Chapter 6 #2
“This season’s been kind of a bust,” he mutters.
“We pick the wrong supercell to chase, or nothing develops at all. Or the equipment glitches and we lose the recording. Bad luck after bad luck. Conditions today are near perfect for development though, and up here, I should have a good enough view no matter where this storm decides to drop something.”
He sets the iPad on a table, balanced on a fold-out stand, and it’s open to some sort of radar app—except, as he swipes through pages, toggles layers on and off, I realize it’s about a thousand times more sophisticated than the one I occasionally check on my phone.
Content with whatever it is he’s setting up, he takes the tripod, now situated with the camera, and positions it to face the direction of the darkening sky.
For as ominous as the color is, it looks placid. It’s hard to imagine the clouds splitting into chaos. What about this storm is so promising for him? My eyes flick sideways. “Remind me. How do tornados form again?”
He clicks his tongue and the tick of a smile is the only small interruption to his downcast focus on the radar. “You grew up in Kansas, Winnie. Shouldn’t you know that?”
“I know it’s something like . . . warm air . . . cold air . . .” I clap my hands together for the final piece of the puzzle. There go those dimples again, and the lines around his eyes crinkle with his chuckle. “But why this storm?”
“You’re not entirely wrong,” he starts, flicking through settings on the camera.
“Warm, moist air hits up against cool, dry air. High pressure, low pressure. Then they create what we call a supercell, which is really just a type of storm with horizontal rotation. The updraft creates a vertically rotating mesocyclone, and under the right conditions, that gives us funnel clouds, which then give us tornados, if they can drop all the way to the ground. All the data points to this storm having everything it needs to produce.”
I only understand thirty percent of the words he said, but if I ask for more clarification I know I’ll end up with a full on meteorology lesson like the time I made an off-hand comment about how pretty lightning was while we watched a storm outside, cuddled up in bed.
It sparked an intense explanation of how the phenomena forms nitrogen oxides and something about plasma and how lightning strikes heat the atmosphere to fifty-thousand degrees Fahrenheit—fives times hotter than the surface of the sun—and him arguing that if I liked lighting I inherently liked chemistry too.
So I stick to a simple, “So, not all supercells form tornados?”
“Only about twenty—thirty percent, maybe.”
“Why does one produce a tornado and another doesn’t?”
“Tornadogenesis still isn’t fully understood,” he mutters as he toys with the settings on the camera again.
He’s so focused he doesn’t notice when my tone drops into sarcasm. “Wow. So there’s no real scientific explanation for it yet?”
“Not yet. But we’re working on it. In fact, that sort of thing is exactly why storm chasing’s so important. We collect data in the field of tons of storms—ones that produce and ones that don’t—and then we can take our observations and compare that with—” He pauses when I snicker.
“So you’re just going off of faith that they exist?”
He tilts his head and looks at me, rebuking what I’m getting at, big hands engulfing the black camera body. “This is different.”
“Is it?” I cross my arms, smug.
“Yes. Tornados are an observable phenomena—”
“Right. Like how I can hear things through my Spirit Box.”
“No. I have real data and variables I can control. Ghost hunters are out here smelling busted natural gas lines and calling it demon farts.”
I ignore the offensive fart accusation. “But you can’t scientifically prove exactly why they form.”
“We can prove enough of it.”
“But you admit there are still some things that aren’t understood about it!”
He throws his hands up, but no level of exasperation with me could cover the flicker of amusement dilating his pupils. He’s always loved a challenge. “Sure. I guess so.”
“Trusting something you can’t see isn’t the worst thing in the world.”
“I trusted you,” he says quietly, hosting his backpack up, “and you were about as hard to pin down as one of these tornados.”
“I don’t recall you ever struggling to pin me down.” The words tumble out faster than my better instincts can put a cap on them. It’s always been like this between us—I don’t know how else to be around Charlie, if not vaguely risqué.
He huffs a laugh, his eyes fluttering closed and decidedly ignoring my quip. “All right, that’s it for me, if you want to—”
“Is this the part where you rip your shirt off and run in front of the camera?” God dammit, I can’t help myself.
My carefully-curated filter’s always fallen apart under his gentle attention.
And getting a rise out of him—an exasperated chuckle, an eye squint, the holy grail of pinking ears—is as ingrained in me as breathing.
But my tease only conjures a cheeky smirk. “Oh, so you saw that one, huh?”
“Kind of hard to avoid it when it went viral.” I dramatize a scowl. “Imagine my surprise when I was simply looking for updates on regional weather and I see your face on the thumbnail of a video with over a million views.”
“My face. Right.”
My cheeks heat. “It’s not like I went seeking it out or anything.”
“Kinda sounds like you did.” Curiosity plays in his eyes. “Have you been keeping tabs on me, Winnie?”
I swallow. “Just curious what sort of things you’re taking your shirt off for these days.”
He snorts and shakes his head as he walks back toward the exit. “Quit flirting, Win.”
“But I’m so good at it,” I deadpan, at odds with the fluttering behind my sternum. So much for getting a rise out of him; I’m the one flustered.
“Believe me, I know.”
I clear my throat. “You ready to talk to some ghosts?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
I rub the back of my neck, suddenly clammy with sweat, as I plod behind Charlie, heading back down the stairs. This prison is a time warp—that’s the only viable explanation.
Why else would it be so easy to step into the shoes of the woman I was before I left him?