Rafe Ortega, 57, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a 300-square-foot shop tucked between a laundromat and a taco stand in west Asheville. He’s got a scar slicing across his left knuckle from prying a rusted 1960s Royal off a trapped kid’s wrist during 2019’s post-hurricane flood cleanup, and a flaw he’s never bothered fixing: he shuts down any interaction that veers past transactional. His wife left him eight years ago because he’d rather spend three nights taking apart a stuck type bar than talk about what was wrong, and he’s spent the years since treating casual connection like a wildfire he can outrun. He only agreed to trivia night at the neighborhood beer garden because his cousin begged, then bailed 20 minutes in to go meet a Tinder date, leaving Rafe slouched at a splintered pine picnic table, sweating IPA in one hand, blank trivia sheet in the other.
The bench across from him creaks before he can make up an excuse to leave. She slides in, her denim shorts brushing his calf when she shifts to make room for the tote bag slung over her shoulder, and he recognizes her immediately: Lila, the new youth librarian who’s been dropping off boxes of beat-up typewriters at his shop for the library’s after-school writing program for the past two months. He’s avoided her every time she’s come in, hiding in the back workroom until his part-time assistant handles the drop off, because the first time he saw her, she laughed at a joke his assistant made, and he felt something hot and sharp twist in his chest he thought he’d burned out years ago. It felt wrong, stupid, the kind of middle-aged man nonsense he’d always made fun of—she’s 32, for Christ’s sake, old enough to be his kid if he’d ever had any.
“Your cousin told me you’d be stuck here alone,” she says, and she’s holding two pretzel bites in one hand, salt sticking to her fingertips, and she holds eye contact with him for two beats longer than is strictly polite. The air smells like cut grass, fried onion, and the citrus IPA he’s drinking, and when she leans forward to set her own beer down, he catches a whiff of lavender and old paper, the same scent that lingers on the typewriters she drops off. “I already told the guy running trivia we’re a team. Don’t worry, I’m good at the pop culture stuff, you’re good at the old weird tech stuff. We’re gonna win.”
He tries to lean back, put space between them, but the bench behind him is pressed up against a stack of folding chairs, so he can’t. Every time she leans in to whisper an answer to him, her breath tickles the edge of his ear, and once, when she points to a question about 1970s office equipment, her hand brushes his forearm, calloused from reshelving books, warm enough that he feels the heat through the thin denim of his work shirt. He catches himself staring at the smattering of freckles across her nose, at the chipped mint-green polish on her fingernails, and he hates it, hates the way his throat goes dry when she laughs at his dumb joke about how no one under 40 knows what a correction ribbon is, hates the way he’s actually having fun, for the first time in longer than he can remember. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to realize he’s just a grumpy old guy who talks more to typewriters than people, for her to leave like everyone else does.
The final question is about the most popular typewriter model sold in the U.S. in 1978, and he writes the answer down before the emcee even finishes reading the question. She cheers, loud enough that the table next to them turns to look, and she slams her hand down on the table, her palm landing right on top of his. She doesn’t pull away. When the emcee announces they won, the crowd around them claps, and the prize is a free two-night rental at a tiny cabin 45 minutes north, right on the stream he fishes every other weekend.
He’s still staring at the prize voucher in the emcee’s hand when she leans in, her mouth inches from his ear, so only he can hear. “I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to ask you to go up there with me for three weeks,” she says, and she squeezes his hand where it’s still under hers. “I saw the trout sticker on your truck. I know you go up there alone. I figured if we won, you wouldn’t have an excuse to say no.”
For half a second, he wants to make an excuse. Wants to say the cabin’s probably too small, wants to say he’s got a typewriter he needs to finish restoring for a client, wants to say he’s not good at being around people for that long. But then he looks at her, at the way she’s biting her lip like she’s nervous he’ll say no, at the gold flecks in her hazel eyes catching the string lights strung above the picnic tables, and he doesn’t. He squeezes her hand back, the scar on his knuckle rubbing against her wrist, and tells her he’s got an extra fly rod in the bed of his truck, if she wants to learn how to cast. She grins, leans across the table to steal a french fry off his plate, and her knee presses firm against his under the table, warm and steady, while the emcee runs through the rest of the night’s prizes.
