Marlon Rios is 53, has kept bees on 12 acres outside Asheville for 17 years, and hasn’t let anyone touch his hive stacks since his wife, Lila, died eight years prior. His biggest flaw is that he’d rather blow out both his bad knees hauling 60-pound hive boxes alone than ask for a hand, even when the local farm supply guys rib him for limping through the door every other week for replacement hive frames. He avoids most small talk at the weekly Saturday farmers market, too, sick of fielding questions about whether his sourwood honey can cure acne, boost vaccine efficacy, or fix a teenager’s bad grades.
The August sun is beating down on the back of his neck the second week of the month, he’s wiping sticky honey off his calloused palm with a crumpled paper towel when a shadow falls across his booth. He looks up, and it’s Elara, the woman who moved into the run-down cottage three miles down his road three months prior. He’s only ever waved at her from the cab of his beat-up Ford F-150, never stopped to talk, too busy rushing to check on swarms or drop off bulk orders to local cafes to linger.
She leans across the rough pine booth edge, her forearm brushing his when she reaches for a small wooden sample stick of wildflower honey, and he freezes. He can smell lavender lotion mixed with the faint, sweet tang of cut grass on her clothes, and the noise of the market—kids screaming, a bluegrass band plucking a fiddle down the row, vendors yelling about heirloom tomatoes—fades to a low hum for a split second. She holds eye contact with him, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, and licks the honey off the sample stick slow, like she’s savoring it, not putting on a performative show.
“Your sourwood’s better than the stuff my grandpa used to harvest outside Knoxville,” she says, and he blinks, surprised. Most people can’t tell sourwood apart from regular clover honey unless it’s labeled, even the regulars who stop by his booth every week. She’s wearing a faded Flaming Lips t-shirt and frayed cutoff shorts, has a tiny black tattoo of a bee on her left wrist, and she’s standing close enough that he can see the faint smudge of dirt on her cheek, like she was digging in her tomato garden that morning.
He mumbles a thanks, fumbles for a jar to hand her, and drops it. It rolls off the booth edge, she bends down to grab it at the same time he does, their heads bump gently, and she laughs, a warm, throaty sound that makes his ears burn. She hands him the jar, her fingers brushing his when he takes it, and he notices her nails are chipped, no polish, like she works with her hands too, not just types at a desk all day.
He’s halfway through ringing her up when she says she saw half his west-facing hive stacks tilting last week when she was walking her rescue pit bull down the dirt road that cuts through the edge of his property. “Looked like the heavy rain shifted the cinder blocks they’re sitting on,” she says, and he nods. He’s known that for three days, has been putting off fixing it because his left knee has been screaming so bad he can barely climb the porch steps some nights.
She offers to help, says she worked hives with her grandpa every summer until she was 18, knows her way around a smoker and a hive tool, won’t mess anything up. He says no immediately, out of habit, says he’s got it handled. She smirks, pulls a crumpled napkin out of her crossbody bag, scribbles her phone number on it in blue ballpoint, and slides it across the booth to him, her palm brushing his wrist when she lets go. “I’ll be at your place at 10 a.m. tomorrow regardless,” she says, grinning. “I work for honey, not cash. And if you’re not there, I’ll just sit on your porch and eat all the peach pie I baked last night by myself.”
She picks up her jar of honey, winks, and walks away before he can protest. He stares at the napkin for 10 full minutes after she’s gone, ignoring customers who walk up to the booth, feeling a twist of guilt in his gut. He hasn’t so much as looked at another woman since Lila died, has told himself it’s disrespectful, that he’s better off alone with his bees and his old Willie Nelson records and his busted knee. He shoves the napkin in his jeans pocket when he packs up the booth that afternoon, almost throws it in the trash can by his truck three times on the drive home.
He sits on his porch that night, sipping cheap beer, staring at the hives he can see glowing gold in the sunset, and pulls the napkin out of his pocket. He thinks about the way she talked about bee foraging patterns like she actually cared, not like she was just making forced small talk, the way her arm felt when it brushed his, the way she didn’t ask him a single stupid question about honey’s “magical healing properties.” He texts her at 9:02 p.m., just two words: Iced tea? She writes back 10 seconds later: Bring extra. I hate weak tea.
She pulls into his driveway at 9:57 the next morning, heavy leather work gloves slung over her shoulder, a Tupperware of peach pie in one hand, her brindle pit bull trotting behind her on a leash. He’s standing on the porch holding two frosted glasses of iced tea, his knee wrapped in a neoprene brace, and he smiles when she walks up. She hands him the pie, their fingers brush again, and he doesn’t flinch this time. They walk toward the hives together, her boot scuffing his ankle when they step over a gnarled oak root at the edge of the field. When she reaches down to scratch the pit bull behind the ears, she leans into his side for half a second, warm and solid, and he doesn’t move away.
