Elio Marquez, 53, has built custom fishing rods out of his coastal Oregon garage for 12 years, and hasn’t deviated from his weekly routine in nearly a decade. He wakes at 6am for black coffee and a beach walk, spends 8 hours sanding graphite blanks and wrapping iridescent thread around rod guides, drinks one IPA at the Mermaid Inn every Friday, and is in bed by 10pm sharp. His ex-wife left him 8 years prior, calling him too rigid, too uninterested in anything that didn’t involve fish or epoxy, and he’d taken the criticism as permission to shrink his world down to only the things he could control: no surprises, no risk of disappointment.
He’s manning a booth at the annual Newport Seafood Festival on a crisp October Saturday when he spots Clara Bennett, the town’s 48-year-old mayor, across the beer tent. He’s avoided her for years, mostly out of embarrassment over his messy divorce, partly because he’d known her since she was a snot-nosed 16-year-old working the fish market cash register, and partly because every guy in town had spent the last two years whispering that she was off limits: too smart, too busy, too public for a regular guy to waste his time asking out. She’s just finished a speech about new pier restoration funding, her navy blazer unbuttoned, a smudge of grilled salmon butter streaked across her left cheek, her boots caked in mud from walking the festival grounds all day. She meets his eye, grins, and heads straight for his table.
Elio’s first instinct is to slip out the back of the tent. He’s got a half-finished rod waiting on his workbench, a frozen pizza in his fridge, no interest in small talk with a public figure who probably only wants a donation to some town initiative. She pulls up a rickety folding chair next to him before he can move, sitting so close their denim-clad knees brush when she shifts to get comfortable. He can smell coconut sunscreen and vanilla perfume mixing with fried calamari and salt air wafting through the tent, can hear the gravel in her voice from yelling over the crowd all day, can see faint laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her hazel eyes when she nods at his half-empty beer.
“Thought that was you,” she says, tapping the king salmon tattoo peeking out from the cuff of his worn flannel shirt. Her fingers brush his forearm for half a second, warm and calloused, and Elio’s throat goes dry. He hasn’t felt a casual touch that wasn’t a customer handshake in longer than he can remember. His brain screams this is a bad idea, that everyone in the tent is watching, that dating the mayor would blow up his perfectly curated routine faster than a broken rod guide on a 40-pound chinook. But the part of him that hasn’t felt alive in years is leaning in, curious, like he’s staring at a fish he never thought he’d get a chance to catch.
They talk for 20 minutes, joking about the time she snuck a 10-pound halibut into the back of his old F-150 as a prank when she was 17, teasing each other about the fact that he still drives that same beat-up truck, that she still can’t cook crab without burning the butter. When she laughs so hard she snorts, she leans forward, her hand resting on his knee for three full seconds before she pulls back, a faint pink flush rising on her cheeks. The salmon butter is still on her cheek, and Elio’s fingers itch to wipe it off, to see if her skin is as soft as it looks.
She cuts to the chase before he can overthink it. She says she’s been meaning to track him down for months, wants to commission a custom rod as the grand prize for the pier’s annual youth fishing derby next summer. Then she pauses, twists the label off her beer bottle, and admits she’s been trying to work up the nerve to ask him out to dinner since she moved back to town two years ago, but he always looked like he was about to sprint in the opposite direction every time he saw her at the grocery store or the bar.
Elio freezes for a full five seconds, his beer halfway to his mouth. He’d spent two years assuming she hated him for how his marriage ended, that she thought he was just the boring, stubborn guy who broke her cousin’s heart. He tells her as much, and she snorts, says she never blamed him for the divorce, that her cousin had been bored of small town life long before she left him. He reaches out before he can talk himself out of it, uses the back of his thumb to wipe the salmon butter off her cheek, his skin brushing hers soft and warm, and she doesn’t pull away, just holds his gaze, the noise of the festival’s cover band fading to a dull hum for a beat.
He says yes to the rod, and yes to dinner the following Friday. She scribbles her personal cell number on the back of a crumpled pier funding flyer, draws a tiny lopsided fish next to her signature, stands up, squeezes his shoulder gently before she heads off to judge the crab cake contest. He sits there for 10 minutes after she leaves, sipping his now-warm beer, watching her laugh as she lets a group of little kids put a paper crab crown on her head by the food booths. He’d spent 8 years thinking his rigid routine was the only thing keeping him safe, the only way to avoid getting hurt again, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he’s looking forward to breaking it.
He tucks the flyer into the pocket of his flannel shirt, pulls out his phone to add her number, and grins when he sees she dotted the “i” in her name with a tiny heart.
