Moe Sorrentino is 57, a retired custom saltwater fishing rod builder who still takes a handful of private orders a month out of his garage in south Tampa. His biggest flaw, per his best friend Jimmy, is that he’s spent the last eight years treating any hint of romantic interest like a hook set from a 100-pound tarpon: he yanks back hard and runs the other way. He blames it on his ex-wife leaving him for a real estate agent who wore boat shoes without socks, says he’s got better things to do than play dating app games at his age, even if Jimmy teases him nonstop about spending every weekend fishing alone at the Skyway piers.
Jimmy dragged him to the St. John’s Catholic Church fish fry on a humid April Friday, mostly because Moe owed him for helping haul a 12-foot workbench out of his old shop last month. Moe was hovering by the beer cooler, paper plate loaded with fried catfish and extra hushpuppies, doing his best to avoid the silent auction tables where a group of retirees were bidding on a golf package he couldn’t care less about, when he turned too fast to grab a second IPA and spilled half the can down the front of a woman’s cream linen button-down.
He was ready to mumble an apology and bolt until he looked up and recognized her. It was Lena Marquez, the county parks and rec director he’d left three unhinged voicemails for in the last month, after she pushed through a rule limiting weekend pier fishing to four hours per person to cut overcrowding. He’d called her a pencil-pushing bureaucrat who’d never held a fishing rod in her life, may have made a snarky comment about her official headshot looking like she’d never spent a day outside in her life.
Instead of snapping, she laughed, dabbing at the beer stain with a crumpled napkin she pulled from her jeans pocket. “Figured I’d run into you sooner or later,” she said, leaning in a little so he could hear her over the classic rock blaring from the gym speakers. “Your voicemails are way more entertaining than the three-hour budget meetings I sit through every Tuesday.”
She was standing close enough he could smell jasmine hand lotion mixed with the faint tang of fried fish and cigarette smoke off the guys standing by the exit. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose braid, a thick streak of silver running from her temple back to the nape of her neck, and she kept glancing at the ragged scar across his left knuckle, the one he got when a carbon fiber rod blank exploded in his vice two years prior. When she reached for a hushpuppy off the edge of his plate, her forearm brushed his, calloused from hauling picnic tables and hiking trail gear, and she didn’t pull away, held eye contact a full beat longer than polite strangers ever do.
Moe’s brain short-circuited. He’d spent weeks fantasizing about telling her off to her face, but now all he could notice was that her eyes were the exact color of the abalone shell he used for inlay on his high-end rod handles. She teased him for the voicemails, admitted she’d looked up his business Instagram after the first one, thought the custom inlay work he did was some of the coolest craft she’d seen in the area. “I grew up fishing with my dad off the Anna Maria piers,” she said, and Moe felt his face heat up, embarrassed by how rude he’d been.
She nodded toward the gym exit 10 feet away, said she had a cooler of craft IPA in the back of her F150 parked by the soccer fields, if he wanted to get away from the noise. He hesitated for half a second, remembered all the times he’d turned down invitations to hang out with anyone who wasn’t Jimmy or his cousin, and nodded.
They sat on the tailgate of her beat-up 2012 F150, crumbs from the leftover hushpuppies sticking to their jeans, as she explained the four-hour pier rule was only temporary. She’d been fighting the county commission for six months to fund a 200-foot extension to the north Skyway pier, exclusively for avid anglers, and the vote just passed two days prior. She hadn’t announced it yet, wanted to run it by the local fishing groups first. “You’re the first person outside my office who knows,” she said, leaning into him a little so her knee pressed solidly against his, the denim of her jeans rough against his.
Moe apologized for the voicemails, said he’d been an asshole, and she laughed, nudging his shoulder with hers. “I like that you care that much,” she said. “Most people just send a generic angry email and forget about it. You screamed about ‘the soul of public fishing’ for 90 seconds. I replayed that one twice.”
He offered to build her a custom rod, free of charge, if she wanted to learn how to target tarpon when the pier extension opens. She said yes, asked if he’d take her out to the south pier this Saturday, said she’d bring the beer, he could bring the bait. He pulled his phone out to save her number, noticed his hands were shaking a little, a thing that hadn’t happened since he was 16 asking his high school crush to prom. He typed her name in, hit save, and glanced over at her, grinning when she winked at him over the rim of her beer bottle.
