Rafe Marquez, 52, has made a living tending wild honey bee hives across Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau for 17 years, and his worst flaw is that he holds petty grudges like they’re prize jars of his sourwood reserve. Eight years prior, his wife left him for a software salesman who’d moved to the area to work remotely, and he’s written off every out-of-state transplant that’s flooded the small towns around Knoxville ever since, convinced none of them care enough to learn the land, let alone respect it. For the past three months, his main target has been the woman running the hot sauce booth directly next to his at the weekly farmers’ market, the one who blasts 90s hip-hop so loud his honey tasting customers jump mid-sip, whose line wraps around the produce stand and blocks access to his stack of jarred comb honey. He hasn’t even bothered to learn her name, only refers to her as “the Brooklyn girl” when he complains to his regulars.
It’s the last market of the season, mid-September, and the air smells like crushed apple cider donuts and fallen hickory leaves when the sky opens up without warning. Rain slams down so hard it bounces off the asphalt, wind whipping through the booths hard enough to yank her canvas awning clean off its poles. She yelps, grabbing for her stack of glass sauce bottles before they topple, and Rafe moves on instinct, catching the top of the stack right as it leans over the edge of her table. Their hands brush, his calloused from prying open hive boxes and pulling splinters out of his palms, hers stained orange at the nail beds from chopping habaneros, warm and rough. He doesn’t pull away for three full seconds, long enough to notice she has a tiny silver hoop through her left nostril and a smudge of paprika on her left cheekbone.
They both scramble under the remaining awning over his booth, pressed so close together their shoulders rub every time one of them shifts. The rain drums so loud on the canvas they have to lean in to hear each other, and he can smell her perfume, something woody and warm, mixed with smoked chipotle and rain on hot asphalt. She smirks up at him, and he realizes he’s been staring. “Took you long enough to talk to me, grumpy honey guy,” she says, and he’s so thrown he snorts before he can stop himself. She tells him her name is Lila, she moved to the area six months prior after quitting her job as a line cook at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Brooklyn, she’s been buying his small-batch sourwood honey from his self-serve stand up on the plateau for months to use in her best-selling hot sauce, the one with the bee sticker on the label that he’d noticed but never thought twice about.
He feels stupid for all the times he’d rolled his eyes at her, assuming she was just another transplant passing through. She leans past him to grab a sauce sample cup, her arm brushing the scar on his left forearm, the one he got when a hive swarmed him early in his career. She pauses, running her index finger lightly over the raised pale skin, and his breath catches. “Bee sting?” she asks, and he nods, too flustered to speak. He tastes the sauce when she shoves the cup at him, sharp with ghost pepper, smoky with mesquite, then sweet with the familiar tang of his own honey, a taste he’s known for half his life.
The rain slows to a drizzle 20 minutes later, most of the other vendors already packed up and gone, the parking lot half empty. She hefts the last box of sauce into the back of her beat-up Subaru, the rear window covered in stickers of chili peppers and bees, and he blurts out the invite before he can overthink it, asks her to come to his property that night, he’s got a bonfire going to burn old worn-out hive frames, a cooler of local beer and honey butter cornbread cooling on his counter. She laughs, bright over distant thunder, pulls a Sharpie from her jacket pocket, scribbles her number on the back of a hot sauce label, shoves it into his flannel shirt pocket. She says she’ll be there at 8, then leans in and presses a quick, warm kiss to his cheek, the spot tingling long after she pulls away.
He stands in the damp parking lot watching her taillights fade down the road, then pulls the crumpled label out of his pocket, running his thumb over the smudged black ink of her number. He pops the last drop of the hot sauce sample he’d been holding into his mouth, the heat spreading slow across his tongue, sweet and sharp and nothing like he’d expected.
