Applied Electromagnetism

by Susannah Nix

  It was just enough time to drag her bag into her room, wash up a little, and reform her frizzy hair into a fresh bun.

  The rain had ramped up into a proper downpour by then, so she grabbed her umbrella on the way out the door. Adam didn’t have one, so they huddled under hers together as they splashed across the parking lot.

  The diner reminded Olivia of what IHOPs were like when she was little, before the corporate facelift: sticky and a little grungy, but homey in an old-fashioned, Formica-covered sort of way. The menu was of the unpretentious, stick-to-your ribs variety that was becoming harder to find in Los Angeles. Sure, she could practically feel her cholesterol rising just sitting in the vinyl booth, but it was reassuring to know there were still restaurants in America that didn’t serve quinoa or kale.

  They both ordered coffee to fuel them through the second half of their late night at the plant. She was feeling more hopeful now that they’d actually gotten started. The situation wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d feared—in fact, it felt pretty manageable. They had two full days before their deadline, and barring any unforeseen catastrophes, they might actually be able to make it.

  Olivia ordered chicken-fried steak from a middle-aged waitress who called her “honey,” and Adam followed through on his earlier pledge by getting the same thing.

  There was a TV on the wall behind Olivia, and he frowned as he stared past her. “That looks pretty bad.”

  She swung around to look at the screen. It was tuned to a local Austin station which had interrupted programming for a weather report. The radar image showed all of central Texas blotted with stripes of red, yellow, and green.

  “That must be the storm that kept us from landing in Houston,” she said. “Looks like it’s headed our way.”

  “More like right on top of us,” Adam said, gazing out the window. The downpour had turned into a full-scale deluge, and the parking lot was filling up with water.

  “We might have to wait it out,” she said. “At least until this band passes.”

  The waitress brought their food, and they dug in with the enthusiasm of people who’d been eating out of a vending machine all day. The chicken-fried steak was as big as a hubcap, and Olivia only made it a third of the way through before throwing in the towel.

  She watched Adam thoughtfully as he piled a mound of mashed potatoes on his fork. He was three-quarters of the way through his chicken-fried steak and still going strong. How did he eat like that and still have a flat stomach? He must spend every second of his free time in the gym.

  “Where did you grow up?” It occurred to her that she knew next to nothing about him, aside from last night’s revelation about his ex-girlfriend—and even that had been light on the details.

  He’d mentioned having to change jobs, but he hadn’t said where he’d worked before. For all Olivia knew he’d fled from another city entirely. Not that she could blame him. The whole situation sounded like an absolute nightmare. It was no wonder he’d wound up so prickly and closed off—and so obsessed with truthfulness.

  “Riverside.” He gulped down the last of his coffee and poured another cup from the carafe. By Olivia’s count it was his eighth cup of the day. On top of all the Cokes he’d gotten from the vending machine, his blood had to be at least fifty percent caffeine at this point. “What about you? You said you’re from around here somewhere?”

  “Houston.”

  “So you’re a city mouse, not a country mouse.”

  Her lips pursed in irritation. “I’m not signing off on your mouse metaphor.”

  “I’ve noticed you seem sensitive about your size.”

  “Remember yesterday, when you told me I should point out when you’re being rude?”

  He blinked at her over a forkful of steak. “I’m being rude again?”

  “If you suspect I’m sensitive about something, maybe just don’t bring it up.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “What brought you to Los Angeles?”

  “College. I transferred to Cal State LA after my freshman year at UT.”

  “Why’d you transfer?”

  She leaned back in the booth, cradling her coffee mug in both hands. There were a lot of reasons—culture, weather, generalized boredom—but one had motivated her above all others. “Mostly, I wanted to be farther away from my family.”

  “What’s wrong with your family?” he asked. “Or are you sensitive about that too?”

  “No, I brought it up, so it’s fair game.” She shrugged and glanced out the window. The rain was still coming down in buckets. “Nothing’s wrong with them. I just wanted to forge my own path, preferably in another state.”

  “What path did they want for you?”

  “Not much of one, to be honest. I was always in the shadow of my siblings. My older brother was this star football player until he blew out his knee a few years ago. And my little sister was an annoyingly perfect straight-A student who ended up at Harvard Law. I couldn’t compete with either of them.”

  “You didn’t get straight A’s?” Adam asked, cocking an eyebrow as he forked the last bite of chicken-fried steak into his mouth.

  Olivia snorted. “I had a solid A-minus average. In any other family I’d have been considered a great student, but not with Emily around.”

  He pushed his empty plate away. “Do you resent her? Or them?”

  “Not excessively so.” Mostly, she tried not to think about them at all. “Do you get along with your sister?” She assumed so, since she’d invited him to dinner.

  “Sisters,” he corrected with an emphasis on the s. “I have three of them—all older.”

  “Wow.” So he’d grown up in a house full of women. That helped explain some things—like his incongruously chivalrous tendencies and considerate streak.

  “We get along okay,” he said with a one-shouldered shrug. “My family’s pretty close. Too close, sometimes.”

  “But you didn’t tell them what happened with your ex.”

  He stiffened, his eyes skating away. “No.”

  “And I can see you’d rather not talk about it, so I’ll drop it.”

  He threw her a grateful look. “Should we get dessert?” he asked, turning to catch the waitress’s attention.

  “Might as well.” Olivia’s eyes went to the window again. Outside, the parking lot looked like a lake, and the rain was still pouring down. “Doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

  They ordered hot fudge brownie sundaes and took their time eating them. The storm still hadn’t abated when the waitress came to clear their empty dishes away a half hour later. “Hope you folks weren’t planning on going anywhere tonight.”

  “We’ve actually gotta get back to work,” Adam told her as he dug his wallet out of his back pocket.

  “Where you work at?” she asked.

  “The Walhalla plant down the highway.”

  The waitress clucked sympathetically. “Not tonight you don’t. Remember that river you drove over on your way here? It’s out of its banks. Highway’s completely flooded out west of here.”

  “But we have to get back,” Olivia said as panic rose in her throat.

  The waitress nodded at the window. “You see any cars out there getting through?”

  They turned to look. The highway that had featured a steady stream of traffic an hour ago was now dead quiet. Not a single pair of headlights shone through the rain.

  They were stranded.

  Chapter Eleven

  “How long before the road’s drivable again?” Adam asked the waitress. His fingers drummed the Formica tabletop like a court stenographer jacked up on speed—or eight cups of coffee and four cans of Coke.

  The waitress shrugged. “Rain’s gotta stop first. After that, maybe a few hours? Assuming the bridge doesn’t take any damage in the flooding. Last year an RV got swept into it and took out a couple of the pilings.”

  “There’s got to be another way around,” Olivia reasoned. “An alternate route to get to the plant
so the workers can get back and forth.”

  “Oh, sure. You can get to it from Rutersville.”

  “Where’s that?” Adam asked.

  “Another five miles down the highway, on the other side of the river that’s out of its banks.”

  “So we can’t go that way either,” Olivia said.

  “Not right now you can’t. ’Fraid you’re stuck here for the time being. But don’t worry, hon. The water always goes back down eventually.” The waitress swept Adam’s credit card off the table and carried it away with their dirty dishes.

  “Fuck,” Adam said, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Maybe we’re almost through the worst of the storm and it’ll stop raining soon?” Olivia pulled out her phone to check the weather, but the cellular signal was crap and she couldn’t get her weather app to load.

  “Or maybe not.” Adam pointed to the TV behind her.

  It was showing another weather bulletin. The radar was pretty much solid red all around them, with more rain bands headed their way from the southeast. The crawl at the bottom of the screen announced a flash flood warning and a severe thunderstorm warning in effect until six the following morning.

  “What now?” Olivia asked numbly. She shouldn’t be surprised, the way the rest of this trip had gone. They really were cursed.

  Adam shrugged helplessly as he stared at the flooded parking lot. “I guess we wade back to our rooms, get a good night’s sleep, and wait for it to stop raining.”

  Even with Olivia’s umbrella, the dash back to their rooms left them both soaked to the skin. Adam left her at the door of her room, and she went into the bathroom to strip out of her wet clothes and dry off.

  She changed into pajamas and crawled into bed with her laptop, but the hotel Wi-Fi wasn’t working. Not surprising, she supposed, given the strength of the storm. The wind had increased in the last hour, and thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. Her phone still didn’t have a signal either, and when she tried to turn on the TV she found the cable was out too.

  There was nothing to do but try to get some sleep and hope things would be better in the morning.

  Someone was pounding on Olivia’s door.

  She wasn’t sure how long it had been going on, because it was hard to hear over the storm raging outside. The wind had picked up considerably since she’d fallen asleep, and the roar of it was punctuated by a deafening crash of thunder.

  She grabbed her phone off the nightstand to check the time and saw that it was after midnight. When she tried to turn on her lamp, she discovered the power was out.

  The pounding on her door resumed with renewed vigor, joined this time by Adam shouting, “Olivia! Wake up and open the fucking door!”

  She used her phone to light her way to the door and fumbled open the locks.

  Adam stood outside in the rain, barefoot, in nothing but the work pants he’d been wearing earlier. “Were you asleep?” he asked incredulously. “How the hell can you sleep through this shitstorm?” The parking lot lights were out behind him, as were the diner’s lights and the lighted sign for the motel.

  A flash of lightning sliced through the sky, illuminating the rain blowing nearly sideways outside. Olivia stepped back so he could come in out of the elements, which was when she noticed he had his suitcase with him. “What’s going on? Why do you have all your stuff with you?”

  He ran a hand through his hair and droplets of water flew everywhere. Several of them hit Olivia’s arm, leaving pinpricks of cold on her skin. “A tree limb got blown down and punctured the roof. Water started coming through the ceiling of my room.”

  She went to get him a towel. “Shit. Is your laptop okay?” Priorities were priorities. Clothes could be replaced, but they needed both their laptops in working order tomorrow.

  “Yeah, the leak was in the bathroom, so most of my stuff is okay.”

  “That’s a relief.” She handed him a bath towel and pointed her phone’s light at the floor, trying not to watch as he dried off his bare torso. “Not that it’s good your room sprang a leak, but it’s good it wasn’t like over the bed or something.”

  Adam grunted as he ran the towel over his head, leaving his hair sticking up in spikes. Another crash of thunder rattled the window, and Olivia wondered how she had managed to sleep through all this racket. She must have been dead exhausted.

  “Yeah, that’s the good news,” Adam said grimly as he draped the towel around his neck like an athlete in a locker room. “They don’t have any empty rooms because of all the people stranded by the storm.”

  “Oh.” Olivia was suddenly, acutely aware of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra and Adam was shirtless and soaking wet in her motel room—that was now their motel room, if she was correctly interpreting the situation.

  “So I need to share with you.” Adam’s eyes drifted to the king-size bed behind her.

  Olivia swallowed down a wave of nervous panic. “Of course,” she told him, forcing nonchalance into her voice. “Of course you can.” It was an emergency, and in an emergency you had to make do. Even if it meant sharing a bed with a gorgeous coworker you were totally obsessed with who didn’t like you back.

  Poor Adam was the one getting the shit end of this stick. If he’d suspected how she felt about him, he must be feeling mega uncomfortable right about now—even more uncomfortable than she was.

  But what choice did they have? She supposed she could offer to sleep on the floor—or in the car maybe. But she couldn’t imagine him allowing her to do either. If she even suggested it, he’d probably insist on being the one to do it. And she couldn’t let him do that. It would be unfair to let him be so uncomfortable, just because she was having inappropriate feelings about him.

  She could do this. It was a big bed. This would be fine.

  Belatedly, she realized they’d been staring at each other without speaking for a weirdly long time, and her nervousness multiplied, filling her stomach with a small swarm of bees.

  Adam seemed to become aware of the awkwardness at the same moment she did and turned abruptly away, dragging his suitcase into the far corner of the room. Using his phone as a light, he bent to unzip it and rummaged around inside. “I’m gonna go change into dry pants, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. Totally.” She waved him toward the bathroom door. “Make yourself at home. You can just shove my stuff aside if it’s in your way.” As the words left her lips, she suddenly remembered all the wet clothes she’d left hanging in the bathroom to dry. Both her bra and her underwear were hanging from the shower rod, right at eye level.

  Adam disappeared into the bathroom, and Olivia waited for the inevitable wisecrack about her display of intimate apparel, but it never came. He was either too polite to comment on her underthings or too tired.

  She tried not to imagine him on the other side of the bathroom door, confronted by her lingerie as he unfastened his pants and pushed them down his narrow hips, peeling the wet cotton off his legs, leaving him in nothing but his underwear.

  Assuming he even wore underwear.

  Olivia shook her head to chase away that particular thought spiral and shined her phone’s light on the rumpled bed. She leaned over to smooth out the sheets on the far side and fluff Adam’s pillow before getting in and turning off her phone, plunging the room into total darkness. She’d been sleeping smack dab in the middle of the bed before, but now she lay so close to the edge of the mattress that her arm kept trying to slide off and flop toward the floor.

  Adam emerged from the bathroom a moment later, his phone’s light casting a blue glow around the room. He paused for a second before padding over to the nightstand on the empty side of the bed. His phone went dark, and she heard him set it on the nightstand. The bed shook as he lay down beside her and arranged the sheets, trying to get comfortable.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said, as if the storm and the leak and their current situation were somehow his fault. “Pretty sure the las
t thing you wanted was to end up sleeping with me.”

  It took all of Olivia’s willpower not to laugh out loud. “It’s fine,” she said, struggling to keep the strain out of her voice as sleazy thoughts filled her brain.

  “I promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.” There was a hint of humor in his tone, as if the idea of wanting to touch her was hilarious.

  Her libido deflated like a punctured balloon. “Great.”

  “And you do the same.” He was joking, but the warning went straight to the pit of her stomach.

  She attempted to play along. “Right. I’ll try not to feel you up in your sleep.”

  There was a long beat of silence before he said, “Every time I think this week can’t get any worse…”

  She let out a thin laugh. “Just imagine if Gavin were here instead of me.”

  The bed vibrated with Adam’s laughter, and Olivia wished she could see him. She loved the way he looked when he laughed, and it happened so rarely.

  “I wonder what Karen in human resources would say about this,” he said.

  “I think she’d probably have a stroke.” Olivia felt like she was having a stroke. She was pretty sure she could smell burnt toast. Or maybe it was just ozone from the lightning outside.

  “I don’t think there’s anything in the HR manual for situations like this.”

  “No, probably not. Although maybe there should be. We should raise it with Karen when we get back to the office.”

  Lightning flashed outside, momentarily casting a glow across the ceiling, and Olivia braced herself for the inevitable crash of thunder to follow. When it came a second later, it was as loud as an explosion, and she felt Adam flinch beside her.

  “I really don’t like storms,” he said in a tight voice.

  “I used to love them when I was a kid. Of course, when you’re a kid they’re not as much of an inconvenience as they are when you’re an adult and you actually have responsibilities and stuff.” Like needing to get back to work.

  Every hour that it continued to rain, it became less likely the roads would be clear by morning. With the power out they couldn’t even log in remotely, and who knew how long it would take to restore service. There were probably a lot of downed trees and downed wires, which would take time to fix, and the utility crews wouldn’t even be able to start until the flooding receded enough to let the trucks through.