Leo Rios, 53, makes his living stripping rust out of 1970s campers and turning them into tiny rolling vacation homes for people sick of city crowds. He’s got a scar across his left forearm from a circular saw mishap three years back, and a stubborn streak a mile wide that’s kept him holding a grudge against Mara Hale for 12 full years. He’d been convinced she tipped off the IRS about his under-the-table camper sales back in 2011, the audit that cost him $14,000 and almost put his shop under, and he’s dodged her at every Hill Country community event since.
The mid-July BBQ cookoff is no exception, until he’s mid-turn with a brisket taco in one hand and a shaker of light beer in the other, and slams right into her shoulder hard enough to slosh half the beer down the front of her cream linen button-down. The fabric sticks to her skin right at the curve of her hip, and he reacts before he can think, dabbing at the wet spot with the crumpled napkin in his pocket, his knuckle brushing the warm, soft skin of her waist through the thin shirt before he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned.
She doesn’t step away. Her sunglasses slide down her nose a half inch, and he can see the little fleck of honey gold in her left iris he never noticed before, even after all those years of her hanging around his ex-wife’s dinner parties. She smells like coconut sunscreen and smoked pork, the kind of scent that sticks to your clothes for hours after you leave the fairgrounds, and she laughs, low and rough, when he stammers out an apology. “Relax, Rios. It’s not like the shirt’s anything special. I spilled chili all over the last one I wore to this thing anyway.”
The grudge sits heavy in his throat, sharp with the old anger, until she nods at the beer stain and says, “For the record, I never told the IRS about your camper sales. That was your ex’s dipshit new boyfriend, the one who worked in the county tax office. He saw your Craigslist listings and ran his mouth to a buddy. I tried to tell you back then, but you wouldn’t answer my calls.”
He blinks. The old resentment cracks, sudden as a rusted bolt giving way under a wrench. He’d spent a decade hating the wrong person, and now she’s standing three inches away, her shoulder brushing his every time a group of drunk college kids jostles past, her mouth twisted in a half-smile like she’s been waiting a decade to say that.
He buys her a frozen margarita from the tent down the row, the kind with extra salt around the rim, and they sit on the tailgate of his beat-up work truck for two hours, watching the sun bleed orange over the oak trees. The country cover band in the corner switches to slow George Strait deep cuts, and she tells him she quit talking to his ex eight years prior, when she bailed on driving her to her first round of breast cancer surgery to go on a cruise with a guy she’d met on Tinder. She shows him the faint scar across her chest, right at the neckline of her shirt, and his fingers twitch with the urge to brush over it, gentle, like he would a scratch on the door of a vintage Airstream he’s restoring.
She mentions she’s been eyeing the 1972 Airstream he listed on his shop’s Facebook page two weeks prior, had been too nervous to reach out because she was sure he’d hang up on her the second he heard her voice. The sun dips below the treeline, fireflies start blinking in the grass at the edge of the fairgrounds, and his knee brushes hers every time he shifts his weight, the contact warm enough to make the back of his neck tingle. He hasn’t felt this jumpy around a woman since he was 16, sneaking his dad’s pickup to take his high school girlfriend to the drive-in.
He invites her back to his shop after the cookoff wraps up, says he’ll show her the Airstream, no pressure, even crack open a bottle of the bourbon he keeps stashed under his workbench for good clients. She tilts her head, considers it for two seconds, then nods, the corner of her mouth tugging up into a grin that makes his chest feel tight.
When they walk to her mobile pet grooming van parked at the edge of the lot, she stops halfway, leans in, and kisses his cheek first, slow, her lips soft against his stubble, then his mouth, the taste of lime and tequila and salt on her tongue. He rests his hand on her hip, right where the beer stain is still half damp, and doesn’t overthink it, for the first time in years.
She pulls back, laughs when he stumbles a half step, and says she’ll follow him back to the shop, her keys already dangling from her fingers. He taps the side of her van’s door twice before stepping back to his truck, already reaching for his keys to unlock the shop gate ahead of time.
