Rafe Mendez, 52, retired air traffic controller, leaned against a splintered cedar post at the coastal Oregon town’s annual salmon festival beer tent, cold IPA sweating through the paper napkin wrapped around its base. He’d bailed on the local church’s pre-festival pancake breakfast that morning specifically to avoid the new pastor, who’d spent the last three months badgering him to join the men’s Bible study group, so he rolled his eyes when he spotted the pastor’s wife weaving through the crowd of screaming kids and sunburnt tourists toward him. The rubber duck race down the creek had just wrapped, and the air smelled like grilled salmon, burnt sugar from the cotton candy stand, and damp pine.
She was 48, freckled across the nose and bare shoulders, a smudge of charcoal streaked high on her left cheek from manning the community grill earlier, cutoff jeans showing a faint silvery scar running up her right calf he’d never noticed before. She carried a crumpled paper plate heaped with blackened salmon and greasy hushpuppies, and when she sat down on the splintered picnic bench next to him, her bare arm brushed his hard enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin through the thin cotton of his faded work shirt. She smelled like coconut shampoo and burnt cedar, and when she nudged his scuffed work boot with her own, he didn’t move away.
“Pastor’s looking for you,” she said, grinning, and took a bite of salmon, juice running down her chin. She wiped it off with the back of her hand, and Rafe felt his throat go dry. He’d lived alone in his tiny off-grid cabin three miles out of town since his wife left him eight years prior, had convinced himself he liked the quiet, the routine of fixing old outboard motors in his garage all weekend, no one asking him where he was going or when he’d be back. But he’d spent the last two months noticing her, when she walked her fluffy golden retriever past his house at dawn, when she waved at him from the passenger seat of the pastor’s beat-up pickup at the grocery store, and a stupid, reckless part of him had wondered if she noticed him back.
He told himself it was wrong, that she was married to the most well-liked man in town, that the whole small town would gossip for months if they so much as spent ten minutes alone together, that he was too old for this kind of messy drama. But when she laughed at his joke about the pastor’s habit of burning every piece of meat he touched so bad it was unrecognizable, her hand landed on his forearm, calloused from hauling fishing nets during the summer she’d spent on an Alaskan trawler before she met her 12-years-older husband, and he didn’t flinch. Her fingers stayed pressed to his skin for three full seconds, and he could feel the rough callus on her index finger, catching on the fine hair on his arm, and his pulse spiked like it used to when he was guiding three incoming planes through a thunderstorm on zero sleep, every nerve ending firing sharp and bright.
Rafe hesitated for half a second, thought about the cold, empty cabin waiting for him, thought about the pastor’s endless sermons on sin and temptation, thought about how long it had been since someone looked at him like he was something worth wanting instead of a grumpy old recluse who fixed boat motors for cash under the table. He nodded, and she stood up, lacing her fingers through his, her hand warm and rough in his. They slipped out the back of the beer tent, no one paying them any mind, and walked down the packed dirt path toward the beach, the sound of the band fading behind them, the crash of the ocean getting louder with every step.
She stopped ten minutes later at a half-buried driftwood log next to a pre-stacked fire pit some teens had left earlier that day, pulled a cheap plastic lighter out of the pocket of the flannel shirt tied around her waist, and lit the dry kindling. Flames licked up the cedar logs, casting wobbly golden light over her freckled cheeks, and when she sat down next to him, leaning her shoulder firm against his, he wrapped his arm around her waist, and didn’t let go.
