7. Chris
Chapter 7
Chris
Now
July 10 th
T he inflow winds are cranking, so Annie slips my well-worn OU hoodie over her undershirt. With the gray sweatpants, she looks ready to curl up with a glass of wine to watch a movie. The wind keeps pulling strands from her ponytail. They whip around her face as she photographs the storm barrelling towards us.
She should be married by now. Her dress is carefully folded in the garment bag with my suit. She should be with him, not here with me. It probably doesn’t mean anything, but I want it to mean everything.
Annie’s not giving me any clues. She’s entirely focused on her photography as if this were any other chase.
She pushes her hair back in irritation, then pulls the hood over it, cinching it tight. She turns to look at me, a smaller circle of her face surrounded by faded crimson. I catch the smile spreading across her lips before she returns to her camera.
I should be watching the storm more, especially with Annie focused on the view through her lens. I lost situational awareness on our last chase and nearly lost everything. So I watch the skies, and whenever my gaze drops on her, I force it back up. I’m so successful at it—eventually—I don’t notice her standing before me until her hand brushes my arm.
“Are you okay?” she asks, concern etched on her face. Her dark brown eyes are soft and bottomless. This close, I notice the shimmer on her eyelids and the liner drawn with a shaky hand. I want to kiss those lids on my way to her full, naked lips. But she doesn’t need the complication of a lovesick friend.
“I should be asking if you’re okay.” I push off the SUV to put some space between us before I do something we’ll regret.
Annie huffs and returns to her camera, a little act of running away now that I’ve turned the conversation to her.
I sigh and remind myself to give her space.
The storm we’re watching falls apart a few minutes later. We abandon our position, racing ahead to catch up to another storm. We miss a thin little snake of a tornado, Annie informs me as she checks up on another live-streaming chaser.
“Maybe it will cycle,” I suggest.
The storm doesn’t. It goes outflow dominant fifteen minutes after we catch it. We drop south, hoping to catch another cell, but it gets away from us when we come across a detour.
It figures that today, of all days, we’d get a bust. Frustration is thick between us, even though we don’t give voice to it. We don’t need to. It’s in the way Annie takes a deep breath and lets it out in a disappointed little sigh as she kicks at pebbles on the side of the road and frowns at her shoes. The way she chews on the hoodie string as she stares at the radar app on her phone.
“We could try for the cell down by Moline,” she says, climbing into the SUV where I’m waiting.
I’d thought about that, too. We could spend all evening chasing these cells around. The odds of getting in the right place on the right one at the right time aren’t looking good. I start up the engine. “We’ll never get there in time.”
Annie presses the plastic tip of my hoodie string to her lower lip. “We could still—”
“Let’s call it.”
“It’s not too late,” she insists.
“I’m tired and hungry,” I say, a gentle reminder that I’ve been driving all day. “Let’s grab some dinner and make a plan for tomorrow.”
She slumps in her seat but nods.
I pull onto the road and stop at an intersection a few minutes later.
We could turn right, back to the man she jilted. Marc will understand. He doesn’t push back or challenge her. But even his patience won’t last forever, and every mile we put behind us will make it harder for her if she changes her mind.
We could turn left. I don’t know where that takes us. I don’t think Annie does either.
She shifts uncomfortably in her seat.
One more time, I tell myself. Then I’ll drop it. “Do you want me to take you home?”
“No.”
I turn left and glance at the GPS, thinking about where to stay the night. Topeka, probably, but my head is a jumbled mess. I’m about to ask Annie for her thoughts when she turns toward me, dropping the hoodie string she’s been nibbling.
Her brows knit together. “You don’t want to be here, do you?”
When I don’t immediately say anything—because Christ, what am I supposed to say?—she rubs her eyes and slumps in her seat. “God, I dragged you away from your plans, didn’t I?”
My plans. Right. Nothing specific, but something like watching the woman I love marry the man she loves, then trying to outrun the pain by chasing as many storms as possible. I want to tell her she can’t ruin anything for me because, without her, there’s nothing. I can’t say that, though.
“I’m where I belong right now,” I say instead, loosening my grip on the steering wheel when I notice I’m strangling it. Annie can interpret that as on the road chasing storms if she wants. But I belong with her, even if she doesn’t belong with me.
Annie gives me a smile that’s more than a little sheepish. “I just…realized I might have kidnapped you.”
I turn back to the road, but her smile has me smiling despite the topic. “Consider me your getaway driver.”
Her smile widens. “Thanks. For everything.”
I’d do anything for her, but I don’t tell her that. I nod instead.
Annie falls asleep, leaving me with nothing but the noise of the road, night setting quick on the horizon, lightning flashing in the distance from the storms that have already passed. For the first time in a while, my head is blessedly empty, and I can simply exist in this fucked up situation. Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll deal with it then.
Annie wakes up as we enter Topeka. Our first stop is a burger joint. We place our orders and go over the forecast for tomorrow. It doesn’t take us long to come up with a tentative plan.
All the times today when I thought about how familiar chasing with Annie felt but how different the situation was, it wasn’t just the situation. She’s different, too. Only I’m not sure how.
“What?” Annie asks with a confused smile, and I realize I’ve been staring at her.
I shake it off. “Nothing.”
“Sounds like something.”
My shrug is intended to get under her skin, and the sugar packet she throws at me proves it’s effective.
“You—”
I don’t want to talk about how I’m staring at her. “Why didn’t you reply to my texts or answer my calls?”
She taps another sugar packet on the table, and for a second, I think she’ll refuse to talk about this, too. “I didn’t know what to say to you,” she says.
I have several suggestions of things she could have said instead of ghosting me, but it won’t change what happened. “Will you accept my apology?”
She stuffs the sugar packet back where it belongs and folds her hands on the table, staring directly at me with her soul-sucking dark brown eyes. “Would you accept mine?”
It was my fault. Everything. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“If that’s true, then neither did you.”
“I drove us into a tornado. I nearly killed us both.”
Annie gives me a look that tells me she sees through my bullshit. “We both know that’s not what we’re talking about.”
It’s not. This is about what happened after. “I shouldn’t have—”
“You’re right,” she says with a sad little smile. “ We shouldn’t have, but we did. Do you regret it?”
I should, but I don’t. That desperate, rain-soaked, blood-smeared kiss meant the world to me. I can’t remember how it felt when the vehicle rolled, but Annie climbing onto my lap, her fingers in my hair, and her skin warm under my hands is something I relive every night when I close my eyes. “No. I don’t regret it.”
“I don’t either,” she says, reaching across the table. I meet her halfway and hold on like I did in the SUV that day. “What could have happened…” her voice drops away, and she shakes her head abruptly, “…I was scared I’d lost you. We shouldn’t have, but… I don’t think it was a mistake. Do you still think it was?”
Fuck. I don’t want to spill my soul to her on the day she left her fiancé. Telling her it meant nothing over a text was one thing, but I can’t look her in the eyes and lie. I draw my thumb along her knuckles and shake my head.
I don’t know if the waiter bringing our order to our table now is a curse or a godsend, but I reluctantly let go of her hand. Annie smiles at me, and for the first time today, she looks happy.