Maceo Ruiz swipes a bead of sweat off his brow with the back of a grease-stained flannel sleeve, the October Austin sun beating down on his farmers market booth hard enough to make the plastic sign for his Maceo’s Mouth Burner hot sauce warp at the edges. He’s restocking the ghost pepper blends when a shadow falls over the table, and he looks up expecting a regular, maybe the retired teacher who buys two jars of mango habanero every week for her grandkids.
It’s not her. The woman standing on the other side of the table has copper hair pulled back in a frayed braid, work boots caked in pale caliche dust, and a lanyard around her neck with a county extension agent ID clipped to it. Maceo’s jaw tightens immediately. He’s had run-ins with food safety inspectors before, most of them fresh out of college who couldn’t tell a scotch bonnet from a jalapeno and loved slapping fines on small vendors for trivial violations. She leans in, elbows brushing the edge of the table, and the scent of jasmine perfume cuts through the smell of roasted corn from the next booth over and the sharp, vinegary tang of his sauce samples. “Maceo, right? I’m Elara. I’ve been meaning to stop by for months. My cousin cried for 20 minutes after he tried your Reaper Roast at a cookout last spring.”
He blinks, the sharp retort about food safety permits dying on his tongue. He nods, grabs a tiny plastic sample cup, fills it halfway with the Reaper Roast, slides it across the table. Their fingers brush when she picks it up, her skin cool against his calloused, sauce-stained hand, and he feels a tiny, stupid jolt shoot up his arm he hasn’t felt since his divorce finalized eight years prior. She tosses the sample back, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t reach for the cup of water he keeps stacked next to the samples for wimps. She licks a stray drop of sauce off the corner of her lower lip, and Maceo has to look away for a second, pretending to adjust the stack of jars on the table so she doesn’t see the flush creeping up his neck.
“Good,” she says, grinning, and he notices a thin, pale scar along the left side of her jaw, like she got kicked by a pony when she was 10, same as his little sister Lila did when they were growing up on their family’s pepper farm outside San Antonio. “Most people can’t handle that without spitting. I run the community youth garden program for the county. We’ve got 12 kids growing heirloom peppers in the plot east of 35, and we’re looking for someone to teach them how to bottle sauce to sell for program funds. I thought you’d be the right fit.”
Maceo snorts, crosses his arms over his chest. He spent two years digging himself out of debt after his ex left him holding the bag for their failed taco shop, and he’s worked hard to keep his life small, low-stakes, no surprises. Adding a side gig teaching a bunch of kids to make sauce sounds like exactly the kind of complication he’s spent years avoiding. “I don’t do volunteer work,” he says, voice gruffer than he means it to be.
She doesn’t back off. She leans a little further across the table, close enough that he can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, and her knee brushes his where he’s sitting on a folding stool behind the booth. “It’s paid. And I looked you up, Maceo. I know you used to run that taco shop on East 6th before the divorce. I know you know how to run a small food business on a shoestring. The kids could learn more from you than any textbook I could hand them.”
He freezes. No one he’s met at the market has ever dug that far into his past, not even the regulars he’s chatted with for years. He stares at her, the hum of the market, the sound of a mariachi band playing two blocks over, the chatter of customers all fading into the background for a second. He’s spent eight years resenting anyone who even mentions his old shop, resenting the idea of letting anyone new get close enough to know that part of his life, but there’s no pity in her eyes, no judgment, just curiosity and a little bit of teasing, like she knows he’s hiding behind his gruff exterior.
The market closes an hour later, the last customers trickling out, the vendors around him folding up their booths and loading their trucks. Elara hangs around, leans against the pole next to his truck while he hauls cases of sauce to the bed, and when he grabs a case that’s heavier than he expects, she steps in, wraps her hand around his bicep to steady him, her palm warm through the thin fabric of his flannel. They heft the case into the truck together, and for three full seconds they’re standing close enough that he can feel her breath on his cheek, no words, no jokes, no talk of youth gardens or hot sauce.
He’s the one who asks her if she wants to get tacos and margaritas at the dive stand down the street, to talk through the program details, he adds, like it’s strictly business. She nods, grins, and hoists her work bag over her shoulder, walking next to him down the sidewalk, their shoulders brushing every few steps.
They sit at a chipped Formica table under a string of fairy lights, the ice in their frozen margaritas clinking against the sides of the plastic cups, the smell of grilled carne asada hanging thick in the air. She dabs a dollop of the Reaper Roast he slipped into his pocket on her carnitas taco, takes a bite, and snorts at his terrible joke about a batch of pepper mash he left out too long once that fermented so hard it blew the lid off the bucket and splattered all over his kitchen ceiling. When she laughs, her eyes crinkle at the corners, and he doesn’t overthink the way he reaches across the table, brushes a strand of wind-tousled copper hair off her forehead, his fingertips grazing the scar along her jaw as he pulls his hand back.
