was a reflex to reach for her phone and pull up Tyler’s name, to force herself to take a shuddering breath in time with the first trill in her ear. He would pick up soon, he always—
A phone rang on the other side of the wall.
The last 24 hours came back to her all at once. Tyler wasn’t chasing; he was here, posted up in her mama’s guest bedroom after he had shown up unexpectedly and treated them to a homemade meal and good company. She had smiled more over dinner than she had since El Reno, had felt alive again in a way that she hadn’t realized she had lost.
He had followed her up the stairs after she had pushed back from the table and headed for bed, saying that he needed to check on something in his luggage. She hadn’t turned to look, but she could sense where his hand hovered just behind her, ready to catch her if she fell.
Tyler’s phone rang a second time, then cut off abruptly just as her own went dark. Then there was nothing to listen to but her own heart beat and the muffled footsteps of someone who didn’t know which floorboards creaked and worried about waking her mother.
When the knock on her door finally came, it was quiet. “Kate?” Tyler asked. “Are you okay?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out but a frustrated sob.
In response, Tyler opened the door.
Her mom had kept a lamp on in the hallway as long as Kate could remember, and for the briefest moment Tyler was limned in the yellow light. His hair was sleep-mussed and he was wearing what was obviously a prototype version of his own tornadeo shirt, but in that moment he was more beautiful than any storm that she’d ever seen.
Then the door closed behind him, and he was lost to the darkness of her room.
“You doing okay, Sapulpa?”
She managed a laugh, shaky and hollow. “Sorry I woke you up.”
“Oh, that’s alright. I wasn’t actually asleep.” He was little more than a shadow at the foot of her bed, but it was comforting to see him move towards her, only pausing when he ran into the foot of the mattress. “Another nightmare?”
“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes with unsteady hands. “It probably seems silly. I know that we– that I made it. I know that I’m okay. My mind just—”
“Can’t let go of the worst case scenario.”
“Exactly.” She gestured at the bed, belatedly remembering that he couldn’t see it. “You don’t have to stand, you know. I didn’t forget southern hospitality just because I spent a couple of years in New York.”
The mattress dipped near her feet, though he wasn’t quite close enough for her to touch. And though Tyler Owens was known for being quick with a quip and a smile, he was content to sit in patient silence, letting Kate work through the swirl of thoughts and feelings that threatened to overwhelm her.
“Sorry,” she finally said, steadier now that she had more than a handful of deep breaths in her. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Do you want me to stay?” And damn him, damn him for sounding so earnest and kind when it was 3:30 in the morning and she had dragged him out of bed to listen to her cry.
“I know that I’m bothering you–”
He cut her off with a quick squeeze to her ankle; even separated by the sheets, his skin was pleasantly warm.
“Sapulpa. Kate. Why do you think I came down here?”
“The weather in Kansas has been a bust, and there’s that low pressure front moving in. Stationing the team here gets you in an ideal position to travel.”
“The Wranglers are in Stillwater.”
“What?”
“LIke you said, Kansas was a bust. But there’s still a lot of cleanup to do in Stillwater, and the crew wanted to help.”
“You didn’t want to help?”
“Don’t be foolish. I am helping.”
Maybe it was the way that he said it – like it was obvious, and that there wasn’t anywhere else he would rather be. Maybe it was the fact that his hand was still on her ankle, and that as he spoke he rubbed his thumb over her leg as if he couldn’t bear not to. Or maybe it was the fact that for the first time since she had watched Jeb get pulled into the afternoon, there was someone she could turn to who could really, truly understand. But she broke down again, gasping breaths giving way to loud and hiccuping sobs, and as she hunched into herself with her eyes screwed shut, she felt Tyler gently pulling her into his lap.
It wasn’t like Stillwater, when he wrapped his arms around her to shield her from the storm. That had been desperate and instinctual; this was something more. He ran a hand up and down the curve of her spine and murmured quiet benedictions into her hair, and when she reached out a grasping hand for something to hold on to, he slid his fingers through her own and squeezed them in reassurance.
“There you go,” he whispered, as if it was perfectly acceptable for her to be crying messily into his shirt. “There you go, darlin’. I’ve got you.”
She fell asleep just as the sun began to peek through the windows, still safe in Tyler’s arms.
***
“I have nightmares too,” he said the following morning, greeting her with a cup of coffee and a breakfast tray.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Kate said, though it was more of an automatic response than a true deflection. Something tangible had shifted between them in those uneasy hours before dawn, and it hung in the air between them now. He wanted to tell her; she wanted to listen. It was as inevitable as the thunder that followed the lightning.
So she shook her head and tried again. “I’m sorry. Please, tell me. But only if you want to.”
He waited until she had finished her food to start. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s…they’re new.”
“You don’t need to be embarrassed about that,” she said gently. “EF5s kind of have that effect on people.”
For the first time since she had met him, Tyler didn’t meet her eyes. “That’s the thing, Kate. It isn’t the tornado that scares me. Even when I find myself back in that theater, with the wind and the rain and the walls coming down all around me…I think about Lily. I think about how close she came to slipping right through my hands. And I think about you, all alone in my truck, and how you left without saying goodbye.” He shook his head, as if doing so would banish the memory. “That’s why I came down here. I haven’t been sleeping. I’ve just been pacing motel rooms and chugging coffee, because every time I close my eyes I feel like I’m losing you all over again.”
It was Kate’s turn to climb across the bed to him, to run her hands gently through his hair and tilt his face upwards until his eyes met her own. “You didn’t lose me, Tyler. I’m right here. And I’m not going anywhere.”
***
The third week of Kate’s hospital-mandated rest and relaxation started with a call from her job.
“We certainly understand what you’ve been through,” said her boss, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and had decidedly never seen a tornado in person in his life. “We just wanted to know how long to expect that you would be out of the office.”
She looked out the window. Her mama stood in the driveway with one hand on her hip, the other clutching a tall glass of fresh lemonade. Supervising, it looked like, to where Tyler was half in and half out of the engine bay of his truck. The sun was shining today, with wispy white clouds streaming cheerfully across the sky.
“I don’t know,” she told her boss. “How long do I have to give you an answer?”
He gave her a week.
***
It was a wonder, how much better the days felt when they were bookended by more than a couple of hours of sleep.
She attributed part of it to the welcome end of the extra-strength painkillers she had been prescribed, which had kept the pain in her ribs manageable but her head cloudy. She would miss the sensation even less than she would miss the bruises, most of which had already faded away into nothing.
Kate smiled when she tilted the bottle upside down, holding the last pill in her palm.
“What are you grinnin’ at?” Tyler asked.
She jumped. They weren’t far apart – he was chopping onions at the counter, and she was sitting at the kitchen table – but she still hadn’t felt his eyes on her.
“It’s the last one,” she said, holding up the bottle. “I think this means I’m officially all better.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“So skeptical,” she laughed, tossing the pill and its bottle neatly into the trash can. “See? That didn’t even hurt. I don’t need it and I have great aim.”
He stepped back from the counter with a smirk. “Well then, how about you get over here and help me peel these potatoes? This hash isn’t going to cook itself.”
“Say please,” she said, but she was already getting to her feet, luxuriating in the fact that it no longer hurt to stand and stretch. It felt good to lift her arms high above her head and to shake out the lingering stiffness in her neck and shoulders, even if it made the too-small t-shirt of her college years rise up on her stomach.
When she looked back at Tyler, he was staring intently at the onions, a faint blush staining his cheeks.
Cathy Carter’s kitchen was many things – cozy and organized, well-stocked and frequently used – but it wasn’t large. Her mama had always done the cooking and Kate had always done the cleanup, simply to spare them from bumping into each other and getting frustrated. But there was something that felt welcoming about sidling up next to Tyler, reaching past him with the barest brush of her arm against his for the potato peeler resting at his side.
“Just the potatoes?” she asked, unable to stop her smile from bleeding into her tone.
“Just the potatoes. I don’t want you to ruin that shirt when it’s time to start frying things.” He poked her in the shoulder. “It’s an antique.”
“Please,” she scoffed, turning towards the pantry before he could see her own blush. “As if anyone’s clothes are getting ruined in my mama’s house.”
The old apron had hung in its place behind the pantry door since Kate had brought it home as a child. At the time, she thought it was funny. Her mother was a straight shooter who preferred to dress simply; there were few people on Earth who would have looked more out of place wearing a frilly pink apron that read Kiss The Cook.
But there was nothing funny about it now, not with Tyler standing preternaturally still as she slid it gingerly over his head. She had to stand nearly on tiptoe to manage it and he had to bend his head low; she felt as well as heard every shuddering breath that ghosted over her ear.
“There,” she whispered. “You’re safe now.”
Slowly – agonizingly, torturously slowly – he raised a hand, brushing an errant strand of hair back behind her ear. “You know what? I think I might be.”
A honk from the driveway heralded the arrival of her mother, returned from the grocery store with the rest of their breakfast supplies. When she came into the kitchen, she found Kate and Tyler working in companionable silence, wearing matching smiles and standing shoulder to shoulder.
***
That night, it was Kate’s turn to knock on Tyler’s door.
He had been pacing back and forth for half an hour, still too unfamiliar with the room to avoid the creaks and groans of the floorboards. She waited as long as she could stand it, checking her phone repeatedly for a message or a call that would serve as an invitation, before throwing her blankets back with a huff and heading for the guest room.
“Tyler?” she asked, voice pitched low. “Are you okay?”
He opened the door with wild eyes, though his hands were steady. “Hey, Sapulpa. Need something?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”
It was so easy to read him now. He wore his smile and his charm like a mask, as if he had gotten so used to the cameras and the fans that it was instinctual for him to perform. But under the swagger and the nonchalance she could see him clear as day — the Tyler who showed up at her motel with a pizza and an apology, the Tyler who drove her to a rodeo to show her a good time. The Tyler who had come here, to Sapulpa, even when she hadn’t asked him to, because El Reno had changed them both in a way that he didn’t know how to navigate alone.
And it was that Tyler who took a step back from the door, gesturing to the spare room with amused acceptance. “Yeah, I think I might.”
It was strange. She had lived in this house for most of her life, but two weeks of perpetual exposure to Tyler Owens had transformed the room next to hers into a space that was uniquely his own. His shoes were stacked neatly next to the door, and the closet that had once held nothing but boxes of Christmas decorations and old school papers was suddenly full of clothing: flannel shirt after flannel shirt after smartly folded pair of jeans hung in a line.
“Huh,” she said, turning slowly in a circle to take it all in. Even his laptop was unpacked, though she hadn’t seen him use it since he had arrived.
“Did I move something I shouldn’t have?” He scratched the back of his neck in sudden shyness, a movement so vulnerable that it made Kate question if she was supposed to see it all. “I’ve been careful to keep everything where it belongs, but I couldn’t get my luggage in the closet without shifting some stuff around.”
“I’m just surprised, I guess. Kinda took you for the type to live out of a suitcase.”
“Come on now, Kate. Just because I used to ride bulls for fun doesn’t mean I don’t know how to be tidy.”
She nodded her head towards the computer. “Have you heard from the Wranglers?”
“Yeah, actually. That’s why I was up. Boone called earlier.”
“I don’t suppose he was asking you to bail him out of jail.”
There – a genuine and sincere Tyler Owens chuckle, though it quickly melted away into a scowl. “Not this time. No, the numbers on the streams are down. They’re worried about subscribers falling off if…well…”
“If you don’t get back on camera.”
“Yeah, something like that.” He shrugged, a gesture of nonchalance that was absolutely weighted down with meaning. “I was gonna tell you in the morning.”
Her heart sank. He was leaving. He was leaving. Her job was waiting for her in New York City, and the Wranglers were waiting for Tyler in a little motel outside Stillwater, and he was leaving.
She took one deep breath to reacquaint her lungs with the concept of oxygen, then another for stability. “Okay. Let’s deal with it in the morning, then.”
“Come on, Kate.” He rubbed a hand over his face in exhaustion. “We both know it isn’t that simple. Not between us, not anymore.”
“Since when do you care about simple?” she asked. “God, Tyler, the day I met you I watched you set off fireworks into a tornado. You exist so far out of my comfort zone that it makes me question my entire life. You– you challenge me. I like that about you. And if you think I’m going to just fly back to New York and never talk to you again after everything we’ve just been through–”
“You like me?”
Stupid, charming cowboy. “Is that what you took from all that?”
“Nah. I just wanted to see you smile.” He sunk down onto the bed. “You’re right, by the way. We can talk about it in the morning. It’s getting late.”
“It’s been late for at least an hour.” And she was too keyed up to sleep now, regardless of what time it was. “You think you’ll actually go to bed?”
“Not without help.” There was that smile again – the real one, the one that it felt like he saved for her. “Wanna tell me a bedtime story?”
She sat down next to him on the bed. “Once upon a time, a very annoying man showed up unexpectedly in my mama’s barn.”
“Oh, great start. Does this story have cloud microphysics? Those are my favorite.”
It almost felt like a childhood sleepover. They laid down as the night got later, lying shoulder to shoulder and staring up at the ceiling. She wasn’t sure how long they stayed up talking, and she didn’t know which one of them fell asleep first.
But for the first time in weeks, she didn’t have a single nightmare.
***
All in all, it only took her a couple of hours to pack up all of her things.
It shouldn’t have surprised her. She had only planned on spending a week in Oklahoma, after all; it wasn’t like she had brought a lot with her.
It just felt strange to leave with no physical evidence of everything that she’d been through. Even her bruises had faded. The past few weeks had ingrained themselves into her psyche, setting up a firm boundary of before and after that would affect her for the rest of her life, and she had nothing to show for it.
Well. Except for a tornadeo shirt that she had stolen out of Tyler’s truck when he wasn’t looking. He just had so many, and she…
At the end of the day, she wanted something to remember him by.
His own packing didn’t seem to be causing him any stress. She watched from the porch as he loaded his luggage into the back seat, pausing just briefly to look up at the clouds and whistle in appreciation.
“Gonna be a bad one tonight,” he said.
It was safer to watch the leaves sway in the wind than it was to search for meaning in his expression. “If you get out of here now, you should be able to catch it.”
“Why would I get out of here? It’s coming straight for us.”
Well– because– well– “The Wranglers,” she said, pathetically.
“Sapulpa, you stopped a tornado from killing me with a combination of science and audacity. If that doesn’t make you a Wrangler, I don’t know what does.”
Three steps took her off the porch and into his vicinity; a swipe of her hand had his hat held securely in her hand. “I’m a Tamer, actually,” she said, sliding his hat on with a smile. “And if you’re staying, I’m driving.”
His answering grin rivaled the oncoming storm. “Yeah, I kind of hoped so.”
***
The wind was cruel, buffeting the truck from side to side as the rain pounded down on the windshield.
That was fine. She had driven through worse.
“Having fun?” Tyler yelled, his voice somehow carrying over the noise of the storm and the noise of the country music he insisted on blasting from the sound system.
“I’d turn around if I wasn’t!” She refused to acknowledge that she liked the music, in the exact same way that she refused to acknowledge all of the times that Tyler reached for the various handholds of the truck in latent panic. He was cute when he didn’t know what was coming next.
She didn’t actually know what was coming next either. She had options: the gravel road they were on would turn back towards town if she kept going straight, but there was an old dirt road coming up on the left that would take them closer to the storm. She needed to get some sleep if she wanted to make it on time to the airport in the morning, but the weather–
Lightning struck across the sky as Kate and Tyler whooped in concert. Her hands turned the wheel as if they were guided by the wind itself, and she put the truck in park so they could take it in. Her job in New York was a static thing, but this storm was growing in real time. She would be sacrificing a part of herself if she didn’t stand back and watch it form.
“It’d be better during the day!” she called, squinting through the rain. “I just know the clouds are beautiful!”
“They are!” he answered, looking at her.
She grasped the steering wheel. Her future was falling apart; it was unfolding her in front of her, behind her, next to her. Lightning struck, and out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Tyler’s smile.
“Tyler?” she asked.
“Yeah, City Girl?”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
His hand was warm around hers as it rested atop the gearstick. Forward, backwards, east or west; Tyler Owens had her.
He had her.
She put the truck in drive.
***
From: [email protected]
Subject: Resignation
To whom it may concern:
I would like to say thank you to everyone at the NWS for their support while I recovered from the injuries I sustained during the El Reno tornado last month. While I intended to resume my position once I had recovered, another opportunity has arisen that gives me the chance to closely study the formation and dissolution of tornadoes, and at this time I feel I must follow it.
I wish you all the best.
If you feel it, chase it –
Kate Carter