Elias Voss, 53, makes his living restoring vintage campers out of a weathered cinder block barn tucked between two stands of white oak outside Asheville, North Carolina. He’s lived there eight years, ever since his divorce, and has one non-negotiable rule: no mixing business, pleasure, or small talk with anyone who lives within a two mile radius of his property. The rule came after his ex-wife left him for his former business partner, who’d rented the cottage three houses down from their old suburban home, and Elias has enforced it religiously, even turning down a $12,000 repair job from the guy who owns the farm next door last spring.
He only agreed to come to the county’s annual fall chili cook-off because his only local friend, a retired forest ranger named Jake, begged him, saying the beer was cold and the judging panel had gotten far less strict about letting attendees sample entries before voting. Elias showed up straight from the shop, work boots still caked with sawdust and contact cement residue, flannel shirt unbuttoned over a faded Johnny Cash tee, and parked himself by the craft beer truck, planning to stay exactly 45 minutes before heading back to sand the cabinetry on a 1972 Airstream he was fixing for a couple from Miami.
He’d been there 12 minutes when he spotted Marnie. She was the new tenant in the cottage half a mile down his dirt road, the one he’d only waved at twice from the cab of his pickup, once when she was hauling a stack of heavy cardboard boxes into the house, once when she was kneeling in her front yard planting wildflowers. She worked as a traveling book binder, he’d heard from Jake, drove a beat up forest green Subaru with a sticker of a quill pen on the back window, and had entered a green chili in the cook-off that was already generating buzz.
She caught him staring, waved, and cut through the crowd of people in flannel and cowboy hats to get to him. She was wearing a denim jacket with ink stains on the cuffs, a thin sweater, and a plaid flannel tied around her waist, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid, and she was holding a crock pot liner full of chili in one hand, a stack of tiny sample cups in the other. “You’re the camper guy, right?” she said, stopping so close he could smell lavender and cedar shampoo on her hair, over the scent of chili and smoked sausage drifting from the cook-off booths. “I’ve been meaning to track you down. I bought a busted 1998 pop-up camper for work trips, and I have zero clue how to fix the lift mechanism.”
Elias’s first instinct was to make an excuse, tell her he was booked six months out, send her to the repair shop in town that worked on regular RVs. Then she held out a sample cup of chili, and when he reached for it, his knuckles brushed hers. Her skin was warm, calloused at the fingertips from handling book cloth and bone folders, and he froze for half a second before grabbing the cup. The chili was spicier than he expected, loaded with hatch chiles and lime, and he coughed a little when he swallowed, his eyes watering. She laughed, a low, throaty sound, and reached out to pat his back, her hand lingering on his shoulder a beat longer than necessary. “Told you it had a kick,” she said, grinning, and he noticed a tiny smudge of chili powder on her left cheek, another on her lower lip.
They talked for 20 minutes, leaning against the side of the beer truck, and every few minutes someone would bump into one of them, forcing them closer, their shoulders brushing, her knee knocking against his once when a group of kids chasing a golden retriever darted past. She teased him about the sawdust in his hair, said she’d seen him out running on the dirt road at 6 a.m. most mornings, that he always looked like he was running from something. Elias didn’t know how to respond to that—no one had paid that much attention to his routine in years, not since the divorce. He was torn, half of him screaming to stick to his rule, make an excuse and leave, the other half unable to look away from her eyes, the way she bit her lower lip when she was thinking about what to say next, the faint scar on her right wrist from what looked like an old knife cut.
They fumbled through the first verse, Elias stepping on her boot once, her laughing so hard she leaned her head against his shoulder for three full measures, her breath warm against his neck. He could feel the heat of her body through his flannel, his heart racing so fast he thought it might beat right out of his chest, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t think about his rule, didn’t think about his ex-wife, didn’t think about the Airstream waiting for him back at the shop. When the song ended, she tilted her head up to look at him, her eyes bright, and said, “For the record, I don’t just want you to fix my camper. I want you to stay for dinner after you do. Maybe longer.”
Elias didn’t even hesitate. He nodded, his throat too tight to talk for a second, and when she laced her fingers through his to lead him back to the beer truck, he didn’t pull away. They left the cook-off an hour later, Elias stopping by his barn first to grab the dog-eared pop-up camper repair manual he’d had since he was 20, and a six pack of the hazy IPA he’d been drinking. She followed him down the dirt road in her Subaru, red and gold fall leaves skittering across the gravel behind their tires, and when he pulled into her driveway, she was already standing on the porch holding the screen door open, the warm, sweet scent of old paper and leather from her book binding workshop drifting out to meet him before he even turned off his truck.
