I grin. “Only you could make tornado-watching sound like a textbook.”
The wind around us eases as the tornado moves farther away. Max barks from inside the SUV, picking up on the shift. The storm keeps pushing east, the massive wall cloud trailing behind it.
“Unbelievable,” Jonah breathes, fixed on the tornado as it moves off. “The vorticity readings are beyond anything we’ve ever recorded so far.”
I watch as the towering funnel begins to narrow, its smooth shape tightening in on itself. The roar fades to a distant rumble, like thunder rolling away after a storm.
“Wait, look,” I point. “It’s losing strength.”
The tornado’s rotation slows visibly, the debris cloud at its base thinning as it releases its earthly treasures back to the ground. The funnel narrows further, its connection to the ground becoming tenuous, then intermittent. Within minutes, the once-mighty column has retracted upward into the clouds like a celestial vacuum cleaner being switched off.
“It’s dissipating,” Jonah says, awe threading through his tone. His gaze stays fixed on the sky where the tornado had been, like he can see its outline lingering in the clouds.
The wind eases to a gentle breeze, the pressure in my ears settling. Above us, the sky begins to break open, patches of blue pushing through as the storm system drifts east. The violence is gone as quickly as it came, leaving only the memory of it behind.
“Did you get what you needed?” I ask, watching him guide Girthmaster down to a landing spot nearby.
The moment the rotors stop, he drops the controller and closes the distance between us in three long strides. Before I canreact, his hands frame my face and he kisses me. I feel the quiet rush of his breath, the energy humming through him.
“We did it,” he says when he pulls back, still close, his expression lit with exhilaration. His thumbs brush lightly along my cheekbones, and something in the way he looks at me makes my pulse skip. “Thank you. For everything.”
I’m about to respond when Lucas loudly clears his throat.
“Should I give you two a moment?” Weather Boy asks, waggling his eyebrows. “Or perhaps an hour?”
“Shut up, Lucas,” Jonah cuts in without looking away from me, that commanding edge back.
“Yep, okay, shutting up now,” Lucas mutters, backing off toward the SUV with unusual speed.
I grin up at Jonah, sliding my good arm around his waist. “So what now, Professor?” I ask, leaning into his side as we head back toward the SUV, where Lucas is very obviously pretending not to watch us.
“I have a couple ideas,” he adds with a wink.
JONAH
I’ve never seennumbers dance before, but the data on my screen has been moving like a perfect waltz for the past three hours. Each column tells a story more compelling than any poem—wind velocity, barometric pressure, temperature gradients—all coming together to map that magnificent stovepipe tornado. This might be the most complete dataset ever collected on a storm of this scale, and somehow I’m the one studying it.
Two weeks ago, I was a professor who’d never been closer to a tornado than my computer screen. Now I survived a direct hit, nearly lost Lila, found her again, and somehow gathered theexact data I spent my career trying to model. The universe has a strange sense of humor.
I glance at the clock in the corner of my laptop: 2:17 AM. Lucas left hours ago, heading back to his station with enough footage to keep his news director busy for weeks. Before he left, he pulled me aside, unusually serious.
“You’ve got something special with her,” he told me, nodding toward Lila, who was checking Girthmaster for damage. “Don’t mess it up by overthinking it.”
Coming from Lucas, advice like that should’ve been easy to dismiss, but something in his expression stopped me. He knows me too well.
I shift in the stiff motel chair, rolling my shoulders to ease the tension from hours hunched over the laptop. My eyes burn, but I can’t stop. Every time fatigue creeps in, I picture that stovepipe formation, and the energy comes rushing back.
Max snores softly from the bed, curled protectively around Lila as she sleeps. She hadn’t meant to pass out—we’d planned to celebrate the chase properly once we got back—but the crash hit her hard. One minute she was describing the storm in detail, and the next she was out, her head tipped against the SUV window.
I didn’t have the heart to wake her when we arrived. Instead, I carried her inside, carefully removed her shoes, and tucked her in. She barely stirred, murmuring something unintelligible before burrowing deeper into the pillows. Max immediately took up his position beside her, throwing me a look that clearly said “I’ve got this covered.”
So here I am, analyzing data while the woman I’m in love with sleeps ten feet away. It feels strangely domestic, this quiet midnight work session with the soft soundtrack of her breathing.
I fire off a final email to Dr. Winters, attaching the preliminary findings. Her response will likely come with the sunrise—she’s notorious for checking her email at 5 AM sharp—but I wanted to get this to her as quickly as possible. The university has invested a lot in this research, and today’s dataset is exactly what we needed to justify their faith in me. If this doesn’t get me the grant, no data will ever be enough to satisfy them.
I’m about to close my laptop when a warm arm slides around my neck from behind, and suddenly my lap is filled with soft curves and sleepy warmth as Lila slides into my space, her body fitting against mine with drowsy precision.
“You’re still working,” she murmurs, her voice husky with sleep. She rests her chin on my shoulder, her wild curls tickling my cheek as she peers at my screen. “It’s the middle of the night, Professor.”
