Rafe Mendez, 53, has owned his small apiary outside Asheville for 13 years, and he’s avoided every local fall harvest festival for the last eight. The only reason he’s here this year is his regular farmers’ market got rained out the week prior, and he’s got three cases of small-batch sourwood honey he needs to move before the cold sets in. He’s gruff with anyone who lingers too long at his booth asking personal questions, a habit he picked up after his ex-wife left him for a Charlotte realtor, convinced the bee farm was a midlife crisis waste of money. He’s hauling a crate of sample jars from the bed of his rusted F-150 when his boot catches on a loose hay bale, and he goes stumbling sideways until a firm hand wraps around his elbow, steadying him.
He looks down first, at chipped terracotta nail polish on short, work-roughened fingers, then up, and his chest goes tight. It’s Clara Voss, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the kid he used to leave jars of honey on her grandma’s porch for when she was recovering from appendicitis at 18. He hasn’t seen her in 10 years, not since the year before the divorce. She’s 48 now, her dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, pulled back in a messy braid, wearing a flannel shirt dotted with apple pie crumbs, a volunteer apron tied around her waist. She runs the baked goods booth next to his, she says, laughing when he blinks like he’s seen a ghost. She moved back to the area three months prior, retired from her ER nursing job in Philly after a particularly brutal stretch of pandemic shifts, looking for something slower, quieter than the constant chaos of a city emergency room.
He’s on guard at first, waiting for the dig about how he ruined her cousin’s life, but it never comes. She leans against the edge of his booth when the foot traffic slows, sipping spiced cider from a paper cup, and tells him she always thought her cousin was an idiot for walking away from him and the farm. She’d seen how hard he worked to build it, how happy he was when he was out checking hives at dawn, covered in bee pollen and grinning like an idiot. He doesn’t know what to say, so he hands her a free jar of sourwood, his best, most limited stock, and she grins, her fingers brushing his calloused, hive-scraped knuckles when she takes it. The contact sends a jolt up his arm he hasn’t felt in years.
The afternoon drifts by, slow and easy. She leans across the booth to pass a customer a honey stick, her hip pressing into his, warm through the thin fabric of his worn work shirt, and she doesn’t step back immediately, just glances up at him from under her lashes, a little smirk playing on her mouth. When a toddler knocks over a jar of creamed honey, they both bend down to mop it up, their heads bumping, and she laughs so hard she snorts, her hand resting on his knee for two full beats before she pulls away to grab more paper towels. He can smell cinnamon and peppermint lip balm on her, and the faint, sharp scent of antiseptic that still clings to her clothes from her old job. He’s fighting it every step of the way, telling himself it’s wrong, that she’s still family even if his ex is gone, that everyone in this small, gossipy town will talk if they so much as hold hands in public. But every time she laughs at one of his dry, dumb jokes about bee stings and bad mountain weather, the voice in his head gets a little quieter.
By dusk, a cold, drizzling rain picks up, and the festival organizers start herding stragglers out. He’s packing up his last crate of honey when he sees her struggling to lift a stack of heavy cast iron pie tins into the bed of her beat-up pickup. He walks over to help, grabbing half the stack, and his boot slips on a patch of waterlogged hay as he climbs up into the bed. He stumbles backward, his back hitting the cold metal side of the truck, and she falls forward into him, her hands slamming down on his shoulders to steady herself, her chest pressed tight to his. The rain is drumming so loud on the truck’s roof they can barely hear the last of the bluegrass band playing across the field, and no one’s nearby, everyone already rushing to their cars to beat the storm. She doesn’t move away, just holds his eye contact, her breath warm on his jaw, and he can see the flecks of gold in her dark brown eyes, the little scar above her left eyebrow from when she fell off a horse at his farm when she was 20.
He kisses her before he can talk himself out of it, soft at first, like he’s testing the waters, and she kisses him back immediately, her hands tangling in the short, graying hair at the nape of his neck. She tastes like apple cider and peppermint, and her hands are warm even through the cold, rain-damp fabric of his shirt. He doesn’t care who sees, doesn’t care what anyone says, for the first time in eight years he doesn’t feel like he’s holding his breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When they pull apart, she’s grinning, wiping a smudge of honey off his cheek with her thumb. She teases him that he took long enough to make a move, she’d been dropping obvious hints all afternoon. He laughs, a real, loud laugh he hasn’t let out since before the divorce. She asks if he wants to come back to her little cabin just down the road from his apiary, she has a bottle of 12-year bourbon she’s been saving for a good occasion, and a loaf of sourdough she baked that morning that pairs perfect with his honey. He nods, already climbing out of the truck bed to lock up his own booth. He grabs the last remaining jar of his rarest, two-year aged sourwood honey from his crate, tucking it under his arm, already reaching for his truck keys to follow her down the mountain.
