Chapter Text
When he catches her in the terminal, he’s slightly out of breath. Her eyes widen, then soften, a smile at the corner of her mouth.
“For the record,” Tyler huffs. “I’m chasing it.”
Her smile widens, but she shakes her head.
“Not yet,” she says, and his confusion must show, because she cups the side of his face and smiles softly. Her thumb scratches against the stubble on his cheek. “I need… I need some time.”
He watches her eyes, asking but not asking, and he nods once, twice. He wants to go with her, he wants to tell her she can have as much time as she needs, he wants, he wants—
“I’ll be here,” he says instead.
In the next two months, he tries so hard not to think about her. It’s peak season, so he’s busy keeping the team in line and out of trouble (and mostly out of danger). Kate texts him occasionally, one off things that he doesn’t know how to respond to.
SPC is calling an area in NW OK today. Should be good. Be careful.
A screenshot of the doppler hook of a nasty cell in Georgia, no comment, just an exclamation point.
A photo of the Manhattan skyline darkened by storm clouds.
A comment on the YouTube channel, side-eye emojis on a video of him explaining the importance of moisture in mesocyclone development. He tries not to think about what it means.
He’s climbing out of the truck at a gas station near Chickasha, his Tornado Wrangler smile dazzling and ready, when he sees her behind the crowd, leaning against a beat-up pickup. He stops mid sentence and without thinking he excuses himself from the crowd, ignoring the confused voices, ignoring Boone. He pushes his way through, smiling but eyes only for her. She’s wearing high waisted jeans and a cutoff T-shirt, the skin of her shoulders dusted with freckles. Her hair is longer, maybe a little darker, blown in the wind so that she has to tuck it behind her ear.
“Hey there, City Girl. How’d you find me?” he asks, once he’s close enough. He can feel the excitement thrumming through him, and the urge to reach out and touch her to make sure she’s real is overwhelming.
“Pretty easily,” she replies, holding up her phone, the screen open to their YouTube channel. They had just that morning recorded and posted the day’s plan, including the meet and greet in Chickasha. He grins at her, and Kate grins back, then cocks her head and squints into the sun to look up at him. “You never called. Or texted.”
“I’m not in the habit of chasin’ things I can’t catch,” he says, and he feels like it’s only a half truth, because had he been given the chance back at the airport he sure as hell would have chased and chased and chased.
She says nothing for a moment, seems to be considering something, then, “I put in for a transfer. Storm prediction center in Norman.”
His eyebrows rise. “That so.”
“Mmhmm,” she hums, her eyes searching his face. “Can I buy you dinner?”
Christ, he thinks. She may be the end of him. He grins widely and tips his hat. “Yes ma’am.”
When he and the wranglers wrap up their day out west and are headed back toward Oklahoma City, Boone finally cracks.
“So. City girl.”
“No,” Tyler responds right away.
“She back, or just here for more chasin’, or—?”
“I swear, Boonie, shut it.”
He keeps quiet for all of thirty seconds. “I’m just saying, she’s got that freaky weather sight. Would be ace to have her on the team.”
“She’s starting a job at SPC in Norman.”
“Oooohoooo, so she is back!”
“God dammit Boonie.” But Tyler is smiling, and so is Boone, but he jabs him in the shoulder all the same for good measure.
She picks him up at their motel, much to the delight of the entire wrangler crew. Tyler is pretty sure it takes everything in them not to catcall as he clambers into Kate’s pickup. She takes him to a BBQ spot she knows, out in the middle of nowhere with colorful Christmas lights strung up around the outside. She insists on paying for the food, but lets him get beer for them both, and her hair glistens with the red and blue lights from outside the window as they sit in a booth and dig into ribs.
“So,” he says, wiping the corner of his mouth with his napkin and taking a swig of beer. “Whatcha been up to.” He tries for a casual tone but he’s not sure it succeeds with the way she smiles at him.
“Went to physical therapy,” Kate says. “Went to therapy therapy.”
Tyler remembers the haunted look in her eyes after the first tornado Javi drove her to, thinking it was odd she seemed so shaken by a wimpy F1. He remembers her panicked breathing that took too long to subside after the rodeo twister, the way she clutched his shirt desperately, her eyes incredulous to find him still there. He knows she was down playing how much it was affecting her to be back, and he doesn’t blame her for it, for feeling like every twister was out to get the people she cared the most about. For feeling like if she lost one more person, she might fully lose herself.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asks gently.
“Not yet,” she replies, and he’s temporarily floored by the realization that the unsaid part of her sentence was but someday, yes.
“Your ma must be happy to have you back.”
“Hah, yeah, too happy maybe. She actually fully cleared out my old room. Was heartbroken to hear that I got a place in Norman instead.”
“SPC huh. Bet they’re pretty excited to have the O.G. tornado wrangler.”
Kate smiles, runs her finger around the rim of her glass. “I’m glad to be back here, helping folks prepare better. Part of my job will be working with communications. If you and I can be caught by surprise at a rodeo—” she just raises her hands to finish the sentence. “Anyway. Seemed like a good opportunity. And they said I could do school at the same time.”
He feels his grin widen, unable to contain it. “Hey, that’s great! Finish that Ph.D. and we can call you Dr. Dandelion.”
“Absolutely not,” she says, pointing a finger at him and laughing. “But I think, I think I’m ready. For school, I mean. Again. And being here, being back.”
Tyler doesn’t say anything as he leans back against the booth, throwing one arm across the seat back. He studies Kate across from him, can see that the wall she kept herself behind the first time he met her has mostly been disassembled. She holds herself more loosely. Still quiet and reserved, still clever and observant, but unguarded in a way he hadn’t seen in her often. Once, maybe, he caught a glimpse as they watched a twister form in a field before they tried to tame it. Or when she weakly twirled her fingers, bleeding from her head and concussed, after saving hundreds of lives, including his own. Now she’s looking directly at him, dark brown eyes hard to read, freckles sprinkled on her cheeks.
“You’ve been out in the sun,” he says out of nowhere, and could slap himself for how stupid it sounds. But to his delight, she blushes.
“Helping with the cows, mostly.”
He frowns. “How long have you been back?”
“A week.”
Tyler tries so hard not to take that personally, and he knows he must fail, because her face scrunches into a look of shame. “Don’t hate me, I needed to sleep for days after moving, and I wasn’t sure — well I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see me, so I…chickened out.”
“Kate,” he says, his voice serious. She cuts him off.
“I thought, I dunno, you didn’t reply to my texts, I thought maybe… I would understand, you know, I left for two months, I—”
“I told ya I’d be here.” He can’t say what he means—I was waiting for you to come back to me, Kate—because he’s pretty sure that it’s both lame and a little creepy.
Her face is serious, eyes scanning across him, and he doesn’t miss the way they glance to his open collar, his mouth when he licks his lips. “And here you are.”
“Here I am,” he agrees, spreading both arms. He folds them in and leans on the table towards her. “So you need help painting your new place or anything? Some landscaping?”
“Landscaping?”
“Yeah y’know, shrubs and things.”
“What,” she starts, then laughs. “What do you know about landscaping?”
“I used to help my aunt with her garden!” he protests. “Seriously, got a green thumb.”
“Ok,” Kate concedes, still laughing. “Ok, but no, it’s a shitty apartment, just has a small porch. And I can’t paint, I’m renting. But I do have an idea.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Something I’ve been wanting to do since the first time I came back.”
He stares at her for a second, then laughs. “This feels like it’s gonna be a big reveal of a crazy idea, but I literally saw you drive into an F5 tornado, so.”
“For the record, that is not something I make a habit of.”
“You sure?”
She glares at him, drains her beer, and puts the glass back on the table with some force. “No, listen. Let’s go dancin’”
Jesus, he thinks, I might be in love.
Kate has the radio low in the pickup as they drive ten miles further outside of town to a run down bar with the parking lot full. The neon sign rising over the bar has the name of tonight’s band—no one he recognizes—and when the door swings open he can hear the twang of the music from where they’ve parked.
“You ready?” Kate asks, unbuckling her seat belt, then flipping the visor down to pull her hair up into a ponytail. He wants to press his lips to her neck, just there under her ear. “Tyler?” she asks again, her eyes sliding sideways to find his. He flips her an easy smile.
“Sweetheart, I was doing this since I could walk. I’m ready,” he replies. She sees her blush, maybe at him using a pet name, and he files that away for later.
In the bar the music has pulled couples onto the cleared open space in the middle, folks doing a mix of old school two step and newer moves from the younger crowd.
“You want a drink first?” he asks, and he has to lean close to her ear to say it so she can hear over the din, his lips not quite accidentally brushing her ear lobe. Kate bites her lip, looking up at him, and shakes her head, grabbing his hand instead and pulling him into the dancing crowd. He pulls her close as the song slows and they sway, not doing any formal steps, just learning the movement of each other. The bar is loud, between the music and people’s chatter, but Tyler feels like they're in their own quiet bubble, Kate’s thumb grazing the hair at his neck. He’s worried she can hear how loudly his heart is beating.
“So what have you been up to, in these last two months,” she asks.
“Well I saw this incredible woman that I was really gettin’ to like drive herself on a suicide mission into a tornado from hell,” he replies conversationally. “That fucked me up pretty good.”
She winces. “Tyler, I—”
“I know why you did it,” he interrupts. “I get it. What I don’t get,” he pauses to twirl her out and then back in, bringing her closer against his chest, “is why you thought you had to do it alone.”
Kate’s eyes shift away. “My therapist says it was a bit of survivor's guilt mixed with really bad decision making. I once placed three people in harm’s way, and none of them survived, and there was no way I could do that again.”
“You could have died,” he says, and he hopes she doesn’t notice how his voice catches just slightly. The fear of that day has mostly subsided, but every once in a while comes back, often in nightmares where he watches his red truck get thrown into the air, where he finds her broken body in the field.
“You could have died, Tyler. I couldn’t live with myself if that happened.”
“How do you think I felt, watching you disappear into that cloud?”
“I’m sorry,” Kate whispers. “I really am. I know what I did was insane and stupid and I don’t think I’d do it again—”
“Liar,” Tyler says, his lips quirking in a small smile despite himself. He tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “Just don’t leave me behind next time, alright? Can we be in this together?”
Kate’s expression changes to a little mischievous. “I think I might need some practice.”
Tyler blinks at her, mouth open, trying to figure out how to reply to that while not losing all credibility as a gentleman. He’s saved from replying by the song changing, ramping up to a faster tune, and the crowd swells as more people join the floor. Kate gets knocked into by someone, sending her stumbling, but Tyler catches her by the elbow. The person apologizes to Kate, but when he sees Tyler his face lights up as he does the tornado finger twirl. Kate and Tyler are swept up into a line dance, and each time he looks over to her she’s laughing, her face bright with sweat and with an excitement and energy he hasn’t seen before. Folks randomly give them both hugs if they recognize them from the El Reno news coverage, or ask Tyler for an autograph, but he’s too busy messing up dance steps on purpose to get Kate to laugh to care that his Tornado Wrangler persona isn’t in place.
It’s an hour later when they finally drag themselves from the dance floor, leaning against the bar. Tyler signals for two glasses of water and Kate downs hers, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She catches his gaze on her lips, her eyes darting to his.
“Kate—”
“Wanna get out of here?” she says instead.
Tyler searches her face, trying to find a glimpse of the reserve, of the not yet from two months ago, but only finds dark eyes trained on his, a confidence in her gaze that momentarily makes him nervous, of all things, but he recovers and gives her a dazzling smile and nods.
Outside the quiet is deafening, his eardrums thick with the noise from inside the bar. Kate hums a tune under her breath, her neck craned up at the sky.
“One last stop?” she asks.
“Where we goin’?” He thinks it doesn’t really matter.
She grabs his hand and drags him to the car. “Tell ya later.”
Later finds them laying in the back of her pickup on an old dusty blanket that was in the cab, staring at the sky. Out here it’s dark dark, with no light pollution to hide the dazzle of the night sky. The wind is soft, and there’s not a cloud around—something Tyler doesn’t usually hope for, but now he finds himself grateful.
“That’s Orion,” he says, pointing at the three dots that make up the belt. “Cassiopeia is over there, the ‘W.’”
“I know the constellations, Tyler,” she says, but her voice has a laugh in it.
“Dunno, thought you might have forgotten what the sky looks like. New York is awfully bright.”
“And loud,” she says. “Used to help me fall asleep, block out my own head. Now it’s just loud.”
“So you’re here for good?” She had implied it, but Tyler needs to know. Needs to hear her say it.
“Yeah,” she says. He turns his head to look at her, but she’s staring at the sky. He can only just make out the curve of her cheek and chin in the darkness. She sighs. “This feels like home.”
“The sky’s a lot bigger here. And the tea is sweeter.”
He’s still looking at her when she turns her head to meet his gaze. He should feel embarrassed he was caught staring, but Tyler finds he doesn’t care.
“No, I meant right here. With you.”
He doesn’t even think when he leans over, places one hand on the side of her face, and kisses her. She makes a soft noise in the back of her throat and he melts into the feel of her. When he pulls back to gauge her face, she’s all dark eyes and swollen lips and Tyler brings his mouth back to hers, uses his tongue to coax her lips open. He moans at the feel of her tongue, pulling himself over her to cage her in with his elbows, his hips pressed against hers, her knees coming up to bracket him. Her hands run along his jaw, into his hair, where she tugs just this side of hard and he thinks he might come right then and there.
“Is this alright?” he whispers, looking down at her, brushing hair away from her face.
“Yeah,” she whispers back, pulling him back down to her and kisses him deeply, her tongue sliding against his. The feel of her beneath him, her hands in his hair, down his arms, has him feeling crazy. He’s already painfully hard against his jeans, and she must feel it because she moves her hips seeking the friction, then gasps when he presses more firmly against her. He spreads his hand across her stomach where her cutoff tee has ridden up, his thumb ghosting along the bottom edge of her bra, and she keens and arches into him.
He wants more than anything to see where this goes, but he slows their kisses, nuzzling at the place between her neck and jaw. “I don’t wanna do this here,” he whispers and feels her smile.
“I had no objections, just want you to know,” she says back. He lifts up and looks down at her, her hair a halo around her head.
“Don’t tempt me sweetheart,” he says, placing a soft kiss to her lips.
“My first day of work is tomorrow.”
He rears back. “Are you serious?” He pushes away from her, sitting up, and she props herself up on her elbows, laughing. He runs a hand down his face, then up through his hair. “We should definitely go. You need to rest!”
“I’m fine,” she protests, still laughing.
He’s already sliding off the bed of the truck, dragging her with him by the ankle. He lifts her off the bed with his hands around her waist and sets her down, then flips the tailgate up and shut.
“Get in, let’s go,” he says, all business, pointing at the driver’s side.
“Tyler, seriously,” she says, hands on her hips. “It’s still early!”
“Kate,” he says equally seriously. “My hand to God, if you don’t get in that truck right now—” he steps closer, his hands cupping her jaw, a thumb tracing across her lip. “The things I want to do to you… there’s not much sleeping involved. So get in the damn truck.”