Don't Get It Twisted, page 17
“Are you even attracted to men? To me? Or is this just some equation you’ve concocted where everything lines up so you can keep lying to yourself about what you really want?”
“You know you’re attractive,” Haley said. “And you know I love you.” All the pieces were there. On paper they were perfect for each other. So why couldn’t she conjure up that spark?
“But you’re not attracted to me and you’re not in love with me. You’re in love with Claire.” Noah sighed. “I can’t replace her for you.”
“You didn’t seem to mind earlier.” She glanced down at his crotch.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Haley,” he swore. Indecision flickered across his face, replaced immediately with his steely glare. “Of course I’m going to get hard when a beautiful woman kisses me out of nowhere. I’m just a man.”
“So be ‘just a man’ for another hour or two,” she pleaded. She needed his validation, needed to know that someone wanted her. “You are with every other woman you meet.”
“That’s different, I don’t care about them. But you matter and I’m not doing this with you, not like this.” He thrust the six pack at her. “Here. It’s all yours.”
“Noah,” she cried, the tears breaking free to stream down her face as she took the beer from him. She could feel the chasm between them widening by the second, a chasm she had dug herself and desperately needed to find a way across. “Please. Forget I suggested anything. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he said, his face a dark cloud of emotions he rarely showed. “I think we need to end all of this for a while.”
“What do you mean?” Haley asked, terrified of what the response would be.
“No more partnership, no more chasing together until you figure your shit out.”
“No,” she insisted, desperation setting in. None of this was what she’d envisioned. “Don’t do this, Noah. I can’t do it alone.”
“I’ll have the lawyer will draw up a contract to formalize the buyout. You’ll probably want your own representation.” His voice was robotic and he refused to meet her eyes.
“Noah, I can’t afford that.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“I have to. It’s time. We always swore it was friendship and business first and you just muddied all those waters.” He shook his head in disappointment as he walked away, his bootsteps echoing on the pavement. “I’ll catch you around, Haley.”
So that was it, then. Haley had played all of her cards and was walking away with nothing. How could she have been so stupid? She could see his silhouette moving around behind the gauzy curtains of room twenty-three but she couldn’t tell what he was doing. He appeared in the window for a second and she looked away. When she looked back, he had pulled the thicker set of curtains closed, blocking her view inside.
I’m sorry, she texted him. Can we talk?
There was no response, even though the message status changed to ‘read.’ She waited a few moments to see if he would change his mind and come back out, because she needed to talk to him, needed to make things go back to the way they were.
The bottles in the six-pack clinked softly against each other as she set the cardboard caddy down in front of his door. What had she been thinking? Her phone vibrated and her heart leapt with hope, but it was just another storm chaser texting to congratulate her on reaching a million. But there was nothing to celebrate.
She got in her car and cranked the engine. She noticed the edge of the curtains move in room twenty-three as she wiped her eyes, but Noah didn’t come out. So she drove away, stopping briefly to drop the key to her unused room at the front desk before continuing on to the highway. There was nothing left for her in Tulsa, not anymore, and the loneliness was crushing. When the highway veered apart, she headed north, to Iowa.
***
Noah finally texted three days later while Haley was sitting on the porch with her grandpa drinking fresh lemonade with macerated strawberries from her grandma’s garden. She was trying to explain the latest radar technology to him when the message flashed at the top of the screen, and she felt the blood drain from her face.
“Well, all that’s neat, but I don’t need a gadget to tell me if a storm’s comin’. I just look off yonder and the sky tells me all I need to know.” Grandpa smiled impishly, making him look much younger than the deep lines on his face did. It seemed like he’d aged since Christmas, the last time Haley had made it up to see them.
“Hold on, Grandpa, it’s a work thing,” she said, standing up from the rocking chair on shaking knees.
She wandered out of eyesight around the corner of the broad, wraparound porch that overlooked rolling fields of corn and, further in the distance, cattle. It had been good to be home, gorging herself on homemade chicken and dumplings and sweet cornbread baked in a generations-old cast iron skillet and getting back in the seat of the tractor to help spread manure over freshly plowed fields.
But she couldn’t ignore her life forever, and Noah’s text had brought it all crashing back. She braced herself for what was coming and opened her messages.
H- I’m sorry for how everything went down and I regret some of the things I said. The lawyer finished up the paperwork, it’s on your desk. Swing by whenever to get it. You can let him know directly if you think anything is unfair. N.
I’m at the farm, she responded.
What’s the address? I’ll mail it there.
Don’t bother. I’ll be back in Tulsa soon.
She set her phone down numbly because she’d run out of tears two days earlier. There was a small part of her hoping he would change his mind once he had a chance to calm down and really think it through, but that glimmer of hope was gone and the illusion of normalcy was shattered. She needed to go back and pick up the few remaining pieces of her life, and then she needed to find a way forward.
But a week later she was still in Iowa, putting the final touches on a video when a new Storm Prediction Center outlook came through. The potential for tornadic activity was decreasing in the plains as spring turned into summer and she was antsy to be on the road again chasing after the storms. She hadn’t been live since the disastrous million follower stream, and she wanted to get back in front of her audience so things could start feeling normal again.
She fought back the impulse to text Noah about the atmospheric conditions brewing in South Dakota. He had texted twice more about the paperwork, and Haley noticed he had removed his access to her channel, and her’s to his. His rejection no longer stung like it had almost two weeks before, but the pain still reared up when she had to think about chasing without anyone else around to count on.
But that was a risk she had to take. A million people were counting on her and she couldn’t pass on a storm because of a little risk. She had chased hundreds of times before, even without Noah nearby, and everything had been fine. She packed her duffel bag quickly, shoving clothes in without bothering to fold them, and was heading out to her car when her grandmother stopped her.
“You’re not leaving without saying goodbye, are you?”
“Of course not,” Haley reassured her. “Just getting the car packed.”
“You don’t have to go, you know,” she said, fixing Haley with a long stare. “You always have a place here.”
Haley had avoided telling them anything about her personal predicaments, preferring not to worry them. But her grandmother was a perceptive woman, and Haley was sure she knew something was wrong, even if she didn’t know what.
“I do,” Haley said, smiling to let her know everything would be okay. “It’s my job. But it was good to be here.”
“At least stay for dinner? I’m making tater tot casserole. You used to love that.”
“I wish I could,” Haley said, meaning it as she bent to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. “But it’s a long drive to South Dakota.”
“Be safe, then. Call us when you can.”
“I will,” Haley promised, then went to let her grandfather know she was going.
They waved her off from the porch, waiting until she reached the end of their long gravel drive to head back inside the house. Haley cranked the radio as soon as she turned on the highway, singing along at the top of her lungs to drown out all the thoughts racing through her head.
***
“Hmm, that’s weird,” Haley said to her chat, zooming in on the radar as she plotted her next move. “This cell looks promising, but then it just… disappears. There must be a radar hole out here.”
She was out in the vast expanse of the Great Plains, somewhere near the border of South Dakota and Nebraska. Wind rippled yellowing waves of prairie grass speckled with bright wildflowers as clouds gathered and rolled across the sky. The area was virtually unpopulated, and if not for the thirty thousand people watching her, Haley would have felt like the only person in the world. Everything was set up for a perfect chase, if only she had a radar view of the storm.
She knew chasing a storm into a radar gap—an area too far from any weather stations to guarantee accurate coverage of storms close to the ground—was dangerous. There was no way to see if or where rotation was developing except her eyes and her intuition. There was no way to know how fast or which way it would move. It was a risk the old Haley never would have taken, but she was Haley reborn, carefree and unrestrained by the caution of accountability. She could thank both Claire and Noah for that.
“Let’s go get a tornado,” she said, laughing as she put her car in gear.
The two lane highway twisted as it descended into a broad river valley with not another car in sight. Haley had been keeping an eye out for Noah’s distinctive truck all day, with its obnoxious lights and promotional stickers, but she hadn’t spotted it. There were a million back roads that led to nowhere out in the sticks, and he could have been on any of them. If he was even out at all.
The blare of the weather alert still made her jump even after hearing it so many times before, and she glanced at the new warning.
“Flash fooding up in this area,” she relayed the information casually to her viewers. They were all waiting for the big show, anyway. “I doubt many of you are up here, but if you are, remember not to drive through flooded roads and keep your weather radio nearby.”
Nerves began to gnaw at her stomach as her grip on the wheel tightened and she scanned the skies ahead for any signs of lowering. Driving into a supercell without reliable radar data felt like the sudden loss of a sense she’d had her whole life, and she felt adrenaline flood her body as the sky darkened further.
The temperature displayed on her dash dropped rapidly as she drove into the advancing cold front and the full scale of the supercell came into view. It towered above the Plains, distinct and otherworldly as it crawled toward her. Thick bands of billowing inflow fed the imposing wall cloud, swirling into the ominous gray. Behind the storm, curtains of rain fell with the rear flank downdraft. She glanced down to see if chat was enjoying the view.
Wow
Is that a tornado?
Can you look up the weather in Shreveport? I’m driving there later.
That storm is MASSIVE
Of course Haley has the best view
I just got here, did I miss the tornado?
The hair on Haley’s arms stood up as she drove towards the storm.
“No tornadoes yet, but this could go any minute now,” she said, awestruck by its structure and size. “Center screen, that’s the beginning of a funnel forming.”
Viewers poured into her stream as the protruding bulge sank slowly to the ground, spinning slowly in place as it intensified and began kicking up a skirt of dust.
“Tornado down!” Haley yelled, her excitement getting the better of her. “This is definitely a tornado down and there likely won’t be a warning on this one, they can’t see it on radar. It’s weak, but it’s definitely down. It’s gaining strength now,” she narrated the scene thousands of viewers were watching from the comfort of their homes. “Can you all hear it?”
She rolled her window down and stuck her microphone into the wind, trying to capture the eerie roar as the scraggly funnel thickened into a fat stovepipe of rotating debris. She watched in wonder as it passed over a tree and left nothing but a jagged stump behind.
“This is a monster,” Haley said. “Picking up big debris. I can’t quite tell what that was, looked like maybe a grain silo?”
Even though the rain had yet to truly arrive, the water in the drainage ditches on both sides of her was rising, fed by the deluge from higher ground. Nowhere near threatening to spill over onto the roadway, but still something to keep an eye on. There was only one road out of the valley, and she was on it.
Forty thousand viewers.
“If you’re just tuning in, we have a large tornado on the ground near… Well, nothing really. This is an unwarned tornado on the ground next to state route 73 south of Martin, South Dakota. If that sounds familiar to you, take cover now.”
The forward flank downdraft arrived, and with it, the rain splattering heavily on her windshield. She flicked on the wipers, trying to keep visibility on the tornado, but it didn’t take long for the downpour to obscure any view at all.
“This thing is rain-wrapped now, but I’m certain it’s still down.” She could hear the roar of the beast, and it was lurking nearby. “I need to move.”
She turned her car around and drove with the rain, hoping it was away from the tornado. She reached the crest of a small hill, then slammed on the brakes. Muddy water rushed across the road below her, overflowing the ditches and flooding the grassy field.
“There’s that flash flooding they warned us about,” Haley said, keeping her tone light as she fought to maintain composure. She had just driven there a few minutes earlier. How had it gotten so deep, so fast? “This isn’t good.”
There was no doubt in her mind that if she tried to cross it, the flood would stall her engine and sweep her car away. The current was too strong. She had no other option but to turn around again, but when she did, she was face to face with the shrouded monster. It seemed frozen in place, but she knew that was an illusion. She was trapped in a game of chicken she couldn’t win. The tornado was on a direct path to hit her and Haley was out of places to run.
“Fuck,” she cursed quietly, her hand hovering over the shift knob as she weighed her options. Off-road, but she would never clear the drainage ditches to have a chance at outrunning it in the field. Or she could take her chances with the flash flood instead. “Goddamn it.”
She waited for a moment, holding her breath and hoping the funnel would turn and take another path, but after a few seconds it became clear that those hopes were in vain.
“Guys, I…” She trailed off. There was nothing to say. If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to make fifty thousand people unwilling witnesses to it. One trembling hand reached out to end her stream.
And then everything went quiet except her own heartbeat pounding a frantic rhythm in her ears. She felt like she was outside of herself, watching as unfamiliar hands rose from her lap to grip the steering wheel. A tree limb smashed into her windshield, showering her with glass, and she was six years old again, screaming all of her anger and fear and uncertainty into the oncoming storm.
Her car rocked to the side and then she heard the roar, a primal answer to her screams that came from everywhere at once and threatened to deafen and suffocate her. She didn’t want to die, but she knew death wouldn’t care what she wanted. It had come for her, and the hunter had become defenseless prey. Moments she had long forgotten flickered through her mind— winning a goldfish at the county fair, 4-H competitions, chess club and her first kiss. Meeting Ash in Intro to Sociology and finally discovering Haley was capable of falling in love.
And Claire.
Her easy smile and inquisitive eyes.
The way she laughed and lit Haley on fire with her kisses.
Metal shrieked as Haley was pushed across the road then lifted completely off the ground. Haley would never regret knowing Claire, even with how it ended. The car slammed back to earth a few seconds later, rolling across the field to settle in a twisted hunk of metal and mud. She only wished she could have had a different chance with Claire, a real one without their work getting in the way.
Haley screamed again as the pain hit, a white-hot and all-encompassing flash that faded as numbness and clarity set in. There was no one for miles to hear her. She reached frantically around beside her, but it seemed her phone and camera had been thrown from the car in the fray. She pushed frantically on her caved in door. It didn’t budge.
She wished the tornado had just ended it quickly, but that would have been too easy. Instead, she was doomed to die of starvation or the exposure, alone because of her own hubris. It almost seemed fitting in a way. She closed her eyes and leaned back into the headrest to wait.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Noah angled his truck towards the distant mesocyclone, letting his audience take in the view from the bluff as he zoomed in as far as he could.
“There’s a tornado in there,” he said. The funnel was hard to see, but it crawled across a valley a half dozen miles away. “No idea why this isn’t warned.”
Haley has it on stream
Wow cool
Haley’s right next to it
Great view, Noah
Who is Haley?
Check Haley’s stream
Haley is Noah’s girlfriend
No, she wasn’t, but he couldn’t bring himself to correct the chatters, otherwise even more rumors would fly and he would come out looking like the bad guy. He wished they would just stop talking about her at all. She had ruined everything, and he didn’t care what she had on her stream, though he wasn’t surprised she had gotten the better angle. She always did. He just needed to focus on his own chase.
He still couldn’t believe she had kissed him. Well, he could—she’d always loved to tease their audiences about their relationship status. And he wouldn’t have minded if she’d left it at that, for the cameras only. But when the streams stopped, she had continued. And as painful as it had been, he knew he had to be the responsible one, for her sake.
