Javi Mendez, 53, custom fly rod builder, had been camped at the same splintered pine picnic table in the Brevard beer garden for three hours when he spotted her. The annual trout festival had wound down an hour earlier, most vendors packing up coolers and display cases, the air thick with residual smoked brisket, pine, and the sharp hoppy tang of hazy IPA lingering in his plastic cup. Golden hour bleeded pink over the Blue Ridge peaks behind the garden, crickets starting their low hum in the wild blackberry patch along the fence, and his stack of handcrafted sample rods leaned against the table leg, cedar grips worn smooth from hours of passersby testing their weight.
He recognized her before she said a word. Maeve Carter, 32, the wildlife biologist who’d moved to town three weeks prior to lead the local stream restoration project, daughter of his late wife’s childhood best friend. He hadn’t seen her since she was 16, slouched on his couch at Christmas, glued to her phone, begging him to teach her to cast before she drove back to Charlotte with her mom. She wore neoprene waders rolled down to her calves, mud caked on her boot toes, sun-bleached auburn hair pulled back in a braid slipping loose at the nape, freckles dark across her nose from days spent out on the water. She walked straight to his table, didn’t hesitate, slid onto the bench next to him instead of across, the side of her denim-clad thigh pressing firm to his when she shifted to set her waterproof notebook on the table.
Javi froze for half a second, throat tight. He’d spent four years clinging to a stupid, self-imposed rule: no one more than three years younger than his 48-year-old sister. He’d watched too many recently divorced friends chase women half their age, make fools of themselves, earn the eye rolls of everyone in their small town, and he’d sworn he’d never be that guy. But Maeve smelled like cold river water, pine soap, and a faint sweet hit of vanilla lip balm, and when she laughed, a low warm sound, at the story of a kid dropping one of his $800 custom rods in the river earlier that day, he found himself leaning in without meaning to.
She told him she’d been stopping by his shop every other day for a week, leaving notes on his door, asking if he’d build her a custom 4-weight rod for the smallmouth streams she was surveying for the restoration project. When he reached for the sample 4-weight propped against the table to hand to her, her fingers brushed his, calloused palm warm against his, and he felt a jolt run up his arm he hadn’t felt since his wife was alive. He tried to steer the conversation to rod specs, bamboo vs graphite, grip width, the custom engraving he did on reel seats for regular clients, but she kept veering back to old memories, teasing him about sneaking her a sip of his beer that Christmas when her mom wasn’t looking, the way he’d tripped over a root teaching her to cast in the front yard, landing face first in clover. Her knee stayed pressed to his the whole time, no space between them, and every time she looked up at him, hazel eyes flecked with gold in the fading light, he forgot what he was supposed to be saying.
The conflict hit him sharp halfway through her story about finding a 20-inch brown trout in a stretch of stream everyone had written off as dead. Part of him was disgusted with himself, thinking about how he’d held her when she was 10 and her parents got divorced, how he’d sent her a $50 Amazon gift card when she graduated college, how she was practically family. The other part was hyper aware of every point of contact between them, the way she tucked hair behind her ear when nervous, the way she’d been leaning closer as the sky got darker, until he could feel her breath on his neck when she laughed.
She cut off mid-sentence, nodded toward the trail head at the garden edge leading down to the Davidson River. “The fireflies are out right now,” she said, voice quieter than it had been, her hand resting light on his forearm through the sleeve of his worn flannel. “I found a stretch of eddy down there where the trout are rising at dusk. Wanna come test that 4-weight with me?”
Javi hesitated for three full seconds, brain running through all the dumb rules he’d made for himself, all the side-eye he’d get if anyone from town saw them walking the trail together, all the guilt he felt for even considering it when his wife had only been gone four years. But then Maeve smiled, a small shy smile he’d never seen on her when she was a kid, and he realized he was tired of living by rules that only made him lonely. He nodded, grabbed the rod off the table, stood up.
The trail was soft under his boots, dotted with clover and wild strawberry plants, fireflies blinking on and off in the brush on either side. Maeve walked half a step ahead, her hand brushing his every few steps, until they reached the eddy she’d talked about, water dark and smooth, the gurgle of upstream rapids soft in the quiet. She took the rod from him, flipped a small woolly bugger onto the line, cast it so soft it barely made a ripple when it hit the water. Ten seconds later, a small brown trout hit, and she whooped, reeling it in slow, grinning so wide her cheeks dimpled. She released the fish back into the water, turned to him, and when he stepped closer to brush a stray strand of hair off her face, his thumb brushing the freckles across her cheek, she leaned into the touch, her hand coming up to rest on his chest over his beating heart.
