Rafe Holloway, 62, spent 28 years as a forest fire smokejumper before trading his parachute for beehive boxes outside Missoula, Montana. He’s lived alone since his wife died in a car crash 12 years prior, and his most consistent personality flaw, per his former crew, is that he’d rather wrestle a grizzly off a hive than make small talk with a woman who makes his palms sweat. That’s why he’d spent the last eight months deliberately avoiding Elara Mendez, the 58-year-old former librarian who’d moved to town to open a used western bookstore, even when she dropped off free copies of old outdoor memoirs at his honey stand every other week.
The September fire department chili cookoff left him no escape. The event coordinator had stuck his chili booth right next to hers, the folding tables separated by less than a foot of pine-needle dusted asphalt. When they both reached for the wobbly folding table the fire chief had left propped against the booth line earlier, their hands brushed, and Rafe felt the rough callus on her index finger from years of turning book pages before he yanked his hand back like he’d touched a live wire. He set up his crockpot of wildflower honey and bison chili with sharp, stiff movements, pretending he didn’t notice when she leaned past him to grab a stack of paperbacks off the shared folding chair behind their booths, her flannel sleeve brushing his bicep, the scent of cedar and jasmine lotion wrapping around him for a beat before she pulled back. He cleared his throat, didn’t look up, and pretended to adjust the heat on his crockpot for the third time in five minutes.
The crowd rolled in an hour later, thick with the smell of beer and wood smoke from the fire pit set up near the bandstand. A group of his former smokejumper buddies stopped by, heckled him about his “grandpa hobby” beekeeping, and nudged each other when Elara leaned over the gap between their tables to hand Rafe a small paper cup of her own chili entry, spiked with dark chocolate and cinnamon. “Fancy city stuff,” he teased, taking a sip, and was surprised by how much he liked the rich, warm heat. She laughed, leaned in a little closer, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners, and said he sounded like every other old cowboy in town who acted like cinnamon was a foreign substance. He held her gaze for three seconds too long, then looked down at his scuffed work boots, his face hot enough to match the chili simmering next to him.
The conflict hit when a seven-year-old kid in a plastic fireman costume went sprinting past the booth, his toy axe catching the edge of Rafe’s open half-gallon jar of raw wildflower honey. The jar tipped, golden honey oozing fast straight toward Elara’s stack of first edition Louis L’Amour paperbacks, the ones she’d said were worth close to $400 total for the fundraiser. Rafe moved before he thought, lunging across the gap between the tables, his chest pressing firm against her back for half a second as he grabbed the jar right before the honey could hit the books, his free arm wrapping around her waist to steady himself when he almost tripped over the table leg. He jumped back like he’d been burned as soon as he set the jar upright, stammering an apology so fast the words ran together. She didn’t seem flustered at all, just laughed, and patted his arm, telling him she’d heard he was fast back in his jumping days, but she hadn’t believed it until now.
He couldn’t focus for the rest of the event. Every time she leaned over to hand a customer a book, every time she laughed at a dumb joke from a local firefighter, he found himself staring, his chest tight with a feeling he’d thought he’d buried a decade prior. Part of him hated it, hated that he was acting like a 16-year-old kid with his first crush, hated that he was even considering letting someone get close enough to hurt again. The other part of him, the part that was tired of going home to an empty cabin every night, tired of eating dinner alone, tired of never having anyone to show the new queen bee he’d found last week, was louder.
When the awards were handed out, he won first place for chili, she won first place for most funds raised for the department. The crowd filtered out as the sun dipped below the Bitterroot Mountains, painting the sky pink and orange, leaving the two of them alone folding up their tables and packing their supplies into the back of their trucks. She wiped her hands on her jeans, leaned against the side of her beat-up Ford Ranger, and looked him straight in the eye, no teasing smirk this time. “I got a bottle of 12-year-old bourbon back at the bookstore,” she said, nodding toward the downtown area three blocks away. “And a first edition of that smokejumping memoir you said you’ve been looking for since you were 20. You wanna come over?”
Rafe hesitated for two full seconds, his mind flashing to the framed photo of his wife on his kitchen counter, the quiet routine he’d built for himself that he’d thought was unbreakable. He’d spent 12 years convinced that letting anyone new in would be a betrayal, that he wasn’t allowed to be happy again after losing her. But he looked at Elara, standing there in her scuffed work boots, a smudge of chili on her cheek, and he knew he was done lying to himself. He grabbed the leftover half jar of his prize-winning honey off the folding table next to him, tucked it under his arm, and nodded.
He followed her to the passenger side of her truck, and when she pulled the door open for him, she let her hand rest warm and deliberate on his forearm for three full beats, no accident, no awkward pulling away, just the quiet, unspoken promise of something new.
