Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 31 years as a state fisheries biologist tracking Pacific salmon runs before he retired to run a tiny bait and tackle shop tucked between a laundromat and a taco stand in coastal Newport, Oregon. His biggest flaw, as his only remaining sibling likes to remind him every Thanksgiving, is that he’s clung to the same grudge for 12 straight years, ever since his wife left him for a wind turbine technician half his age. He’d sworn off anything resembling romance the day she drove away with the dog and their good set of cast iron pans, convinced anyone over 50 chasing dates was just embarrassing themselves to outrun the creak of their own joints.
He’d walked into the annual Newport Seafood Festival that August afternoon planning to do three things: eat two pounds of grilled Dungeness crab, drink three cold IPAs, and avoid the woman who’d opened the vegan bakery two blocks from his shop six weeks prior. Elara Voss, 58, had marched into his store her second week in town, carrying a stack of pamphlets about lead sinker poisoning in seabirds, and had tried to convince him to swap his entire inventory for non-toxic alternatives. He’d laughed in her face, told her hippie nonsense didn’t sell to commercial fishermen, and had ignored every one of her friendly waves in the grocery store parking lot ever since.
The first IPA went down fast, cold and bitter against his tongue, the smell of fried cod and garlic butter thick in the humid air. The bluegrass band playing near the crab shack was halfway through a cover of a Johnny Cash song he’d loved in college when he turned too fast to avoid a kid chasing a seagull with a cotton candy cone, and sloshed half his second beer down the front of a cream linen shirt. He looked up, ready to apologize, and froze. It was Elara. The beer had soaked through the shirt just above her collarbone, darkening the fabric, and she was staring at him, one eyebrow raised, a half smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
He stammered an apology, fumbling for the stack of napkins in his pocket, and when he reached out to dab at the spill before he thought better of it, his knuckles brushed the soft skin of her throat. She didn’t flinch. She just took the napkin from him, dabbing at the fabric herself, and said she’d been meaning to corner him anyway, that she’d found a supplier for non-toxic sinkers that were the same price as the lead ones, if he’d just stop being stubborn enough to listen.
They ended up leaning against the split-rail fence surrounding the beer tent, talking long after his beer was empty and the sun started dipping low enough to paint the ocean gold. She was closer than she needed to be, her shoulder brushing his every time she laughed, and he kept catching the scent of jasmine shampoo mixed with the salt of the ocean on her skin. Her auburn hair had streaks of silver running through it, pulled back in a loose braid that kept falling over her shoulder, and every time she tucked it behind her ear, he’d catch a flash of tiny gold hoop earrings. He kept waiting for the familiar irritation to rise up, the urge to brush her off and go back to his crab, but it never came. Instead, he found himself telling her about the salmon runs he used to track, about the time he’d spent three weeks camped on a remote riverbank counting spawning fish, and she listened, her hazel eyes fixed on his, no eye rolling, no jokes about him being a boring old bureaucrat.
He almost said no when she asked if he wanted to walk down to the jetty to watch the sunset, away from the noise of the festival. The voice in the back of his head was screaming that this was exactly the midlife crisis nonsense he’d spent 12 years mocking, that she was going to lecture him about lead sinkers the whole time, that he was going to make a fool of himself. But he nodded anyway.
The sand crunched under their work boots as they walked, the sound of the bluegrass band fading behind them, replaced by the low crash of waves against the rocks. When they reached the end of the jetty, she leaned against a weathered wooden piling, turning to face him, the sun turning the edges of her hair pink. She told him she hadn’t come to town to change anything, that she’d moved here after her husband died of lung cancer two years prior, that she’d just liked arguing with him because he was the only person in town who didn’t tiptoe around her like she was a grieving ghost.
He reached out before he could think better of it, brushing a fleck of pink cotton candy off her cheek, his thumb grazing the soft skin of her jawline. She didn’t pull away. She leaned in a little, her hand coming to rest on his forearm, the calluses on her fingers from kneading bread rough against the sunburnt skin of his arm. The kiss was slow, salty from the wind on their lips, no hurry, no expectation, just the soft press of her mouth against his, the sound of seagulls crying overhead and waves hitting the rocks below.
They stayed on the jetty until the sun sank all the way below the horizon, the sky fading from tangerine to deep indigo, the first stars pricking through the dark. He asked her if she wanted to come back to his cabin for coffee, that he had the good stuff, the dark roast she’d mentioned liking at the grocery store. She smiled, squeezing his forearm where her hand still rested, and said yes.
He held the door of his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 open for her, his palm brushing the small of her back as she climbed in.
