CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
KELSEY
WE STARTED SOUTHWEST THROUGH ILLINOIS TOWARD Iowa. Archer was a good travel companion. He asked about the details of the Spiral Project, how I’d forecast the potential storm, what my grad students were working on. I asked about his travels, his work on the Butterfly House, the other jobs he’d had. We fell into comfortable silences and commented on passing scenery or towns.
He was easy to be with. Even with our intense, crackling heat and my own tension about the physical part of our relationship, I liked just being with him.
A couple of hours in, I reached into the cooler on the floor of the backseat and dug around for a plastic bottle. I twisted the lid off and handed it to Archer.
“Chocolate milk, you fourth grader,” I said.
“You remembered.” He flashed me a smile. “I’m touched.”
“Yeah, well…” I reached back and grabbed another bottle. I opened it and took a swig. The chocolate milk slid rich and creamy down my throat. “You might be on to something here.”
As the night fell, fewer cars populated the roads. We took a break around midnight, stopping at an all-night diner. We mapped out the remaining route as we ate. I gave Archer a rudimentary course on storm chasing and etiquette in the likely event that we ran into other chasers along the way.
After paying the bill, we stepped outside with take-out cups of coffee. Along with an increasing, cold wind, rain had started to fall, even though we were nowhere near our destination yet.
“Hold on.” Archer shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over my shoulders as we hurried to the van.
Once inside, I slipped my arms into the jacket sleeves, giving in to the urge to nestle into the enveloping warmth of leather and Archer. The lining was soft and worn, his clean male scent clinging to the fabric.
I checked the radar on my phone and told Archer the rain would pass in about fifteen minutes.
“Come on.” I gestured for him to follow me into the back of the van, where the seats were stored into the floor.
“Really?” Archer shrugged. “Okay. I usually like to take my time, but I can get the job done in fifteen minutes, if that’s what you want.”
I threw him a look. “I meant that you should take a short nap before we get going again. It’s past midnight and we have at least another six or seven hours to go. Not safe for you to drive if you’re too tired. Unless you want me to drive.”
“Silence, woman.”
I reached out to bonk him on the head. He grabbed my wrist and planted a warm kiss on my palm. We clambered into the back of the van and settled down on a couple of sleeping bags. Rain splashed across the windows.
“So why did you agree to storm chase?” Archer asked.
“I never could resist a triple-dog dare.” I nudged his hip with mine. “And I wanted to do it with you.”
He watched me, curious. “And why are you with me?”
The question sounded like he was referring to more than just storm chasing. I looked at the sky, the clusters of clouds, the spilling rain.
“That’s a multicell storm,” I said, gesturing to the windows. “It’s formed by bunch of different cells that contain an updraft and downdraft. It’s the most common type of thunderstorm.”
I took a swallow of coffee. “The rarest is called the supercell thunderstorm. It creates the most destructive tornados, winds, and hail. It’s usually isolated from other thunderstorms, but it’s the most powerful type of storm. The most beautiful and incredible, too.”
I leaned forward, aware of Archer’s gaze. The rain came harder, pattering onto the roof like little pebbles. His leather jacket wrapped around me like an embrace.
“I used to chase supercell storms,” I said. “Used to wait for them, watch for them. When I was in college, I hooked up with a group of storm chasers and we’d take off at a moment’s notice when we saw something forming. Always hoped we’d catch a tornado or get caught in the middle of severe weather. Sometimes we did. I loved the risk, the excitement, the unknown. There was something so adventurous about chasing something completely unpredictable. Something you couldn’t control.”
“Why did you give it up?”
I shrugged. “I grew up. I’d been a risk-taker as a kid, but after my father died I learned some tough lessons about being an adult.”
“What happened?”
“He died of a heart attack when I was in my junior year,” I said, my chest constricting. “After he died, I hit the self-destruct button hard. I drank too much, slept around, partied a lot. Quit school. Ended up in a couple of bad relationships.”
I felt his tension and held up my hand to stop him from saying anything. I stared past him out the window.
“Dean knew I was crashing hard, but I wouldn’t listen to him when he tried to help me. So finally he called my mother and told her I was in bad shape. She came to bring me back home so I could get myself together. When we returned to Chicago, I found out my father had left her in debt. The house they’d worked so hard to buy had been foreclosed, and she’d been forced to move. She hadn’t told me so I wouldn’t be upset.
“Despite everything, my mother was undeterred. She was working three jobs. She’d rented an apartment. She was saving up money to go into business with Maria. She was dealing with her fucked-up daughter. Not once did she give up. Hell, not once did she even complain. She just buckled down and got to work. That woman has a will of iron. And I didn’t even know it until then.”
“That’s why you straightened up,” Archer said.
“Damn right. I went back to school. Finished undergrad work with honors and got into several grad programs. I’ve been a success story ever since.”
“And this?” Archer reached out to tug at the blue streak cutting through my hair. “A souvenir of your wild past?”
My throat constricted. He had souvenirs, too. Reminders. Scars.
“Something like that,” I admitted.
Once again, I was breaking my own rules. No personal stuff, I’d told him. And yet I’d taken him to meet my mother and was telling him all my secrets.
“Okay, well.” Unnerved suddenly, I shifted around, pretending to arrange the sleeping bag. “That was weird. Subject change, please.”
He didn’t respond. When I turned to look at him, he closed the distance between us and pressed his lips to mine in a warm, lovely kiss. My breath caught in my chest. Our lips sealed together, moving with ease and growing heat.
“You didn’t answer my question.” Archer lifted his head. He put his hand against my cheek. “Why are you with me?”
I stared at him, into his midnight eyes with their starlike points of light.
“You’re the first real risk I’ve taken in a very long time,” I whispered.
A smile tugged at his mouth. He shifted closer, but instead of kissing me again, he pulled me down so we were both lying on our backs. He tugged me against his side.
I wanted to stay there forever. Enveloped in his leather jacket with his body heat warming me, and the rain falling, I was suddenly and intensely glad that I’d given over to him, even for a short time. It was a thunderstorm with him, brief but intense. One I knew I would never forget.
We got back on the road after we’d slept a couple of hours and the rain had stopped. As we headed southwest through Illinois and Missouri, we played road-trip games, drank chocolate milk, and ate tea cookies.
I offered to drive again, but Archer had his hands glued to the wheel and acted like my offer was a personal insult. By navigating through country roads, we missed the interstate traffic as we approached the Kansas border.
“There’s a line of storms forming to the southwest,” I told Archer, after checking the radar. “Take County Road 7. If we need to divert north, we can take the back roads.”
I scrambled into the back to get the camera equipment ready. Storm chasers always traveled in packs or at least pairs so that one person could drive while the other tracked the storm. I slipped my Nikon around my neck and returned to the front seat with my laptop.
“Your grad students do this a lot?” Archer asked, leaning forward to look at the darkening clouds.
“As often as they can, though tornado season is in the spring and summer.”
“And what do you do if you see a tornado?”
“Most of the time the objective is to get the best video possible,” I said. “Video can be a huge help in confirming model results. Of course, if we had a Doppler on Wheels or other high-tech equipment, we could do much more.”
I checked the radar on my laptop again. “It’s shifting north. You can take 56 toward Topeka, but don’t get on the interstate. We need to avoid the traffic.”
An ocean of fields stretched out on either side of the road as we drove. My stomach knotted up with both anxiety and excitement.
I got out the camcorder and filmed the towering cloud that stretched toward the stratosphere. The rain started coming down harder, pushed by the increasing wind. We passed a few cars and vans parked on the side of the road.
I looked at the sky. My instinct told me the wind shear and moisture would move farther north, and that we could catch the storm if we were patient.
I didn’t usually like being patient, but it had been so long since I’d even tried to chase a storm that I decided to play it safe. Archer navigated the van north. We stopped once for gas.
As Archer filled the tank, I grabbed the video camera and went into the convenience store. I bought a few granola bars and some beef jerky to restock our supplies and chatted briefly with the clerk about the storm chasers who had come through already.
On my way back to the van, I stopped at the edge of a field that stretched alongside the station. The clouds were tilting downshear at an angle that seemed favorable for supercell formation.
I pulled out my camera and filmed the sky. My heart swelled in response to the sheer beauty of the sky and clouds, the mysteries they contained, and the certain fact that no matter how hard I tried, part of them would always remain unpredictable.
“Ready, storm girl?” Archer called.
I paused the camera and returned to the van, pushing my windblown hair out of my face. Archer reached out to take the camera from me. I pulled a rod of beef jerky out of my pocket and unwrapped it.
“I’m going to map out a different route to keep us away from the interstate,” I said.
“What were you filming?” he asked.
I gestured to the clouds and took a bite of jerky. “Those are likely to become supercells. The ratio of instability to shear is perfect.”
“Tell me more.”
I glanced up, realizing Archer had the camera trained on me. I frowned.
“What are you doing?”
“Filming you. Tell me about the supercell.”
Though I wasn’t all that nuts about being on camera, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to lay out the basics since I’d have to review the video later anyway.
“We’re looking at a storm formed from a specific set of weather conditions,” I said into the camera. “If the wind changes too rapidly with height, then the storm will be ripped apart. If the instability is too strong, then the storm will destroy itself with its own downdraft. But when the two are just right, the intensifying rotation creates a self-sustaining storm that lasts much longer than your garden-variety thunderstorm.”
I gestured to the sky behind me. “Behold the supercell.”
Archer lowered the camera, his gaze on me. “You’re great on film.”
I shook my head. “Flattery will get you… well, it will almost certainly get you laid later on, but right now we have a storm to follow.”
He grinned and climbed into the driver’s seat. I adjusted the GPS as we started out of the gas station.
“We’re going to divert south a short way,” I said. “I don’t think the low level jet is going to be optimal, but we need to stay on the tip of the moisture tongue.”
“Sounds promising. I’d like you on the tip of my moisture tongue.”
I poked him in the arm. “The moisture tongue is a region of dewpoints and instability. It’s where storms often form, but the strongest are at the tip of it. Take E550 south.”
He followed orders. I liked that he was willing to cede power to me out here. He clearly recognized that I knew what I was doing, and even with all his dominance and control, he could let me take the lead in my own sphere.
We drove for another hour. I watched the sky. Lightning split through the clouds, followed by the rumble of thunder. I looked at the radar again and called Colton, who gave me details from the Rapid Refresh model.
“One more hour,” I told Archer. “It’s heading in this direction. Let’s stop and get something to eat. If it’s not here by nightfall, we’ll be done for the day.”
He pulled into a diner, where several trucks and vans were parked in the lot. We went inside, the noise of male voices filling the interior.
I scanned the crowd, picking out at least four tables of storm chasers. If I hadn’t caught snippets of conversation about wind shear and instability, I’d have known them from their attire of jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps, and the laptops and tablets sitting between their plates of steak and eggs.
“Kelsey?” A male voice, sounding surprised, made me turn. A beefy, bearded guy approached, looking me up and down. “I’ll be damned.”
I smiled. “You were damned a long time ago, Henry.”
“True enough.” A grin split through his beard as we exchanged a hug. “What’re you doing here? I thought you were stuck in a classroom somewhere.”
“I usually am,” I admitted. “But I thought I’d come out for a while. Henry, this is my friend Archer. Archer, Henry and I were in grad school together.”
They exchanged greetings, and Henry invited us to join his group for dinner. As we followed him to a crowded table, the guys shuffled around to make room for two more chairs. Henry introduced us to the meteorologists, grad students, lab workers, drivers, and photographers who’d all gone out together in a fleet.
We compared notes on the storm, talked about their plans and ours, and checked our data against each other’s. Everyone hummed with excited energy, all of us knowing the chase wasn’t over yet.
This was what the Spiral Project unit would be like, if I ever had a shot at getting it off the ground again. I tried not to think about the fact that even if I did, I wouldn’t be one of the project’s storm chasers. I’d be stuck in front of a computer screen at King’s.
I shook my head, not letting that thought encroach on my enjoyment. And as we ate, talked, and laughed with the others, something rose inside me like a perfect, shiny balloon.
Happiness. I was happy sitting there with the people who shared my love of weather, all of us speaking the same language and eager to hunt the elusive storm.
I was happy sitting beside Archer, his warm thigh pressed to mine. He was at ease too, comfortable with these no-bullshit guys who pursued a risk with both dedication and hard work.
But when Henry asked if we wanted to join their caravan, I looked at Archer and shook my head.
“We’re going solo on this one,” I told Henry.
Archer smiled and winked at me. A lovely sense of togetherness passed between us, as if he and I had been a team from the beginning. When we hadn’t let the flip of a coin decide our fate.
I reached into my pocket for my phone. “Henry, take my cell number and we can keep in touch.”
We exchanged numbers before Archer and I headed out again. Yes, I was happy sitting with a noisy crowd of storm chasers, but I was even happier being alone with Archer. There was no one on earth I’d rather have been with right then, on the road chasing thunder and lightning.
I checked the radar again, studied the sky, and mapped out a route. Archer followed my directions. The rain had let up over the past couple of hours, but as we approached the convergence of activity, it started again. It was late afternoon now, and the descending sun was hidden behind a wall of dark clouds.
Adrenaline simmered inside me. If today were a bust, we’d have to start all over again tomorrow. And while that meant more time with Archer, I needed to be back in Mirror Lake by Tuesday. The longer it took, the less chance we’d see a tornado.
We diverged onto the backcountry roads again. A crack of lightning bolted through the sky, followed by the rumble of thunder. Archer peered through the windshield at the gray expanse of the horizon.
The sky darkened over the landscape. Clouds boiled up. The wind whipped over the stalks of wheat and crashed against the side of the van. I stared at the clouds.
“It’s a supercell,” I murmured, excitement flaring in my chest. “Look, there’s rotation at the cloud base.”
I adjusted my camera settings and snapped some pictures of the cloud formation. My heart pounded hard. I felt it, like a flame licking at my skin, the sense that something big was churning through the sky, past the clouds, a convergence of air and energy.
Then I saw it. The funnel cloud. It was nothing more than a slight downward extension of the cloud at first, and then it became more prominent. A cold, dry gust of wind rushed past us—the forward-flanking downdraft.
The funnel grew, visibly rotating, reaching toward the ground. Dirt, grass, and leaves stirred and began swirling northward ahead of the tornado. The vortex expanded.
I lifted my camera, exhilaration and fear firing through me.
“Archer!”
He slammed on the brakes, jerking the van to a halt. “What the—”
I couldn’t speak. I could hardly breathe. I slid the window down. The roar of the tornado was like a massive, grinding machine.
Archer grabbed my camcorder and trained it on the funnel cloud. I tried to steady my shaking hands as I pressed the shutter button and snapped a series of pictures.
“It’s an extreme right-mover!” I shouted over the noise. “Moving south of due east!”
He dumped the camcorder in my lap and took hold of the wheel. My body lurched against the seatbelt. Archer spun the van in a three-point turn and floored it. We shot after the tornado like a horse breaking free at the starting line. The tornado raced across the field, throwing around a mass of debris.
Archer drove right down the middle of the road, so fast the van hydroplaned. My heart felt like it was going to claw out of my chest.
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
“Film it!” he yelled back.
The order snapped into my brain. I forced myself to train the camcorder on the tornado and hit the video record button.
Wind slammed against the van, skidding us half off the road. Archer righted the wheel and kept going. The tornado moved toward us, roaring like a colossal beast.
“Archer, it’s coming in our direction!”
He gripped the wheel harder, his knuckles burning white. “Hold on.”
Oh, Jesus. He wasn’t going to stop. He was going to try and outrun it. Terror ripped through me. The tornado launched toward us, a massive, swirling, destructive force. Somehow, I managed to keep my camera focused and kept filming. Branches and leaves rained down, hitting the windshield. I put the side window halfway up, but kept the camcorder trained on the vortex.
I braced my feet on the floor, my blood alive with fear. The column of rotating wind drew closer. We’d be airborne in less than five seconds, sucked into the tornado and dropped God only knew where. Chewed up and spit out.
“Archer, stop! We need to get into the ditch!”
He didn’t stop. The van jerked and skidded against the force of the wind. Archer pushed the gas pedal, forcing the van to go faster. Faster. The van started to shake. The tires skidded. No way could we go faster than a tornado. I stared as the vortex approached, bearing down on us.
“Archer…”
“Holy fucking shit,” he muttered.
“Go!” I screamed. “Go!”
He leaned over the steering wheel, his jaw set. The windshield was a mass of swirling wind and debris. The van plowed forward.
We were no longer chasing a tornado but being chased by one. Not predator but prey. I gripped the door handle. Fear burned through me.
A crash of wind hit the side of the van again, pushing us into the shoulder. I heard Archer’s shout over the noise of the storm. He swerved, jerking the van back onto the road.
The tornado spun to the north just as our van flew past it. Archer kept driving at full speed, racing through the chaos. My pulse hammered so hard and fast I almost didn’t notice the decrease in noise.
I twisted in my seat and stared out the back window as the tornado moved over the road and rampaged through the field. I watched it go, shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
Archer hit the brakes and brought the van to a stop. A crash of thunder echoed across the sky. I leapt out of the van and stood watching the tornado until it disappeared from sight. A wide swath of crushed wheat and uprooted trees lay in its wake as far as the eye could see. Evidence of a fierce, violent force of nature no one could control.
Archer rounded the front of the van. His forehead was damp with sweat and rain, his body taut with the same frenzied tension that filled mine.
“Kelsey, are you—”
I spun to face him, my breathing harsh. Energy and heat crackled between us. With a sudden shriek of pure glee, I flung myself at him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders and my legs around his waist.
He grabbed me, pressing our bodies together, laughter shaking his chest. Fireworks burst into my blood, and then I was laughing too, the wind still whipping around us.
“You’re crazy!” I yelled, thumping my fists against his back. “Totally fucking crazy.”
“Damn right.” Still laughing, he swung me around in a circle. “Crazy about a storm girl.”
I tightened my hold on him, dizzy with relief and elation, wanting to relive that insanity all over again.
When Archer stopped, he grasped the back of my neck. His eyes blazed the instant before he brought my lips to his. It was a hard, hot kiss filled with the rush of danger and exhilaration.
A tornado spun through both of us, crashing and spinning. I drove my hands into Archer’s thick hair and opened my mouth over his, deepening the kiss until it felt like I was drowning in him. When I lifted my head, I ran my palm over the side of his face as he slid me down the length of his body. His heart beat against mine, powerful enough to feel through our clothes.
For a minute, I could only stare at him. A flash of lightning illuminated his face. His jaw was locked, his breathing still rapid. He’d loved the thrilling power of the chase as much as I had. The tight way he held me, the rigid power of his stance, and the bright, intense gleam in his eyes told me in no uncertain terms he could push me to my limits and protect me the entire time. That he would.
Thunder cracked and resounded inside me. The reverberations echoed in my blood, breaking open a long-buried seed filled with my deepest desires. They flew upward—free, unfettered, limitless. Because of him.
Because of us.