Rafe Mendez, 53, owns a tiny craft rum distillery tucked between a bait shop and a laundromat in Key West’s Old Town, has spent the last twelve years perfecting two rules: never mix business with pleasure, and never under any circumstances engage with anyone related to his ex-wife. He’s stubborn to a fault, the kind of guy who’ll fix a broken still himself at 2 a.m. instead of calling a technician, who still sleeps on the same lumpy twin mattress he bought the day he moved out of the marital home, convinced any upgrade would feel like surrender to softness he doesn’t deserve. He only agreed to man a booth at the annual tiki and coastal conservation festival because the city threatened to yank his distillery license if he skipped out on the mandatory community event, and he’d sunk too much of his life into the brand to lose it over a few hours of forced small talk.
The late May sun bleeds gold over the waterfront, salt thick in the air, steel drums thumping a lazy calypso beat two booths over. Rafe wipes down the same tiki glass for the fourth time in ten minutes, ignoring the group of spring breakers yelling for samples, when a shadow falls over his table. He looks up, and his throat goes dry. She’s got dark hair streaked with sun-bleached honey, a spray of freckles across her nose, wears a linen button-down unbuttoned just low enough to show the edge of a silver starfish pendant at her collarbone, and she smells like coconut sunscreen and jasmine, the kind of scent that sticks to your clothes long after someone leaves the room. He recognizes her instantly: Lila, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the kid who’d hidden in the back yard eating wedding cake instead of dancing at his reception eighteen years prior, who he’d not seen a single time since the divorce papers were signed.
She leans her hip against the edge of his booth, close enough that her bare knee brushes his denim-clad calf when she shifts her weight, and holds out a hand for a sample. “Heard your 12-year dark rum won state this year,” she says, her voice low, throaty, like she’s spent the whole day yelling over crowd noise. When he hands her the small tasting glass, their fingers brush for half a second, and he feels a jolt run up his arm, sharp and warm, the kind of feeling he’d convinced himself he was too old to ever have again. He tells her he knows who she is, and she laughs, a bright, loud sound that cuts through the noise of the festival, and says she’s been looking for him. She moved down to the island six months prior, she says, left a boring corporate job in Atlanta and a dead marriage, bought a 32-foot sailboat she’s been fixing up docked at the city marina, heard he was still running the distillery and wanted to see if he was still as grumpy as he’d been back when he was married.
Rafe’s chest tightens. He knows better. Talking to Lila is the kind of stupid move that blows up small towns, that’ll get back to his ex before the sun rises, that breaks every stupid rule he’s lived by for over a decade. Disgust warps with sharp, unbidden desire, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was in his 20s, stupid and reckless and ready to throw caution to the wind. He watches her lick a drop of rum off her lower lip, her dark eyes locked on his, no look of awkwardness or hesitation, and he feels the walls he built around himself crack just a little. She asks about the thin scar snaking up his left forearm, the one he got when a still exploded three years after he opened the distillery, and he finds himself telling her the whole story, leaning against the booth closer than he should, ignoring the customers waving him down for samples, only half aware of the world outside the small bubble the two of them are standing in.
When the festival wraps at 8 p.m., the crowd thinning out, vendors folding up their tables, Lila slips a crumpled napkin into the front pocket of his work jeans, her fingers brushing his stomach through the thin cotton of his shirt. “I’ve got that bottle of your first run 10-year reserve you gave me as a wedding gift,” she says, her voice low enough only he can hear, “Never opened it. Figured it’d taste better with the guy who made it. Dock slip 17B, if you’re not too busy sticking to your rules tonight.” She winks, turns, and walks away, her linen shirt fluttering in the sea breeze, and Rafe stands there staring after her for a full five minutes, the napkin burning a hole in his pocket.
He spends twenty minutes closing up his booth, arguing with himself the whole time. It’s a bad idea. It’s messy. It’ll cause all kinds of drama he doesn’t need. But when he locks the last case of rum into the back of his pickup, he finds himself turning left toward the marina instead of right toward the distillery. The salt wind hits his face as he walks down the dock, string lights strung between the sailboats bobbing in the water, and he spots her sitting on the bow of her boat, holding two glasses, the unopened bottle of 10-year rum sitting on the seat next to her. She waves when she sees him, and he steps onto the wobbly gangplank, his boots thudding against the weathered wood.
