Ronan O’Malley, 59, spent 32 years running commercial salmon fishing boats out of Oregon’s Tillamook Bay before a blown rotator cuff forced him to sell his vessel and open a tiny bait and tackle shop right off the boardwalk. Eight years prior, his wife left him for a Portland real estate broker who wore loafers without socks and had never held a fishing rod in his life, so Ronan had made a deliberate habit of keeping to himself, avoiding town events unless he was strong-armed into showing up. That’s how he ended up at the annual coastal seafood festival in mid-July, a 20-pound cooler of smoked sockeye slung over one shoulder, his well-worn flannel dotted with fish slime he hadn’t bothered to scrub off, baseball cap pulled low to avoid eye contact with neighbors who’d badger him to donate to every fundraiser from the high school football team to the local animal shelter.
He dropped the cooler off with the festival volunteer manning the food tent, nodded when she thanked him, and turned to slip out before anyone could corner him, cutting through the pie-judging tent to skip the crowded main path. He wasn’t looking where he was going, and his shoulder collided with a woman holding a tray of blueberry pie slices, sending one sloshing off its paper plate and down the front of his flannel. He swore under his breath, then froze when he looked up and saw Elara Voss, the 57-year-old librarian who’d moved to town three months prior, her hazel eyes wide with apology, a smudge of blueberry filling on her lower lip. Everyone in town talked about her like she was a porcelain doll: she ran the children’s story hour every Saturday, volunteered at the local church’s food bank, and had turned down three separate date offers from the town’s most eligible bachelors in the last two months, leading everyone to assume she was either celibate or still hung up on an ex back in Seattle.
She grabbed a handful of napkins from the table beside her, stepped close enough that Ronan could smell the lavender lotion she wore mixed with the faint, dusty scent of old paper that clung to her clothes, and dabbed at the blueberry stain on his sleeve. Her knuckles brushed the thick, silvery scar on his forearm, the one he’d gotten when a winch snapped on his boat 12 years prior, and she paused for half a second, her thumb brushing the raised edge of the scar before she seemed to remember herself, stepping back a foot but not breaking eye contact. She said she’d been stopping by his shop twice a week for the last month, hoping to catch him when he wasn’t busy, wanting to ask if he’d take her out on the small recreational boat he kept docked behind his shop—she’d never been salmon fishing, and every other fisherman in town made lewd jokes about “teaching her the ropes” that made her skin crawl.
Ronan’s first instinct was to make an excuse, to say the boat was broken, that he didn’t take passengers, that he was too busy. He’d spent years convincing himself he was too rough around the edges, too set in his ways, too old to be anyone’s first choice, that anyone showing him interest was just after free gear or a donation to the library’s new book fund. But he couldn’t look away from the way her freckles popped across her nose when she smiled, the way the summer wind caught her linen dress so it pressed against her hip for a split second, the way she didn’t fidget or look away when he stared at her, like she was actually waiting for his answer instead of just being polite. He found himself saying he was free the next morning, if she didn’t mind waking up at 6 a.m., if she didn’t mind getting her shoes dirty, if she didn’t mind that the boat had a broken radio and smelled like diesel and old bait.
She lit up, grinning so wide the corners of her eyes crinkled, and grabbed his wrist to pull him out of the tent and down the boardwalk toward his shop, her small, warm hand wrapped around his calloused forearm so tight he could feel the callus on her index finger from turning thousands of book pages. She stopped at his shop’s back dock, and he grabbed two cold IPAs from the mini fridge he kept behind the counter, sitting down on the weathered wooden planks beside her, their knees knocking together when she shifted to face him. She told him she’d left her ex-husband of 25 years because he refused to do anything spontaneous, that he’d rather watch golf on TV every weekend than take a day trip to the coast, that she’d moved to the small town specifically to do all the wild, unplanned things she’d spent her whole adult life putting off. She admitted she’d been watching him fix fishing reels through his shop window for weeks, that she loved his gruff act, that she thought the way he talked to the teenage boys who came into his shop for bait, giving them free lures and telling them old fishing stories, was the sexiest thing she’d seen in years.
Ronan felt the tightness in his chest he’d carried for 8 years loosen, just a little. He’d spent so long thinking he was broken, that no one would ever want the messy, scarred version of him that smelled like fish smoke and diesel, that he’d forgotten what it felt like to have someone actually look at him, not just the grumpy bait shop owner everyone asked for donations from. He didn’t say any of that, though, just took a sip of his beer, and when she leaned in, her face inches from his, he didn’t pull away. The kiss was slow, sweet, the taste of blueberry pie and iced tea on her tongue, and when she pulled back, she tucked a crumpled ticket for the festival’s fireworks show that night into the pocket of his flannel, saying they could do that first, before the fishing trip.
