Roman Voss, 53, has been running his small apiary outside Asheville for 8 years, ever since his divorce settled and he quit his corporate sales job to do the one thing that never felt like work. His biggest flaw is that he’d rather swallow his own tongue than court small-town gossip, which is why he’s spent the last three weeks pointedly ignoring the new baker’s stall two down from his spot at the weekly downtown farmers market. He knows who she is: Mara Hale, his ex-wife Lena’s first cousin, 48, moved back to town last spring after her husband died of a heart attack, got approved for the market slot two days before opening day. The air between their stalls smells like cut clover, warm wildflower honey, and her sourdough and roasted peach crostatas, thick enough to taste on humid July afternoons.
Mara walks over to his stall at 2:47 p.m. that Saturday, 13 minutes before the market was supposed to close, her faded denim apron dusted with flour, work boots caked in red clay from the dirt road leading to her rental. She leans across his folding table to grab a sample spoon of sourwood honey, her bare shoulder brushing his sun-warmed bicep, and he catches the faint scent of lavender soap and baked stone fruit under the flour. She holds eye contact for three full beats when she licks the honey off the spoon, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, and says Lena always used to rave about his sourwood, that she never believed it was that good until she snuck a sample when he was helping an elderly customer the week before. Roman tenses at the sound of his ex’s name, his jaw tightening; he’s already heard the old market regulars whispering about how often she stops by, part of him screaming to shut the conversation down, avoid the mess, but he can’t look away from the smudge of flour on her left jaw, the way she doesn’t swat when a bumblebee hovers an inch from her wrist, just holds still and smiles at it.
Thunder rumbles low off the Blue Ridge peaks ten minutes later, the sky turning a bruised deep gray, and the market coordinator yells that everyone needs to pack up immediately, the storm is rolling in faster than predicted. Roman fumbles to stack glass honey jars into wooden crates, his hands slippery from sweat and a spilled jar of wildflower, rushing to cover the small display hives so the bees don’t get soaked. He steps back to heft a full crate onto his pickup bed, his boot slipping on a patch of rain-slicked clover, and he starts to tip backward before a warm hand wraps tight around his forearm, holding him steady. Mara is already soaked, rain plastering her blonde hair to her neck, her apron dark with water, and she laughs a little breathless, saying she was heading over to help, saw him struggling with the crates from her stall.
They stand there for three seconds, rain pouring down, her hand still curled around his arm, his free hand resting on the wooden crate between them, before he admits he’s been avoiding her, not because he doesn’t want her around, but because he knows what people will say, that getting involved with your ex-wife’s cousin is exactly the kind of small-town drama he spent the last 8 years running from. She nods, wiping a drop of rain off her cheek, and says she knows, that she hasn’t even told Lena she talks to him, that she thought it would be wrong too, until she watched him spend an hour showing a group of foster kids how to hold a frame of bees without getting stung the previous Saturday, talking soft and slow so he didn’t scare them. She says she hasn’t met anyone that gentle in years.
He helps her load her baking supplies into the back of his truck, since her car battery died in the humidity, won’t turn over no matter how many times she turns the key. He drives her to his place first, says he’s got hot water and dry sweatshirts, that they can wait out the worst of the storm before he takes her to her rental on the other side of town. They stand in his kitchen, rain drumming hard against the screen porch, and he makes peppermint tea, pulling out a jar of the limited-batch sourwood he’d set aside two weeks prior, the stuff he usually only saves for his mom for Christmas. He dips his thumb in the jar to let her taste it, and she wraps her lips around his thumb for half a second, licking the honey off, the tip of her tongue brushing the thick callus on the side of his thumb from years of lifting heavy hive boxes. When she pulls back, she swipes a stray drop of honey off her chin with the back of her hand, and leans in to kiss him, slow and sweet, the taste of peach and honey on her mouth.
