Jax Marlow, 57, spent 22 years as a commercial salmon fisherman before a winch accident bit off two fingers on his left hand and pushed him into early retirement, now runs a scuffed, salt-streaked bait and tackle shop just off Newport’s harbor. He’d avoided the town’s annual clam bake fundraiser for seven straight years, but his next door neighbor had threatened to cut off his supply of wild blackberries if he skipped again, so he’d showed up in his oil-stained flannel, work boots still caked with dock mud, and parked himself by the beer cooler 20 minutes in, fully planning to slip out as soon as he’d drunk enough to not feel guilty about bailing.
The air reeked of grilled lobster, cedar smoke, and brine off the bay, and every time someone he recognized walked past he’d pretend to be intensely focused on the label of his IPA, avoiding small talk like it was a rotten hook. He’d just reached for a second cold can when another hand bumped his, cool and soft, with a faint blue ink stain on the index knuckle and a thin silver ring shaped like a breaking wave wrapped around the middle finger.
He pulled his hand back like he’d touched a hot grill, then looked up. The woman standing next to him was maybe 49, with sun-streaked auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, hazel eyes flecked with bright green, and a faded denim jacket covered in old band pins. She was the new town librarian, he realized, the one who’d moved into the old blue cottage three blocks from his shop six months prior. He’d seen her in his store a handful of times, buying fishing line for her teenaged son, but he’d never said more than two words to her, too busy hiding behind a reel repair bench to make conversation.
“Sorry,” she said, grinning, not pulling her own hand away from the cooler. “I’ve been waiting for one of those IPAs for ten minutes. The chardonnay they’re serving tastes like dish soap.” Her voice was low, a little rough, like she smoked the occasional cigarette or spent too much time reading aloud to kids. She leaned against the cooler next to him, close enough he could smell her perfume: coconut and cedar, no cloying floral notes, nothing that felt like it was trying too hard.
He mumbled a reply, half turned like he was ready to walk away, but she didn’t take the hint. She nodded at the stub of missing finger on his left hand, then at the fish hook tattoo wrapped around his wrist. “You’re the guy who runs the tackle shop, right? I tried to bring in a stack of old fishing memoirs to donate a few weeks back, but you had the ‘closed’ sign up even though I could see you through the window fixing a reel.”
He felt his ears go red. He’d seen her that day, had frozen up, pretended he didn’t notice her knocking, because the last time he’d tried to have a casual conversation with a woman who wasn’t his neighbor or the grocery store cashier, he’d rambled about bait weights for 20 minutes and left feeling like an idiot. Part of him screamed to make an excuse, say he had to get back to his border collie, leave, but the other part of him, the part that hadn’t felt a spark of anything besides boredom and quiet resentment in years, kept him rooted to the spot.
They talked for 45 minutes, standing by the cooler, the noise of the crowd fading into background static. She told him she’d moved to Newport after her son left for college in Seattle, had quit her corporate marketing job to run the library, had been divorced for three years after her ex-husband left her for a yoga instructor half his age. He told her about the fishing accident, about his ex-wife leaving him for a real estate broker in Bend, about how he’d spent the last eight years only talking to people when he absolutely had to, convinced he was too old, too beat up, too set in his ways to bother with anything new. The whole time, she stayed close, their elbows brushing every time she laughed, her eyes never drifting away from his face like he was actually worth listening to.
When the crowd started to move toward the stage for the charity auction, she tilted her head toward the jetty, a half mile down the beach, where no one from the party would be able to see them. “Wanna get out of here?” she said, and he didn’t even hesitate.
The rock jetty was cold under their boots, waves crashing against the rocks a few feet away, sending up fine sprays of salt water that landed on his cheeks. They sat on a smooth piece of driftwood, their knees pressing together, and neither of them moved away. He told her about the time he’d been stuck in a storm 50 miles off the coast for three days, thought he was gonna die, and she told him about the time she’d snuck into a Pearl Jam concert when she was 17, got thrown out for crowd surfing. When she reached over to brush a fleck of ash off his cheek, her thumb lingering for a beat on the rough stubble along his jaw, he didn’t flinch. He’d spent so long telling himself that wanting anything besides quiet routine was stupid, that dating at his age was just asking to get hurt again, that the unspoken small-town rule against pursuing the new librarian less than a year after his ex had moved away was too strong to break, but all of that noise went quiet the second her skin touched his.
They stayed there until the sun dipped below the horizon, the sky turning pink and tangerine, the string lights of the party flickering in the distance. She stood up, brushed sand off her jeans, and asked him if he wanted to come back to her place. She had fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, she said, and a stack of old Louis L’Amour westerns she’d found at a garage sale, the same ones he’d mentioned he read every winter when the fishing season was slow.
