by Mari Carr
Then he’d opened the door to Doug. And his invitation.
TJ had agreed to the trip because he didn’t want to go back into that kitchen, didn’t want to face what he’d almost done, what he was afraid he might still follow through on.
“You can’t stay gone until December, TJ,” Slim said, pulling him back to the present.
“Actually, I can. I have a job that’s going to keep me away.”
“What job? What about your dad?”
“Slim—” TJ started.
“He spent a few nights in jail a couple weeks ago. Got shitfaced. When you didn’t answer, I called the cops and he took a swing at Sawyer. Didn’t the sheriff call you?”
“No. He didn’t.” But TJ’s gut told him Sawyer had probably called Doug. Unlike him, Doug typically spoke to at least one member of his family every day. Not because he was homesick or a mama’s boy or anything. It was just because there were so freaking many of them and they were all close.
He wasn’t surprised Doug had kept the information to himself, but they’d definitely have a chat about it when his friend got back from the reservoir.
“He’s on a bender, man. Worse than usual. Lost his job at the butcher shop and I’ve banned him from the bar.”
TJ didn’t say he thought Slim should have done that years ago. He suspected the only reason he hadn’t was because he could make some money off Thorn and the second he got unruly, he knew TJ would be there to drag him out.
“Sounds like he won’t be your problem anymore then.”
Slim sighed. “Rumor has it he’s been driving himself over to that biker bar in Clarke.”
TJ rubbed his eyes wearily and pulled himself to a sitting position on the sleeping bag. So much for boneless. The tightness in his shoulders reappeared with a vengeance.
His dad had lost his driver’s license six months earlier, something that probably would have happened sooner if TJ wasn’t always picking him up at Slim’s after work every time he slipped his leash. That night, the battery on his phone had died and he hadn’t realized, hadn’t gotten the call. Like a dumbass, he’d actually hoped it meant his dad had gone straight home from work.
“I’ll give Sawyer a call. Tell him to be on the lookout.” TJ would never forgive himself if his dad hurt someone else on the road while driving drunk. “Maybe he can impound his car or something.”
“Yeah,” Slim didn’t sound convinced. “Maybe. You sure you can’t get back earlier?”
“I’m sure,” TJ lied.
“Okay, well, I’ll stop bothering you then.”
They said their goodbyes, and TJ sat staring at the inside of the tent.
Rosalia had made a comment last night, wondering how they could stand to sleep on the ground night after night. TJ hadn’t mentioned that he was used to sleeping rough. His bedroom at home consisted of a shitty mattress on the floor and a beat-up dresser. At some point in his life, they’d had decent furniture, but TJ had sold off most of it piece by piece over the years to bail his dad out of jail or to pay legal fees for his drunk-in-public and drunk-driving charges.
He tried to tell himself it was time to go home. Time to stop being selfish and get back to reality. His dad hadn’t been able to hold down a job for more than a few weeks in years, which meant the little money his dad had made at the butcher shop was probably long gone.
TJ had signed his last paycheck from the lumberyard and left it on the kitchen table when he headed out with Doug. In the back of his mind, he had figured he would be back in Compton Pass before his dad blew through the few measly hundred bucks.
But that was a month ago. October had arrived, and there was no way his dad had any money left. For booze or food. TJ had sent the first small check from this gig straight to the bank to pay the mortgage, then he’d called Doug’s brother, James, and asked him to check in on his dad. James promised he would, said he’d take over some groceries even, but TJ couldn’t keep asking the Comptons to step in. It was his responsibility. His promise.
So yeah. It was time to go home.
He looked at his phone, considered doing a search for a bus station nearby.
Instead, he clicked back onto YouTube and continued playing Rosalia’s show.
He didn’t want to leave.
In his entire life, TJ had never done a goddamn thing for himself. This trip, this time with Doug and Rosalia, was for him.
If he went back home now, it wouldn’t be long before he was back at that kitchen table again, staring at the bottle.
“Hey.”
He glanced up to see Rosalia peering through the open mesh.
“Thought I heard,” she paused, grinning, “my voice over here.”
He stood up, unzipped the tent and joined her outside. “Doug assigned me homework,” he lied. “Wants me to study the camera angles he’s been using in your videos.”
“Oh. That’s cool.” She blushed lightly, her common reaction to him, and he was hard-pressed not to reach over and run his knuckles along her cheek. He wondered if the pretty pink was warm to the touch. “Should I ask what you think of…me in the show?”
“Seriously? You’re a rock star, Rosalia. Beautiful, intelligent. You make me want to go back to school to study meteorology. If only—”
“Science wasn’t hard,” she added, finishing his joke.
“Exactly.”
“Are you okay? You looked…deep in thought when I first walked over.”
He wondered how long she’d been standing there.
“I’m fine.” He gestured toward the camp chairs. Doug had started a fire at lunchtime, declaring hot dogs were only edible when they were burned black. No one had disagreed with that assessment.
TJ threw another log on the fire, while Rosalia opened the cooler. “Want a soda? Bottle of water? Beer?”
He was seriously tempted by the beer but shoved the feeling away. “Water’s cool. Thanks,” he said as she handed it to him and the two of them sat down. This was the first time he’d ever been completely alone with Rosalia. Doug had remarked a few days ago that he was worried about her, claiming she was quieter than normal. Since TJ had nothing to compare her current behavior to, he didn’t feel the same sense of unease. To him, she seemed sweet and sort of shy and…fuck…just his type.
“You didn’t feel like joining the others at the lake?” she asked.
“No. Doug assures me that all this downtime won’t last, so I thought I’d take advantage of it.”
Rosalia nodded. “I’m sure it must seem very dull right now. Storm chasing always looks so exciting on the TV shows, but in reality…it’s more often us setting off weather balloons in church parking lots—”
“Church lots?”
She laughed. “There are a ton of church lots, especially in the South. And six days of the week, they’re vacant. We try to get ahead of the storms usually.”
“What happens after you send the balloon up?”
“We find a gas station, eat boiled peanuts and wait for it to feed us data.”
“Wow,” he said, purposely adopting a bored tone.
“Right? Actually, the GPS system on the balloons feeds us the data in near real time as it ascends.” She spent a few minutes explaining how the balloons worked and how they could interpret the data it provided. TJ tried to pay attention to her words, but he was too distracted by the way her long dark hair was laying over her shoulders and the way her brown eyes looked almost black in this light. She was beauty incarnate.
TJ took a long chug from the bottle of water and forced himself to concentrate.
“…to capture how the temperature, moisture, and wind are changing.”
He nodded, hoping to hide the fact he’d missed too much of her lesson. “I’ve been watching your videos. In one, the tornado seemed really close.”
“I’d never put myself or the team in danger, if that’s what you’re worried about. We stay well out of the path. I know the video you’re talking about. It was Doug’s fancy camerawork that made i
t look a lot more impressive than it was. That tornado was actually dying out and nearly half a mile away. And while tornadoes can happen at any time, we’re not in peak season right now, so I suspect this trip will consist more of severe storms than twisters.”
Half a mile didn’t seem all that far away to him, but he kept that thought to himself. “I wasn’t worried about the danger to me.”
“Oh, I wasn’t implying…” Rosalia gave him an adorable little shrug that proved she had thought that.
“You have a cool job,” he said. “You’ve really found your calling.”
Rosalia’s blush deepened. “Seems like you have you too.” Like him, she didn’t seem to enjoy being the center of any conversation.
He wouldn’t call driving a forklift around and moving wood all day a cool job, and it sure as fuck wasn’t calling to him as a dream job.
“I mean…if you’re anything like Doug. He’s mad about filming and editing our shows,” she added, and he realized she wasn’t talking about the lumberyard. He thought of how it felt to work with a video camera again after so many years away from his passion. Like Doug, he loved filming, loved trying to capture the essence of a place, the excitement of a moment or the unmasked expression of a person. “There’s nothing like holding a camera.” He started to add again but stopped himself just in time.
“Did you and Doug go to college together?”
Her question took him aback. Apparently, Doug had respected his wishes, hadn’t outted him as a complete novice. “No.”
She waited for him to say more. She always waited. For a month solid, she’d opened the door for him to share, and he’d slammed it right back in her face time after time.
Unfortunately, the phone call from Slim had put him in a bad place, reminded him of how tired he was of TJ Nicholas’s life. He wanted to be someone like Rosalia. Like Doug. They’d taken their dreams and created happy, productive lives for themselves.
TJ had pissed away the years since graduation. Just once, he wanted to be someone who’d done something more than take care of an alcoholic father and drive a forklift. But the truth was, that was all he knew. Staying away didn’t change that, didn’t make him a different person or a better one.
He searched for a way to break the silence. Rosalia toyed with the locket she always wore. TJ pointed to it. “Who gave you the locket?”
She smiled. “My grandmother. It was hers, a gift from my grandfather on their wedding day. She gave it to me the day I got my doctorate.”
“It’s pretty.”
Rosalia looked down at it, and he thought for a second he saw the beginning of tears in her eyes. “Grandma said Granddad would have been very proud of his granddaughter, the doctor. She said that by wearing the locket, I’d always be able to carry a piece of them, of their love, with me.”
TJ wished he had something from his mother that he carried around like that. It had never occurred to him until that minute he didn’t have anything of hers with him. Not that there was much left. And what did remain was at home…with Thorn. He should have packed something. He could use a little of her love right now.
All he had with him was a tattered, faded picture of his mom that he carried in his wallet. “That was sweet of your grandma. Where’s your grandfather now?”
Suddenly, he understood her tears.
“He died. He was killed by a drunk driver when I was six. I know that seems too young to have very many memories, but I remember him so well. And…” Her voice broke. “I remember the night the police knocked on the door to tell us the news. My grandmother was waiting for him to pick her up. She and my mother had spent the day together, baking for the holidays. I’d just snuck out of the kitchen with a fresh-baked sugar cookie. It was tree-shaped with green and red sprinkles. No one knew I was there when they opened the door. The policeman said something I couldn’t hear and my grandma fell to the floor. She just crumpled. My mother bent down with her, wrapped her arms around her, and they fell apart together. It was the first time I’d ever seen either of them cry.”
She shook herself from her painful memory, wiping her eyes. “Sorry,” she said with a rueful grin. “I have no idea why I just told you all that.”
TJ swallowed heavily. A guilt he didn’t want to feel gripped him as he recalled Slim’s words. Thorn had been in jail. He was driving drunk, endangering others. How could he let his father rip apart a family the way Rosalia’s had been?
If he was going home, it had to be now. The longer he stayed, the harder it would be to leave. To walk away from Rosalia, who was stealing more and more of his heart each day. To leave Doug behind.
Stay or go.
Stay or…
“Rosalia,” he started, the answer clear to him.
“Hey, Rosie!” Eric yelled, hustling toward them, Doug and Justin a few feet behind. “Was checking the weather forecasts on my phone and there’s a big-ass storm gathering near the Kansas/Oklahoma border. Has some serious twister potential.”
Rosalia was up and out of her seat. “Let’s break camp and try to beat it.”
The next thirty minutes were a whirlwind of activity as the tents and the pop-up camper were taken down, their equipment, coolers and chairs all thrown into the vehicles. TJ couldn’t believe how quickly they were able to pack and get on the road.
Eric and Justin took the lead position, Eric serving as navigator. Rosalia was behind them in her RV as he and Doug brought up the rear in Doug’s truck.
Doug was grinning ear to ear, clearly in his element. “Here’s where it gets exciting.”
The trip took them nearly four hours, the sky growing darker the closer they got to their destination of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
They traveled down a country lane, the area sparsely populated, mercifully. Eric actually found a Baptist church in the middle of nowhere—Rosalia hadn’t been joking about the abundance of churches—and guided them to the empty lot.
They hopped out of their vehicles, all of them convening in Rosalia’s RV.
“Wind’s pretty high. You still plan to set a balloon off?” Justin asked. “We’d have to be generous with the helium to make sure it goes straight up and not into one of those trees over there.”
Rosalia sat down and clicked a few buttons on her laptop.
Doug looked at TJ and murmured, “She’s checking the radar.”
Rosalia looked up. “I don’t think we’d garner any useful information if we set it off now. Our primary goal is the pre-storm environment, how the moisture, instability, and wind shear are evolving. We’re too late to grab that data. This is a full-blown storm.”
Doug glanced out the window. “It’s a hell of a storm, strong wind, thunder, heavy rain. Any funnel clouds forming, Eric?”
Eric was looking at his own laptop and he shook his head. “Not yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t form. All the conditions are right.”
Doug rubbed his chin. “Been a pretty uneventful fall. I feel like we should take advantage of this. Why don’t we capture some footage right now? If nothing evolves, we can use it for B-roll in future shows.”
Rosalia seemed to like that idea. “Okay. Let’s do it. This is a great storm to use to discuss supercells. I’ve had a couple high school teachers email to request a show about them.”
“We’re taking requests now?” Justin asked. “What are we? The radio?”
Meanwhile, TJ gave her a blank stare that must have amused her, so she tried to explain her plan for the show. “Thunderstorms begin with pockets of rising air called cells. Large and energetic cells rise more quickly, and we call them supercells.”
“Save it for the camera,” Doug said, his case open as he started putting it together.
She laughed. “Let me just grab some rain gear. I’m going to get so wet.”
“That’s what she said,” Doug joked.
Rosalia laughed lightly, but her suddenly pink cheeks betrayed her. She’d obviously played out that fantasy before. TJ wondered who was with her though—him o
r Doug?
Or both of them?
Doug spotted her reaction, too, and his expression sobered. Great. Now all three of them were thinking about sex.
TJ would bet his last dollar neither Doug nor Rosalia were playing it out the way he was.
Justin and Eric, mercifully, had sprung into action the moment Rosalia said they were going outside, so they missed the entire exchange.
“I can set up a live feed,” Justin said. “We’ve been talking about that, and this seems like a great place to give it a try.”
Doug readily agreed, as he and Justin had worked out all the particulars for a live broadcast over the past two weeks and they were chomping at the bit to do one.
Rosalia was less enthusiastic. “No room for mistakes when you go live feed.”
Doug was ready to counter that argument with the compromise they’d come up with. “Let’s do the trial run Justin suggested. We just send the link to his classmates at the university for this first attempt.”
Rosalia shook her head at Justin’s and Doug’s puppy-dog expressions. “I hate when you guys gang up on me with cuteness. Fine. Okay.”
For the next few minutes, they gathered their equipment and put on their rain gear.
TJ nearly lost his footing as he stepped out of the RV, the wind catching him off guard, packing a serious punch.
Doug grabbed his upper arm, steadying him. “I got you.”
“Thanks, man. Wasn’t expecting such strong wind.” TJ swallowed heavily when Doug released him. There was too much shit swimming around in his head right now. Between Slim’s call, his deepening feelings for Rosalia and his overactive sexual fantasies, he was hard-pressed to concentrate on the task at hand. Which was bad, because the storm was raging and it was taking all the strength he had just to keep a firm grip on the camera.
Rosalia was obviously more accustomed to strong wind because, despite her petite size, she was doing a better job combating the gale force pushing against her back.
She wore a large-brimmed hat that kept precious little of the rain out of her eyes. She held a weatherproof microphone as she led him and Doug away from the RV. The church had built a picnic shelter near a playground, so they stepped under the roof briefly to get a bearing on their surroundings. He could see she and Doug both looking for the perfect spot to broadcast from.