Manny Ruiz, 53, has spent the last 18 months driving the backroads of central Georgia as a minor league baseball scout, logging 40,000 miles on his beat-up Ford F-150, eating more gas station pork rinds than he cares to admit, and sticking to a strict rule: no fraternizing with the locals. It’s a rule he forged after his ex-wife left him three years prior, right when he landed this promotion, claiming his nomadic work schedule made him “uninvestable.” He’s stubborn to a fault, refuses to let anyone get close enough to prove her right.
The annual town peach festival afterparty spills into his usual dive bar on a sticky July Saturday, the air thick with sweat, fried dough, and the sweet tang of peach schnapps shots being passed around by the newly crowned peach queen and her court. Manny’s perched on his usual end stool, sipping a draft PBR, ignoring the racket, when a woman squeezes past him to flag down the bartender. Her hip brushes his forearm first, the cotton of her pale yellow sundress soft as down, and he catches a whiff of peach nectar and lavender laundry detergent before she turns to apologize.
It’s Lila, the woman who runs the town’s peach co-op, the one everyone in town whispers about, widowed six years, off-limits to any out-of-town guy dumb enough to make a move. Manny has avoided her for months, convinced she’d corner him about sponsoring the local little league team or selling him an overpriced crate of peaches he doesn’t need. But when she leans in to talk over the Johnny Cash blaring from the jukebox, her elbow bumping his where it rests on the bar, he notices the faint calluses on her knuckles from sorting peaches at dawn, the tiny scar on her left wrist from a time she fell off a ladder trimming trees, the way her hazel eyes crinkle at the corners when she laughs at his offhand joke about the peach queen’s over-the-top tiara.
He fights the pull at first. Tells himself he’s leaving for a new post in Florida in two months, that this is just small town boredom talking, that getting involved with someone everyone in town has an opinion on is asking for trouble. But she knows more about baseball than he expects, rants about how the Atlanta Braves wasted a first round pick on a pitcher with a bad slider back in 2019, mentions she used to drive two hours every Sunday with her dad to watch the minor league team in Macon when she was a kid. When she reaches past him to grab a napkin off the bar, her hair brushes his jaw, and he has to stop himself from leaning into the contact.
The sky opens up out of nowhere, fat raindrops slamming against the bar’s tin roof, and the crowd spills out into the parking lot, yelling as they run for their cars. Lila pats at her purse, swearing she lost her keys, and Manny doesn’t even think before he offers to walk her to his truck to wait out the storm. He holds his old scouting jacket over their heads as they run, his arm slung tight around her shoulders, her body pressed so close to his side he can feel the heat of her through the thin, damp fabric of her dress. When they yank open the truck door and tumble inside, rain dripping off their sleeves onto the floor mats, he’s halfway to making a dumb joke about the weather when she leans in and kisses him.
She tastes like peach schnapps and mint gum, her hand resting light on the side of his neck, and he doesn’t pull away. For the first time in three years, he doesn’t overthink the logistics, doesn’t run through a list of reasons this is a bad idea, just lets himself be there. They sit in the truck for an hour, rain tapping soft against the windshield, talking about her dad’s old baseball card collection, about the teenage prospect Manny scouted the week prior who throws a 97 mile an hour fastball but still lives with his grandma and makes her peach pie every Sunday.
Lila finds her keys tucked in the side pocket of her purse when the rain lets up, and Manny walks her to her beat-up Subaru, his hand brushing the small of her back as she climbs in. She tells him to stop by the co-op at 8 a.m. the next day, she’ll save him a crate of the sweetest white peaches she’s picked all season, no charge. He drives back to his rented cottage on the edge of town, the windows rolled down, the cool post-rain air blowing in, and pulls out his phone when he gets to the driveway. He shoots his boss a quick text, asking if he can extend his Georgia post for another year, no questions asked. He shoves his phone back in his pocket, grinning, when he sees a text from Lila pop up before he even makes it inside the house, a photo of her holding a giant peach, with a note that says don’t be late.
