Chapter 17
Seventeen
SAM
By noon, I know Brooks is gone.
I learn it because one of the recovery volunteers asks whether the Storm Posse lead truck is coming back to haul another load of tarps, and Hershel looks toward the parking lot where the truck is missing.
“Where is he?” I ask.
Hershel’s mouth tightens beneath his beard. Today’s shirt is Black Sabbath, faded nearly gray, which feels appropriate. “Left early.”
“Left where?”
“Didn’t say.”
I stare at him.
He has the decency to look uncomfortable. “He left abruptly, Sam. That’s all I know.”
For two years, I knew where Brooks was every hour of the day. In the truck. In the warehouse. At some sponsor thing. In bed beside me, even when the distance between our bodies felt wider than any highway. Even when I left, I knew vaguely where he was.
Now he's somewhere beyond my knowing.
And I hate how much that bothers me.
“He didn’t tell you when he’d be back?”
“No.”
“Right.”
I turn before Hershel can offer one of his rock-and-roll sermons. I'm not sure I can withstand a comparison between my marriage and an Iron Maiden song right now.
Outside The Funnel Cloud, Muncie keeps trying to put itself back together. Pickup beds fill with splintered boards. A church group stacks bottled water beneath a canopy. Someone has spray-painted HOT MEALS on a sheet of plywood and propped it near the road.
Life goes on in the rudest possible way.
Brooks told me the choice was mine now.
If I want a life separate from his, he’ll let me have it. If I want to stay here, build something here, be someone without his name attached to mine, he’ll support that too.
It sounded decent when he said it.
And yet, it felt awful.
For so long, he held on too tight. He took my seat. My field. My say. He made love feel like a locked door with him standing on the other side, telling me it was for my own good.
Now he has finally opened his hand.
And all I can do is stare at the space he left.
By late afternoon, storm chasers start drifting in as the day stretches toward evening. They come in sunburned and wired, carrying laptops and road grime. Half of them are helping with cleanup. The other half are pretending they aren’t already thinking about the next system.
That’s storm season for you. One town is still sweeping glass out of the gutters while the sky starts warming up for the next performance.
A guy at the end of the bar has a radar loop pulled up on his tablet. Two others huddle over a paper map spread across a table sticky with spilled beer.
“Dryline’s sharpening,” someone says.
“Cap breaks tomorrow, maybe earlier if we get enough surface heating.”
“Models are messy.”
“They’re always messy. What else is new?"
I wipe down the same section of counter three times and try not to listen.
I fail immediately.
The system is still west, still more promise than threat, but I feel it anyway.
That little lift under my skin. The part of me that wakes before the radar does.
Storm season electricity, humming in the walls, in the backs of people’s voices, in the way every chaser in the room keeps glancing toward the televisions.
Once, Brooks and I would have been shoulder to shoulder by now.
He would have leaned over my shoulder, and said, “Tell me what you see, Sammy Girl.”
And I would have told him. Better yet, he would have actually listened.
My chest pinches hard enough that I set the rag down.
“You okay?” Petra asks from beside the register.
“No.”
"Well, at least you're not pretending."
I open my mouth to say something, then clamp it shut.
The door opens behind me, bringing in heat, dust, and the low murmur of new voices.
Then the room changes.
No one stops talking all at once. There’s no dramatic hush, no record scratch, no big movie moment.
But I feel him before I turn.
My body does the recognizing before my brain catches up. The old, stupid instinct. Brooks is in the room.
I look over my shoulder.
He stands just inside the door, one hand still on it, as if he forgot the next step after entering a building. His hair is windblown. His shirt is wrinkled from travel. His jaw is rough with stubble, and exhaustion sits beneath his eyes.
His gaze finds mine immediately.
For a few seconds, I don’t breathe right.
The bar keeps moving around us. Someone laughs. Ice drops into a glass. A chair scrapes against the floor.
Brooks looks at me like none of it exists. And maybe, for both of us, it doesn't.
Then he breaks eye contact.
The loss of it is so sharp I feel ridiculous for reacting at all.
He walks away.
For one ugly second, I think that’s it. He came back. He saw me. He remembered his promise to let me choose, and now he’s going to leave me alone so thoroughly I’ll have no choice but to respect him for it.
Then he stops at the jukebox.
My stomach drops.
“Brooks,” I whisper, but there’s no way he hears me.
He feeds in a quarter.
The first notes of Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever, Amen” fill The Funnel Cloud.
I go still.
Petra’s head snaps toward me. Hershel looks up from his table. Someone near the pool cues says, “Well, that’s a choice.”
It's more than a choice.
It's our wedding reception in a rented hall with bad lighting and Brooks’s tie already loosened.
It's his hand warm at the small of my back.
It's him singing softly against my ear, slightly off-key and completely unashamed.
It's me laughing into his chest because I thought I’d gotten everything I ever wanted.
I shove away from the bar.
My boots stick slightly to the floor as I cross the room. Brooks turns before I reach him, like he’s been counting my steps.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
His eyes move over my face. “Playing a song.”
"You plannin' on dancing with one of the linemen?"
A corner of his mouth lifts, then falls.
That’s when I see his wrist.
Brown leather. Small silver clasp. Worn near the edge where his thumb used to rub it while he studied radar or talked business or pretended not to be nervous before interviews.
The bracelet I gave him when we were broke and stupid in love.
Something to keep me with you, I'd told him when I gave it to him.
For two years, his bare wrist told me things he never said aloud. That he’d put away the life we had before the accident. That he couldn’t stand carrying a piece of me anymore. That maybe, when he looked at it, he remembered the baby we lost and wished he’d never let me in that truck.
Now it sits against his skin like it never left.
My throat closes.
Brooks follows my gaze but doesn’t explain. He doesn’t launch into a speech. Doesn’t try to make the bracelet proof of anything.
He only holds out his hand.
“Dance with me.”
I look around the bar. Storm chasers, linemen, recovery volunteers, locals, half the remaining crew. No dance floor. No space cleared. Just tables, scuffed boards, and every nosy person in the Texas Panhandle suddenly developing excellent peripheral vision.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Probably.”
"People will stare."
"When have you ever worried about that?"
“There isn’t a dance floor.”
"There's a floor," he says, nodding toward the floor beneath us. "If we dance on it, it's a dance floor."
“We’re going to look like idiots.”
"I'll look like an idiot. You'll look like the woman dancing with an idiot."
I hate him a little for making my mouth twitch.
His hand remains there between us. Open. Waiting.
I roll my eyes because if I don’t, I might cry in front of everyone in this bar.
“Fine,” I say. “Once.”
He takes my hand carefully and draws me close.
His palm settles at my waist, warm through my shirt. My hand finds his shoulder by memory, the same place it always went, just like it did in that reception hall.
Every part of his body feels familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Old and new.
My cheek nearly rests against his chest before I catch myself.
“Don’t look so proud,” I mutter.
“I’m mostly trying not to pass out.”
“From one dance?”
“From you saying yes.”
We move in the middle of the bar, two idiots slow-dancing where people usually argue about routes and drink too much after flirting with weather that could kill them.
Brooks doesn’t sing this time.
I almost wish he would.
The memory comes anyway. Him at our wedding, mouth near my ear, singing like he didn’t care who heard. Me laughing because I was so happy it embarrassed me. His bracelet brushing my wrist every time he adjusted his hold.
I look down at it again.
“You put it back on.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
His thumb moves once against my hand. “Because it belongs there.”
I have a dozen questions. Why did he take it off in the first place? Why did he put it back on? What the hell are we doing?
“I hate you for this,” I say.
His gaze drops to mine. “If I believed you meant that, it might make this a little easier.”
“That what you want? For me to hate you?”
“No.” His voice goes rough. “It would kill me, but death might be a little easier than knowing I fucked up the most perfect thing I ever had.”
The room narrows around us.
But Brooks is right here, and for the length of a breath, I let myself remember what it felt like before every touch had history waiting under it.
I have not forgiven him.
Luckily for both of us, he hasn't asked me to.
His hand stays at my waist, steady and careful, like he knows he has no right to hold tighter.
The song keeps playing.
Then Hershel’s voice cuts through from behind us.
“Brooks.”
The old urgency in it snaps both our heads around.
Hershel stands near the table with the maps, phone in hand. Two other chasers are leaning over the radar now, all humor gone from their faces.
“System’s organizing faster than expected,” he says. “If we’re moving, we need to move soon.”
The bar shifts in an instant.
Chairs scrape. Someone swears. Laptops turn. The old current runs through the room, bright and dangerous.
Brooks looks down at me.
I look toward the radar, then back at him.
“I guess you’re going to chase that,” I say.
Brooks doesn’t look away.
“Only if you’re with me.”