Roman Voss, 52, had spent the last eight years perfecting a routine so rigid he could tell you the exact minute the first peach vendor set up their stall at the weekly west Michigan farmers market: 8:17 a.m., no exceptions. A former high school chemistry teacher turned beekeeper and small-batch mead maker, he’d walked away from public education the week his divorce finalized, trading lesson plans for hive boxes and grading rubrics for fermentation logs. His biggest flaw, as his only remaining friend liked to tease, was that he treated every unexpected deviation from his schedule like a personal attack, going so far as to turn down three separate invitations to tap takeovers in Grand Rapids because they fell on the same day he usually inspected his hives. He even kept a whiteboard above his kitchen sink mapped out with feeding schedules, bottling dates, and market drop-off times, color-coded with the same dry erase markers he’d used for lecture notes.
The mid-June air hung thick and sweet the morning she walked up to his stand, heavy with the smell of grilled bratwurst from the food truck at the end of the row and overripe strawberries from the stand next to his. He was wiping down a sample glass with a paper towel when he spotted her, first noticing the thin, silvery scar snaking across her left wrist before his eyes lifted to her face. He knew that scar. He’d put aloe on it 12 years earlier, when she’d burned herself on a Bunsen burner while rushing to pick up her son Jesse, his favorite lab aide, after school.
He froze mid-wipe, half-convinced he was imagining her. She’d moved to Chicago shortly after Jesse graduated, he’d heard, and he hadn’t thought of her in years outside the occasional random memory of her showing up to parent-teacher conferences in that same soft yellow sundress, laughing at his terrible jokes about stoichiometry. He felt a sharp, unfamiliar twist of guilt in his gut when he realized he was staring at her hips, at the way the cotton fabric pulled tight when she leaned in to read the handwritten labels on his mead bottles. He told himself it was wrong, that she was Jesse’s mom, that he was still the same boring teacher she’d known a decade prior, that he had no business feeling that low, thrumming pull of attraction.
“Roman? Right?” She smiled, and the little crinkle at the corner of her eye was exactly the same as he remembered. Her voice was a little raspier than it used to be, like she’d spent too many years cheering at football games or smoking cigarettes on porch steps. She leaned a little closer, and he caught the scent of jasmine lotion mixed with cherry lip gloss, cutting through the sharp, honeyed smell of the mead on the table between them. “I’m Clara Bennett. Jesse was your lab assistant senior year, 2011? I just moved back to town last week, renting my dad’s old cottage on the lake. I saw your name on the stand sign and had to stop.”
He fumbled for a sample cup, his knuckles brushing hers when he passed it to her. The contact was tiny, accidental, but he felt it all the way up his arm, hot and bright. “Wildflower mead,” he said, clearing his throat. “Fermented six months, 12% ABV. Not too sweet. We get most of the nectar from the clover and apple blossoms on my property.”
She took a sip, her eyes widening a little when she swallowed. “That’s incredible. I always thought you were way too smart to be stuck grading high school lab reports where half the kids spelled ‘beaker’ wrong.” She leaned against the edge of the table, her shoulder brushing his bicep when a group of graduation-capped teens walked past, yelling and waving at friends. “I used to make up excuses to come pick Jesse up early, you know? Just so I could hang around your classroom for five minutes and talk to you. My ex-husband always thought I was crazy for volunteering to chaperone every single science fair.”
Roman’s throat went dry. He’d spent so long convinced he was invisible, that his grumpy demeanor and bee-stung knuckles and habit of rambling about hive dynamics would scare anyone off, that the admission hit him like a punch to the chest. The guilt he’d felt ten minutes earlier warred with a giddy, almost teenage excitement he hadn’t felt since he was 20, sneaking beer into his college dorm room. He’d spent years writing off any kind of connection as too much work, too likely to end in the same messy way his marriage had, but he couldn’t make himself step back from her.
He didn’t even hesitate when she asked if he wanted to grab a beer at the dive bar down the street once the market closed. He told the kid he paid to pack up his stand to handle it, and he didn’t even care that it threw off his entire hive inspection schedule for the day, or that he’d have to redo the whole whiteboard calendar when he got home.
They sat in a booth in the back of the bar, the neon “Coors” sign casting pink light across her face. Her foot brushed his under the table halfway through their second round, and she didn’t move it. She told him about her divorce, about how her ex had cheated on her with his secretary, about how she’d driven 12 hours straight to get back to Michigan, singing off-key to 90s country the whole way. He told her about the bees, about how he’d almost given up on the mead business two years in when a bear destroyed half his hives, about how he’d forgotten what it felt like to talk to someone who didn’t just ask him for bulk honey orders or discounts on wedding mead.
The sun was starting to set by the time they left the bar, painting the sky in streaks of tangerine and lavender. They walked down the path to the lake shore, the grass cool and damp under their sneakers. She leaned her head on his shoulder when they stopped at the edge of the water, and he wrapped his arm around her waist, his palm settling warm against the soft fabric of her dress. She tilted her chin up to kiss him, and he didn’t overthink it, didn’t waste time worrying about whether it was wrong or too fast or going to mess up his carefully constructed routine.
He tastes cherry lip gloss and the faint tang of the wildflower mead she’d sipped at his stand six hours earlier, and can’t remember the last time he didn’t mind his schedule getting turned completely upside down.
