Elias Voss, 53, has spent the last seven years of his life prioritizing carburetor rebuilds and chain adjustments over anything that requires talking about feelings. A vintage motorcycle restorer who runs his shop out of a converted 1950s gas station outside Asheville, North Carolina, he’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a 1978 Kawasaki exhaust burn, a shelf above his workbench stacked with half-unpacked divorce papers, and a long-standing rule against going to community events unless there’s free fried food involved. The weekly Mountaintop Volunteer Fire Department fish fry is the only exception he’s made since moving to the mountains from Chicago post-split, and even then, he usually eats alone in his truck before anyone can strike up a conversation about his personal life.
The air smells like hot grease, vinegar slaw, and cut grass when he steps under the tent that Friday evening, a paper plate piled high with catfish and hushpuppies in one hand, a sweating mason jar of sweet tea in the other. The bluegrass band set up by the picnic tables is halfway through a fast rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and he’s craning his neck to find an empty spot at the end of a table when he turns too fast, colliding shoulder-first with someone coming the other way. A glob of sloshed slaw drips straight down the front of a crisp cream linen blouse, and he freezes, already halfway through a gruff apology before he looks up and recognizes her.
It’s Maren Hale, the county clerk who made him wait three hours for a property tax appeal signature three weeks prior, the woman he’d ranted about to every customer who walked through his shop door for ten days straight, the one he’d called a rigid, pencil-pushing stick in the mud to his best friend over beers last weekend. He grabs a handful of paper napkins off the nearest table automatically, dabs at the slaw stain on her chest before he realizes what he’s doing, his calloused fingers brushing the soft fabric over her collarbone before he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned. His ears burn hot, and he expects that tight, flat professional smile she wore in the office, the one that made him want to slam the door on his way out.
Instead, she laughs, loud and throaty, swatting his hand away gently when he tries to apologize again. She’s wearing jeans and scuffed leather boots instead of the tailored blazer she had on at the county building, her blonde hair pulled back in a messy braid instead of the tight bun he remembered, and he spots a smudge of dirt under her thumbnail that looks like it came from gardening. “Relax, Voss,” she says, and he’s surprised she remembers his name. “I was actually looking for you. Found a 1967 BMW R60 registration in the county archives last week when I was digging up old property records. I remembered you mentioned you were restoring one for a client during your appeal.”
He blinks, thrown off so hard he nearly drops his plate. He’d mumbled that in passing, half annoyed, when he was explaining why he needed a zoning exemption for the back lot of his shop to store project bikes. He sits when she nods at the empty spot next to her on the picnic bench, and their knees brush under the table, the rough denim of his work jeans rubbing against the softer fabric of hers. She leans in every time the band picks up a faster tune to talk, her mint iced tea breath fanning his cheek, and he keeps catching her glancing at his hands, the small scar across his knuckle from a carburetor explosion last winter, the grease stain he can’t scrub out from under his fingernail. She tells him she moved to the area six months ago, finalized her own divorce eight months prior, took the county clerk job to get out of the fast-paced Charlotte legal scene, spends most of her free time tending to raised tomato beds behind her rental cabin. She holds up her hand to show him her own calluses, and when their fingers brush as he leans in to look, he feels a jolt go up his spine that has nothing to do with faulty wiring.
He’d spent three weeks thinking she was the most insufferable person in the county, had gone out of his way to drive the long route around the administration building to avoid seeing her, and now he can’t stop looking at the faint freckles across her nose, the way she laughs so hard at his bad joke about faulty motorcycle wiring that a snort comes out. When the band slows down for a waltz, half the crowd stands up to dance, and she tilts her head at him, her eyebrows raised. “You dance?” she asks, and he snorts, says he hasn’t danced since his wedding, which was 12 years prior and ended very badly. She stands anyway, grabs his wrist, pulls him up before he can protest.
His hand rests light on her waist when they sway off-beat to the music, her hand curled around his shoulder, and they’re so close he can smell lavender perfume mixed with the faint smoke of the fryer floating through the tent. He’s hyper-aware of every point where their bodies touch, the way her hip presses against his when someone bumps into them from behind, the way her head tilts up so her eyes lock with his, no cold professional distance left, just warm, dark brown eyes crinkling at the corners. She leans in first, kisses him quick, soft, right there on the dance floor where half the town can see, and he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t even think about the fact that he swore he’d never get involved with anyone who works for the county, that he’d spent years avoiding any kind of connection that didn’t come with a parts list and a repair manual.
When the song ends, they walk back to the table, and she pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of her purse, the old motorcycle registration, and flips it over to show him her phone number scrawled in blue ink across the back. “I’m free next Saturday,” she says, tucking it into his hand. “I want to see that R60. And don’t slam the door on me when I show up, okay?” He grins, says he’ll have a cold IPA waiting for her, and a plate of hushpuppies, no slaw included, just to be safe. He tucks the registration into the pocket of his grease-stained Carhartt, his fingers brushing the edge of her handwriting, and watches her walk to her beat-up Subaru, the golden sunset gilding the edge of her braid as she waves over her shoulder.
