twisted history part one - scott miller
Scott Miller x Reader (Part One)
summary: After being ghosted in college over a one-night stand; the ghost, Scott, reappears ready to turn your world upside down once again.
warning(s): severe weather, disaster (tornado), mild language, implied sexual content, angst, tension
word count: 2.1k words
Masterlist | part two
Then
He was the kind of boy who looked like a forecast: clean lines, pressure dropping behind his eyes.
I sat three rows up in Atmospheric Dynamics, pretending to be fascinated by vorticity while my heart did its own messy spin. After the lab night—a thunderstorm shivering over Cambridge, his hands careful on my hips, my laugh dropping like warm rain—I’d woken to an empty side of the bed and a note that said nothing useful. The campus smelled like petrichor and bad decisions. I put on a sundress because it felt like armor and went to class anyway.
After lecture, I caught him by the door. “Scott.”
He paused like you do when your name pulls you back by the collar. He looked exactly at me and not into me. “Hey.”
“About last night—” I started, soft.
“It was one time,” he said, voice level, an instrument he knew how to play. “I shouldn’t have—” He edited the sentence like code, stripped it to function. “We should keep it simple. School. Work.”
My face remembered how to smile; my stomach didn’t. “Right. Simple.”
“I’ve got a meeting,” he added, as if that explained the space where decency should’ve been.
And then he walked away, neat, contained, the human version of a door closing without a slam.
I learned a hundred ways to take up less space. Moved seats. Did the labs. Kept my sweet drinks and stopped asking why sweetness felt like a dare. You don’t need a storm to get wrecked. People will do.
Now
The backseat of Tyler’s ute judders; the sky has gone that nickel color that means the afternoon is loading a gun.
“Remind me why we’re in the back of a moving vehicle toward danger?” Ben shouts over the wind. He’s braced against a pelican case, hair already at war with Oklahoma.
“Because your editor wants ‘immersive,’ and the atmosphere is obliging,” I shout back. “Look—see the flanking line? That’s your clue the main updraft has friends.”
Boone—camera on his shoulder, grin like a golden retriever with a drone pilot license—pivots toward us. “For the vlog: We’ve got Y/N riding shotgun—okay, truck-bed—today. Ben’s friend, storm brain extraordinaire. She’ll make us sound smart.”
I smile for the lens because the sun likes me today, because the light turns my sundress into something brighter than I feel. “Hi. I’m here to bully Ben’s adjectives with science.”
Tyler twists around from the cab, arm hooked over the seat, hat tipped just so. “Boys, back off. I’ve only known her days, but she’s like a little sister to me. You hear?” He winks at me, goes serious for the camera. “Also she’ll roast you with math.”
The road unspools. Heat shimmers. Off to the west a wall cloud is hanging like a question somebody’s going to answer wrong. I squint at the base, at the skinny aspirational finger of rotation tasting dirt.
“Mesocyclone tightening,” I call, half to Ben, half to myself. “Look at the scud getting hoovered—see how it feeds? That’s inflow. Dewpoint’s doing the most. If that rear-flank downdraft wraps just right, we’ll see a stovepipe go needle, go wedge.”
“Translation,” Ben says, dutifully. “Bad.”
“Potentially bad,” I correct. “Weather’s a thousand coin flips and a rumor.”
We pass a line of white trucks on the shoulder, clean logos glinting: StormPAR. They look surgical in a world held together by zip ties. I track the convoy the way your tongue checks a busted tooth. I wonder who’s behind the wheel, but there are a thousand men in Oklahoma with that jaw and those sunglasses, and anyway, I’m not looking.
The dryline breathes in. The world tilts.
Tyler taps the roof and Boone smacks the window twice: pit stop.
We slide into the gravel lot of a diner that has held the sky’s secrets for sixty years and isn’t about to stop. Tyler’s fans appear like they smell high wind and free stickers. Phones up, voices shrill with the cocktail of fear and someone to blame it on in a fun way.
“You saved my cousin’s car last week!” a girl squeals at Tyler. “Like actually pushed it.”
“I’m twenty percent adrenaline, eighty percent brisket,” he deadpans, signing a hat. “Eat your veggies, stay in a shelter. Dani, get this kid a T-shirt.”
I get pulled into a selfie by a teenager shaking hard enough to rattle bone. “Is it true you do the science?” she whispers.
“I do the explanations,” I say. “The science is the sky; we’re just translating.”
She beams. I’m pivoting to grab waters when the mood swings. Javi Rivera strides in from the lot like a problem you’re lucky to have. Scott is a step behind him, jaw set, eyes already heated. They’re both mud-dusted and efficient, the StormPAR convoy stacked behind them in a tense line.
“Tyler,” Javi says, keeping the temperature just under boil, “you cut us off at the bypass.”
“We had a school bus!” Tyler shoots back, instantly hot. “I’m not going to let you park a dish in front of—”
Scott starts where Javi stops. “Your livestream was blocking—”
He breaks off.
He sees me.
The words leave his face. For a second, he looks like a man who suddenly remembered the exact position of his own heart. He doesn’t say my name. He doesn’t say anything.
I feel the old anger strap itself on like a parachute.
“Excuse me,” I tell the kid with the hat, stepping past. I angle my body so I’m almost between Scott and the fan swarm, not because I want to touch him, but because I want him to feel what it’s like to be corrected by a boundary.
Tyler clocks the freeze and, because he is both chaos and shepherd, claps a hand to my shoulder. “This is Y/N,” he announces to Javi and, pointedly, not to Scott. “She’s helping Ben keep me from sounding like a raccoon with a weather thesaurus.”
Javi’s mouth flickers. “Hi. Javi Rivera.”
“Hi,” I say, warm. “Big fan of your phased array. Your data briefs are tight.”
“Thank you,” he says, pleased despite himself.
I don’t look at Scott.
I aim my smile at Tyler. “I’m going to grab extra water from inside before people pass out.”
“Take Boone,” Tyler says automatically.
“I’ll be quick.”
I can feel Scott watching me walk away. The ridiculous part of me wants to check if his expression is apology or inventory. I do not check. I step into the cool, coffee-and-bacon air and lean against the counter to ask for two flats of bottles like my hands aren’t trembling.
Back at the door, through glass, I see Javi angle toward Scott, lips forming what’s up with you? Scott shakes his head in that universal male sign for later, which always means never.
The storm pulls itself together for the evening show.
Ben and I take the same booth every morning because routines hold when nothing else does. He types; I scribble gust-front notes and draw little arrows to make my brain feel useful.
“Tell me about your college,” he says, pen hovering. He’s learned to ask questions that let me choose which past I hand him.
“The Institute,” I say, because we all call it that when we’re being coy. “Nights in the lab with the fluorescents buzzing like crickets. Pizza that could break a window. Professors who spoke about wind like it was an old friend and an occasional thief.”
“You liked it.”
“I loved it,” I say, and it’s true. “It made the world make sense, even when people didn’t.”
He raises a brow. “Person, singular?”
I smile into my coffee. “Plural.”
The bell above the door jangles and brings the outside in—heat, grit, the smell of something brewing. Tyler barrels in, hat tipped back. “We’ve got a boundary doing the tango two counties over,” he announces. “We roll in ten.”
I’m already packing up, but my lungs are a little tight, the old anxiety moving around furniture. “I might sit this first push,” I tell Ben, voice even. “Track from here. I’ll feed you the numbers. Catch up in the second wave.”
“You okay?” he asks, quiet.
“I’m fine,” I lie, which is what functional people do when their nervous system is chewing gum wrappers.
He squeezes my shoulder and follows the stampede. The diner empties to a hum.
I open my laptop. The GR2Analyst feed paints the state like a bruise blooming. I can breathe better looking at colors than out the window. I’m mid-note on storm-relative helicity when the door jingles again.
“Of course,” I say to nobody.
He spots me before I can pretend to be part of the furniture. He doesn’t hesitate; he approaches like a man who decided to stop pretending time fixes anything without help.
“Y/N.”
“Don’t,” I say, without heat. “You’ll waste the first sentence on my name and run out of courage by the fourth.”
He stops at the far side of the table like it’s a neutral zone. For a second he looks like the boy at the lab bench who couldn’t look at me and look away at the same time. Then he squares it all away, the way he does.
“I was a jerk,” he says, plain. “Back then.”
“Accurate,” I say, focused on the radar. “And after.”
“I didn’t—” He exhales hard. “It was a one-time thing to me. I made it that on purpose. I had this… rule. No complications. No promises I couldn’t keep. I thought I was protecting both of us.”
“You weren’t,” I say. “And it wasn’t your decision alone.”
His jaw tightens. “I know.”
“You don’t get to define what happened and then define what I’m allowed to feel about it,” I add. My voice is steady. Practice: that’s all anger is, edges honed by repetition.
He nods like he’s been rehearsing taking a hit. “You’re right.”
“And now you work for a man who treats the sky like a claw machine,” I say, tipping my head toward the white trucks outside. “So forgive me if I’m not dazzled by your growth arc.”
“Javi is my partner,” he says, bristling for somebody who deserves it. “We’re trying to put data where it buys minutes.”
“And who signs the checks?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The silence is a confession.
“You haven’t changed,” I say, quietly. “You’ve just got better gear.”
He flinches like I taught him something he didn’t want to learn. “That’s not fair.”
“I don’t owe you fair,” I say. “I owe you honest.”
His radio cracks, Javi’s voice sharp: “Scott, where are you? We need to move. Rotation tightening near 412.”
He looks at me like he’s waiting for permission to go. I don’t give it because I’m not in the business of making men feel moral. I look at my screen. “You’re about to lose your road options if you don’t go now,” I say, purely practical.
“Y/N—”
“Go,” I repeat, blandly. “Do your job.”
He does. The door bangs the way weather does when it wants you to know it doesn’t care about your narrative.
I stare at the map. The hook fattening. The couplet kissing. It’s easier than staring at the past.
By the time the lot has stopped steaming, Tyler’s declared a morale emergency. “We’re going to Miller’s,” he says. “We’ll hydrate in liquid and fiddle. If you try to say no I’ll make it content.”
The band saws at something that makes everybody’s blood swing. We pack into a corner that smells like cedar and spilled beer and adrenaline trying to sit down. Ben nurses a Coke like it owes him money. I order first on muscle memory.
“Shirley Temple,” I tell the bartender. It slips out like breath.
The drink arrives pink as a dare. I spear the cherry with my straw and feel sixteen in a dangerous, forgiving way.
“You used to get that,” a voice says behind me, amused and a little wrecked.
I don’t need to turn to know who it is. I turn anyway.
Scott stands there like the idea of him; he’s showered and somehow still looks storm-touched, clean tee, knuckles nicked. The dim light sharpens his mouth. The noise swallows the world and hands us a little pocket of it back.
“What happened to your sweet?” he asks, a question pretending to be a joke.
“Some things change,” I say, and the cherry is suddenly a ruby I don’t want to choke on.
His mouth tips. “Some things don’t.”
“Like what?” I ask, and I hate that I sound curious.
“That you walk into a room and the weather calibrates.”
For a second I almost smile, because he used to talk in equations and now he’s trying poetry and both feel like truth the way a bruise does. I don’t smile. I let him try.
“I was an ass in school,” he says, louder than the band, like he wants the whole place to witness. “And after. I told myself rules about staying clean. I used people cleanly. I’m not proud.”
“Good,” I say. “Shame’s a start.”
“I’m trying to—”
His phone buzzes between us on the bar, screen upside down. He turns it over without meaning to. The name glows white in the dark: RIGGS.
I don’t look at him. I look at the cherry, bright as a warning light.
He silences it. It buzzes again. Again. He breathes like he’s lifting something heavy that isn’t in his hands.
“Just—give me one sec,” he says, and his voice splinters.
“Of course,” I say, pleasant as a blade. “You’ve always been good at stepping out.”
He flinches. He doesn’t move. The phone stops. It lights again—JAVI this time, caps like an alarm. His hand hovers.
He looks at me. He looks at the phone.
Somebody yells from the other side of the bar. The televisions all blink amber. A siren blares from a dozen pockets and the old radio by the kitchen door:
EMERGENCY ALERT. TORNADO ON THE GROUND. SEEK SHELTER NOW.
The power hiccups. The fiddle jerks to silence. The room inhales as one organism.
Scott’s hand is still hovering. My cherry slides off the straw and plops into pink.
He makes a choice with his eyes.
And the whole bar lurches like a truck dropping into a ditch.