Rafe Mendez, 53, forensic arson investigator, only showed up to the county fire department’s annual beer garden fundraiser because the chief owed him a favor after Rafe ruled a 2023 hardware store blaze was accidental, saving the department a six-figure insurance headache. He’d spent the last hour leaned against a splintered split-rail fence, half-empty hazy IPA in one calloused hand, avoiding eye contact with every former classmate and distant acquaintance that wandered past. A thin scar snaked up his left forearm, souvenir from a ceiling collapse at a meth lab fire the winter prior, and his scuffed steel-toe boots still had flecks of charred drywall caked in the treads from a job that morning. His biggest flaw, one he’d never admit out loud, was that he’d actively pushed every potential romantic connection away since his divorce eight years prior, opting to crash on the lumpy couch in his office half the week rather than deal with the mess of getting to know someone new.
He was halfway to making up an excuse to leave when Lila Marlow stepped into his line of sight. He recognized her immediately—his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who’d brought a jar of wildflower honey to his wedding and had snuck him a shot of tequila before the ceremony when he’d been panicking. He hadn’t seen her in seven years, not since the messy split where he’d cut off contact with every member of his ex’s family to avoid the drama. She had a smudge of golden beeswax on the edge of her jaw, her flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows to show freckled forearms dotted with tiny bee sting scars, and she smelled like clover and lemon dish soap when she stopped a foot away from him, holding her own can of hard seltzer.
They talked for 20 minutes, first about the honey farm she’d opened three years prior outside of town, then about his cases, the ones he could talk about, anyway. She asked about the scar on his forearm, leaning in even closer when he explained how he’d pushed a rookie firefighter out of the way of the falling drywall, her eyes fixed on his face like she actually cared about the answer, not just making small talk. Rafe’s internal fight got louder by the second—one half of him screaming that this was a bad idea, that the small town gossip would be unbearable, that he was crossing a line he’d drawn years prior, the other half of him thrumming with a kind of excitement he hadn’t felt since he was in his 20s, the sharp, giddy thrill of doing something he wasn’t supposed to.
When the band slowed down to play a worn-out slow dance standard, Lila tilted her head at him, that same smirk still on her face. “You still dance as bad as you did at your wedding?” she asked. Before he could come up with a snarky retort, she grabbed his free hand, her palm warm and calloused from handling hive frames, and pulled him toward the patch of trampled grass everyone was using as a dance floor. He stiffened up at first, his hand hovering awkwardly at her waist for ten full seconds before he let it rest there, feeling the heat of her skin through the thin flannel of her shirt. She rested her head on his shoulder for a beat, her hair brushing the side of his neck, and mumbled that she’d always thought her cousin was an idiot for letting him go, that she’d had a crush on him since she was 20 years old.
The last of his resistance melted right then. He didn’t care about the gossip, didn’t care about the line he was crossing, didn’t care about the stupid rules he’d made for himself after the divorce to keep himself safe. When the song ended, he didn’t let go of her hand. They snuck out of the beer garden ten minutes later, walking down the rutted dirt path to the creek that ran behind the fairgrounds, the sound of the band fading behind them as crickets started chirping in the oak trees lining the bank. They sat down on a fallen cedar log, their shoulders pressed together, and Lila wiped the smudge of beeswax off her jaw with the back of her hand before reaching up to brush a fleck of charred drywall off the collar of his work shirt.
Rafe leaned in, kissing her slow, the faint taste of peppermint and hard seltzer on her tongue mixing with the bitter aftertaste of his IPA.
