Manny Ruiz, 59, has spent 17 years as a minor league baseball scout crisscrossing the Southeast in a dented 2016 Ford F-150, surviving on gas station coffee, lukewarm hot dogs, and the quiet thrill of spotting a kid with enough raw talent to outrun the small-town limits most are born into. His biggest flaw, per his older sister who he talks to twice a year, is that he’s built his entire life around avoiding anything that could be called a distraction. His ex-wife left him 12 years prior for a commercial real estate broker who slept in the same bed every night, and Manny leaned into the road ever since: no permanent address, no strings, no one asking him when he’d be home next.
He’s camped at the bar of a roadside dive just off I-75 in north Georgia on a rainy Tuesday night, a half-drunk pale ale sweating through its cardboard coaster in front of him, scribbling notes in the margin of a scouting report about a left-handed pitcher who hit 93 mph three times that afternoon at the high school playoff game. The jukebox spits out Otis Redding at a low rumble, rain lashes the cinder block walls, and he’s half-convinced he’s the only person in the room until someone slides onto the stool two spots down from him, carrying a whiff of lavender and raw, unprocessed honey that cuts straight through the bar’s usual smell of fried peanuts and old cigarette smoke.
He glances up. She’s mid-50s, streaks of silver threading through dark hair pulled back in a loose braid, a faint scar slicing through her left eyebrow, and her bare forearms are dusted with fine, pale yellow powder he recognizes as bee pollen. She orders a bourbon neat, and when she shifts to rest her elbow on the bar, her knee brushes his, light as a fastball’s graze off a batter’s jersey. Manny flinches before he can stop himself; he hasn’t had casual, accidental contact with a woman who wasn’t a waitress sliding a plate of fries across a counter at him in longer than he can remember.
She smirks, like she notices. “You’re the scout the coach was yammering about before the game, right? Manny?” He tenses. League unwritten rule: you don’t fraternize with anyone connected to a program you’re scouting, no exceptions. It’s the first rule he teaches new hires every off-season. He nods, short and gruff, already planning to finish his beer and bolt for the motel 10 minutes up the road. “I’m Lena. Ex-wife of that same coach. Don’t worry, I don’t snitch to the team staff. They still think I’m mad about the 2022 playoff loss, so I can get away with just about anything.”
She holds out a small glass jar of honey, capped with a scrap of beeswax, across the bar. Manny’s fingers brush hers when he takes it, his calloused from 17 years of turning doorknobs and gripping baseball bats to test their weight, hers soft but sticky at the fingertips from handling hives all day. The honey inside glows gold in the neon of the bar’s beer sign. “I run the beekeeping operation on the west side of town. Brought samples for the bar owner, he infuses his bourbon with it. Try it later if you want. Won’t poison you, promise.”
He should leave. He knows he should leave. But he stays. He asks about the scar on her eyebrow, she laughs and says she got stung by 17 bees when a hive collapsed on her three years prior, the doctors stitched her up and told her she was lucky she didn’t go blind in that eye. She moves one stool closer, so their shoulders are almost touching when she leans in to point at the name scrawled across the top of his scouting notebook—the shortstop, says that’s her nephew, asks what he thinks of the kid’s swing. Every time their arms brush when he flips a page, every time she tilts her head back to laugh at the dry, deadpan joke he makes about the umpire’s terrible strike zone that afternoon, Manny feels that wall he’s built around himself for 12 years chip a little more. He’s disgusted with himself at first, for even considering breaking the rule he’s lived by for half his career, for even wanting to talk to a woman longer than it takes to order a meal. But the desire is louder, warm and slow, like the honey he twists off the lid to taste when she’s not looking, sweet and thick and better than anything he’s had in years.
The bartender raps a rag on the counter an hour later, says they’re closing early, the parking lot’s flooding, the county just announced the roads out of town are gonna be closed for at least three hours. Lena turns to him, a faint, teasing glint in her eye, and says she’s got a cabin 10 minutes away on higher ground, he can wait out the flood there, no strings attached if that’s what he wants. Manny hesitates for exactly two seconds, then nods.
They run through the rain to her truck, soaking through their shirts before they can yank the doors closed, and by the time they get to her cabin, tucked between a stand of oak trees and three rows of wooden bee hives, Manny’s jeans are stuck to his legs. She hands him an old, worn flannel shirt that smells like cedar and her lavender perfume, and when he pulls it on over his damp t-shirt, it feels more like home than any motel he’s stayed in the last decade. She’s standing at the stove stirring hot cocoa when he walks back into the kitchen, and he crosses the room before he can talk himself out of it, cups her face in his hands, and kisses her. She tastes like bourbon and honey, her hands come up to rest on his back, and for the first time in 12 years, Manny doesn’t think about the road, or the scouting report, or the rules he’s supposed to follow.
They wake up the next morning to sunlight streaming through the kitchen window, the hum of bees drifting in from the hives outside, the roads already cleared of floodwater. Manny picks up his phone, calls his boss, tells him he’s gonna stay an extra day to re-evaluate the shortstop prospect, just to be thorough. He hangs up, reaches across the kitchen counter, swipes a dollop of honey from the open jar sitting next to her coffee mug, wipes it across her lower lip. She laughs, leaning in to kiss it off his finger, her teeth grazing his knuckle soft as a bee’s wing.
