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Funny that she would look to a town like Blue City for staying sharp. It was a sleepy little place. Quaint in a way that made Lou think of Mayberry and other black and white television shows centered around the nuclear family and the white picket fence nonsense. She guessed it wasn’t nonsense really, but she was never one to jive with the entire little lady at home business. It was fine if that was what you wanted, but it had never been for her.
Even if it was a role her family desperately prayed she’d turn towards one day. Fat chance with the funding she’d received. With all the resources from Skie Industries she’d gotten access to she was never looking back. The promise of getting unlimited funds, the space to really stretch out and dig into her latest research—storm prediction, primarily tornadoes and other potentially severe weather phenomena—had made her sign on the dotted line without looking at all the terms too closely. Rookie mistake for sure, but it would work out.
Even so, it was worth having an extra set of eyes on her. How bad could it be? She dealt with Grace just fine and they made a decent team. It would be good to have someone else helping Grace out, seeing as they had a larger facility that was theirs. Plus there was the fact that her best friend hadn’t stopped making moon pie eyes at her boyfriend Anton in the eight months the love birds had made it official.
Lou was happy for Grace. She was. It was nice to see her come alive under Anton’s surprisingly soft boy touch. They were sweet together. But there was talk of them moving in with one another and Lou didn’t really see Grace staying with her on the move while Anton had a permanent set up in New York.
It was like they said. All good things must come to an end and all that, right? It made Lou happy that Grace was moving on to something new. A place with Anton, really making a home and settling down. But that wasn’t for Lou.
Never had been. Never would be.
She knew Anton would offer her a place to do research. That he’d help her make the connections necessary for her to keep up her momentum, but settling down in one place?
Blech. No thank you.
She knew Grace didn’t, and wouldn’t, understand her on the matter, so she avoided it as best she could. Lou didn’t want the white picket fence, or the 2.5 children, or the husband at home. She had wanderlust in her blood. And while she knew no one would name Kansas as top places to visit, it suited Lou just fine.
It was new. The landscape different, the people in town she’d seen unfamiliar, and it was enough to keep her mind fresh. Constant change was the key to Lou’s ability to stay on the cutting edge of research. If she stayed put she’d get lazy and slow, she’d let it all go down the drain if she got too comfortable.
Just thinking about that gave her the heebee jeebees. She’d gone through too damn much in the last decade to stop now that she was picking up momentum. Getting respect in the science community wasn’t as easy as one might think, especially when one was a woman prone to…eccentrics.
At least, that’s what Lou liked to think of them. Quirks. Yeah, she was quirky and focused. Not manic like Grace liked to say. There was a fine line, and she could walk it perfectly okay. Even with a handler. She grimaced just thinking about someone dogging her every step.
“They probably heard about the shrink ray,” Grace told her with a wag of her finger, and crossed her arms. “I told you that was going to come back to bite you in the ass.”
“Listen, it’s purely theoretical. Anyone who doesn’t know that is nuttier than me,” Lou said with a shrug. “And I bet this handler is just here to check some boxes and tattle on me if I go off script. No biggie.”
“What is there even to handle if I’m here?” Grace asked.
Lou opened her mouth to say that she didn’t rightly know, because it’s not like she really caused that much trouble in the grand scheme of things, but the sound of the building’s door buzzer stopped her. Grace frowned and squinted at the doors. They were made of glass, big art deco things that were framed in gleaming brass.
There was a man standing there, a computer bag over one shoulder, or at least Lou thought it was a computer bag? He was so big it looked like a purse on his frame. He was easily 6’6, broad shouldered and muscled. She couldn’t make out his face, not with the way the sun was shining behind him. It was framing him, casting him in a halo of light that blacked out his features. The only thing she could really see was his size and the golden crown of hair that was pulled back and knotted at the top of his head.
“Holy shit. Who’s the blond god?” Grace asked, sitting up straight.
“No idea. Maybe he’s here for the renovations that are going to happen in the basement? They said the contractor would be out today.”
Grace hopped up from the table and nodded. “That tracks. I mean, do you see the size of him? He’s a mountain.”
“He is very…big,” Lou settled on and looked away from him when he hit the buzzer again.
“Coming!” Grace called out and waved a hand to him. “I’ll let him in and see if he thinks the basement is haunted.”
Lou sighed and went back to her charts. “It’s not haunted. I told you. Old buildings have sounds. Not everything has to have a seance.”
“You’re a real drag since we left Europe. You know that, right?”
Lou didn’t answer her, but she grinned and kept flipping through the charts. They were maps of the area. All marked with the hotspots of the last three decades for tornado and catastrophic weather phenomena. It looked like Blue City was sitting right in the center of it all.
If this summer went like many others there shouldn’t be too far to go before they were in prime inclement weather. She heard the beep of the door opening and Grace’s excited voice mingled with a much lower baritone. She tried not to notice how nice that deeper voice sounded.
He was here to do contract work. Not be ogled by her. Crap. What if Grace was right and all the science really had scrambled her brains? How could she be attracted to a voice? She didn’t even know what he looked like. Big couldn’t really count, right?
She took out a marker and began to think about where would be the best place to start. Maybe to the south…if they did that then-
“Hey, Lou?” Grace called out to her. She sounded unsure, a little worried, which was…well, it wasn’t good if she was talking to the building contractor.
Lou dropped her pen and looked up. “What is it?” she asked, standing.
