Chapter 2
Two
brOOKS
By the time I step out onto the yard, my boots look like they’ve lost a fight with a mud monster. I head for the equipment bay, the team still buzzing.
The moments after a chase are some of my favorites.
Sure, nothing beats the thrill of the chase, but when the danger drops and everyone’s coming down off the high?
There’s something soothing about it. Everyone’s laughing a little too loud and replaying their favorite moments where they looked death right in the face.
Hershel’s already arguing with one of the camera guys about how his beard looks on camera.
In a few minutes, he’ll be quoting Ozzy and telling them Gen Z’s music sucks.
Luci is wringing the rainwater from the end of her ponytail.
She's grinning like a Cheshire Cat, so clearly ready to go again that I can’t help but miss being that young.
I watch them, feeling further away from them than I ever have.
Instead, tonight, I keep hearing Sam’s voice over the comms.
Storm is cycling earlier than we expected.
If you didn’t know her like I do, you’d think she was reading a recipe from a blog. But I heard it. The memory just under the words.
Even if Hershel didn't get it, I trusted her before she finished explaining. Asking for a reason was just an excuse to hear her voice.
Just for a second.
Because, for a brief flash, I could have sworn she was right there beside me in the truck.
I could see her in the passenger seat, boot braced up against the dash, her eyes focused on the monster before her like it was the most beautifully terrifying thing she’d ever seen, and she didn’t want to miss a minute of it.
For a second, I’d almost turned to Luci and said, “What do you see out there, Sammy Girl?”
I pull the equipment bay door back so hard that it rattles on the track.
“You break it, you buy it,” Hershel calls out from behind me.
“I already own it.”
“Doesn’t stop you from having to buy another one if you break it, does it?”
I perform laughter as if the camera’s still trained on me. A memory of Sam after a chase hits me so hard that I’d swear I time traveled. She’s leaning against the truck, looking out at the sky. The wind is up, that promise that the monster was just over the horizon, ready to fight.
“We gonna get Mr. Hyde today?” she’d asked.
“If anyone can call him down, it’s you, Sammy Girl.”
I’m not ready for the memory that follows.
Rain hammering on the truck roof as Hershel drives like a bat out of hell.
Sam in my lap, face pale, breathing shallow from pain and shock.
Blood on my shirt, my hands. Me begging her to stay with me.
Her skin looking alien under the emergency room lights.
A doctor saying in that too-gentle voice, “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle, but… ”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Just one night. That’s all I ask.
“Brooks?”
Tony’s voice causes me to resurface so fast that I nearly tumble backward.
I turn. He’s standing in the doorway with a coil of cable over his shoulder.
Tony always looks like he’s just wandered in and still somehow manages to look like he belongs.
He’s the kind of guy people trust because he looks completely harmless, but carries himself with just enough competence to make you feel safe.
“Need something?”
He shifts the cable higher. “Just returning this. Sam said she thought this cable was going bad. Figured I’d change it out before the next chase so she didn’t have to worry about it.”
I stop just short of tightening my fingers into a fist.
Sam said.
There’s absolutely nothing to what Tony just said. But that doesn’t stop the spike of fear that travels up my chest.
Good ol’ Tony. Always taking care of our Sam.
“She catches everything, man. Nothing gets past her.”
“Right,” I say, because anything else would make me sound like a crazy person.
I look past him toward the yard. Sam’s standing near the command trailer with her arms folded tight over her middle. She’s talking to one of the crew, her hair coming out of the top knot she secured hastily this morning.
She doesn’t look like a woman hiding something.
She looks like my wife, the woman I fell in love with when she heard me talking to Hershel about a storm system that was supposed to hit her town the next evening.
She’d been 22 and obsessed with the movie Twister.
She’d told me I looked nothing like Bill Paxton, but she’d try not to hold that against me.
“You should tell her to get some sleep,” Tony says, pulling me back.
“Sorry?”
“She’s not sleeping enough, I don’t think. Said something about it.”
Now she’s talking to him about how she’s sleeping?
I try to pull off that charming smile that some reporter asked me about once. Something tells me I look more like the Joker.
“What else you two talk about?”
Tony shrugs. “Just stuff.”
Before I can stick my foot further into my mouth, Luci appears behind Tony.
“Everything good back here? Thought maybe you got lost.”
Tony looks between us. “Yeah. Just putting this away.”
He drops it with the other cables and disappears, leaving Luci looking at me.
“What?” I ask.
“You’ve got that look,” she says, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her rain jacket.
“That look?”
“The one that says you’re burning calories from thinking.”
I glance toward Tony’s back retreating across the yard. “I’m good.”
“Sure you are.”
I hate that I want someone to tell me how stupid I’m being. More than anything, I hate that I’m not brave enough to talk to Sam about all the things that are keeping me awake at night.
Luci looks between Tony and me. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you had a grudge against poor Tony.”
“Why would you say that?” 36 years old is too old to be playing these stupid games, but here we are.
“Tony’s just friendly,” Luci says, and I can’t stop that tight feeling from crawling up my chest. Because if she has to tell me that Tony’s just friendly, it means she’s noticing the same thing I am. “Sam’s stuck at command now, and Tony’s a radar nerd. It makes sense they'd hit it off.”
Hit it off.
Out in the yard, Sam laughs. I look up and see Tony at her shoulder, looking at something on the tablet in her hand. It’s not the laugh I know. Not the one that comes loud and uncensored when it’s just her and me. I hate to admit that I haven’t heard that laugh in a long time.
“I don’t like him hanging around her,” I say before I can stop myself.
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble, Brooks,” Luci says, walking closer to me. She places her hand on my bicep, looking up at me. “Trust her. If you come at her accusing her of something you don’t have proof of, it’s just going to hurt her.”
I look up and see Sam looking through the bay door. Our eyes meet, and for a second, there’s an expression I don’t recognize, but then it’s gone. She turns away.
Hurt her. That’s the last damn thing I want to do. I’ve done enough hurting her for a lifetime.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Luci says beside me. I look down at her. “She’s just…I get the feeling she sometimes feels set aside. Coming at her with an accusation about the one person who’s back at command with her probably would just make her feel more isolated.”
Damn it.
I nod. “You’re right. This is my problem. Not hers.”
Sam’s quiet on the drive home.
Over the past two years, there’s been more drives like this than there haven’t. Her quiet. Me wishing she’d either get angry or cry or anything.
Maybe not cry. But definitely get angry.
Angry Sam is a beautiful sight. Before the accident, Sam would get fighting mad at me, the world, the storms, anything.
When Sam gets angry, her whole body goes into fight mode.
She juts her chin, her eyes flashing with fire that makes you want to throttle her and kiss her all at once.
And God forbid she uses your middle name.
Quiet Sam is the one that breaks my heart. And I’m so used to Sam being quiet at this point that I have no idea how to get back to what we were.
Her head is turned toward the passenger window, her reflection giving the illusion of looking back at me. If I were a poetic man, and the old Sam would swear I was, I’d say her reflection was her past self looking back, asking me what the hell I was doing.
“You hungry?” I ask, because it’s better than nothing.
“No.”
“Did you eat today?”
“Yes, Brooks, I ate.” She punctuates the sentence with a sigh.
“Just making sure.”
I should reach for her hand, pull it to my lips like I always have. Tell her that whatever’s happening between us, we’ll work it out.
If you come at her accusing her of something you don’t have proof of, it’s just going to hurt her.
My hand tightens around the steering wheel.
When we get home, the house is dark except for the light over the kitchen sink. In another lifetime, I’d pull her into the kitchen, turn on the radio, and dance to some old country song.
Instead, I stop in the mudroom and kick off my boots. Sam takes off her raincoat, hanging it next to mine, the sleeves touching more than we’ve touched all day.
Another memory surfaces. Me pulling her back against my chest, burying my face in the crook of her neck.
“You’re dirty,” she’d say, not making any effort to pull away from me.
“Thought that was how you liked me, ma’am.”
“Brooks.”
Sam’s voice filters in with the memory and, for a moment, I’m not sure if it’s actually her or the memory of her.
When I turn to face her, she’s looking at me with an expression that I don’t recognize, which scares the hell out of me, because I’d have sworn that I knew every expression in this woman’s library.
“Yeah?”
She steps closer. Her hand comes up slowly, as if she’s afraid I might disappear on her. Her palm settles over my heart, and just like that, I’m that 27-year-old man looking down at the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, wondering how the hell I was going to convince her to let me keep her.
“I miss you,” she says.
That should be enough. That should be enough to say everything that’s on my mind.
Luci’s voice comes back. Just going to hurt her.
I've broken her heart enough already. I can't do it again.
“I’m right here,” I say.
“Are you?”
I smile, but it feels forced, and I know her well enough to know she feels it.
I lean down and kiss her forehead. Her body tenses. Whatever she was expecting, it hadn’t been a chaste kiss on the forehead.
What the hell is wrong with you, Carlisle?
She’s not sleeping enough. It’s not Luci’s voice this time. It’s Tony’s.
I pull back. It’s better this way.
No chance of her smiling up at me with a pregnancy test in her hand, thinking she has the world by the tail.
No chance of her losing another baby.
No chance of coming so close to losing her altogether.
“Right,” she says. And even when I don’t try, the hurt is there.
“Sammy.”
“You’re tired.”
“I am.”
As if that explains anything.
“I’m going to shower,” I say, saving her the awkwardness of being the one who walks away.
By the time I leave the shower, Sam is sitting on the edge of our bed wearing one of my old Storm Posse shirts. Her hair is loose around her shoulders as she stares down at the phone in her hand.
I round the bed, looking at the phone over her shoulder. I can tell myself I’m not nosing around all I like, but no one would believe that lie. Not even me.
A notification comes in.
Tony Danvers.
My body goes still.
I see the text beneath the name.
Tony:
You okay? You were a little quiet tonight.
It’s a normal question. But I can't stop asking myself:
Why is this man texting my wife at midnight asking if she’s alright?
I could just ask her. Could say something.
Sam sweeps the notification away, setting the phone down on her nightstand.
If nothing’s going on, it’ll hurt her.
He’s just being nice. She’s just telling him how she slept. He’s getting her coffee just the way she likes it. He’s texting her at midnight asking if she’s okay.
It could all be nothing.
But that little voice inside my head keeps asking: What if it’s not?