Rafe Mendez, 53, has run his small-batch meadery out of a repurposed apple packing barn outside Grand Rapids for 11 years. His biggest flaw is that he’s shut down every romantic advance since his ex-wife left him for a travel influencer she met at a mead tasting he’d hosted, convinced anyone who shows interest in him only cares about his award-winning brews or the 12-acre orchard he inherited from his grandpa. He’s skipped every town picnic, mixer, and charity fundraiser for 7 years running, just to avoid the local busybodies who treat his single status like a community project.
The July farmers market is sweltering, humidity so thick it clings to the back of his throat when he breathes. He’s wiped his sticky hands on his oil-stained work jeans a dozen times in the last hour, the hem of his cutoff gray tee soaked through with sweat at the collar. The bluegrass band at the end of the row is plowing through a cover of “Folsom Prison Blues,” kids dart between stalls chasing a stray golden retriever, and the air smells like grilled sweet corn, cut peaches, and the sharp, honeyed tang of the blackberry mead he’s pouring samples of.
He doesn’t see her walk up until her shoulder brushes his bicep, warm and bare through the thin fabric of his shirt. He freezes, half-way to setting a sample cup down on the counter. No one has touched him that casually, that unselfconsciously, in close to 8 years.
She’s 48, he knows, the landscape architect who bought the run-down farmhouse a mile down the road from his orchard three months prior. He’s seen her driving past his gate at dusk most nights, windows down, indie folk blaring from her beat-up Subaru, and he’s left three jars of his wildflower honey on her front porch anonymously, just because he noticed she’d been planting pollinator gardens along her fence line. He’s avoided every attempt the diner waitresses have made to introduce them, convinced she’s just another city transplant looking for a fun rural fling before she gets bored and moves back to Chicago.
She leans in over the counter, auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid, freckles dusting her bare shoulders, and her knee brushes his where they’re both pressed up against the rough pine edge of the stall. “The lady at the jam stall said your mead’s the only thing in this county that won’t give me a hangover worse than the renaissance faire I went to last month,” she says, holding eye contact for three full beats, no quick polite glance away, and he can smell pine and lemon on her, like she’d been out cutting cedar before she came to the market.
He snorts, pours her a sample of the cherry mead, and their fingers brush when he hands her the small plastic cup. Her nails are chipped, caked with a little dark dirt at the edges, no fancy polish, and he relaxes a fraction. For the next 15 minutes they banter, her making fun of the overpriced goat milk soap stall two rows over, him complaining about the raccoons that keep breaking into his honey supers. He finds himself leaning in closer than he should, elbows on the counter, and for a second he forgets to be cynical, forgets to wait for the other shoe to drop, for her to ask for a discount or a free bottle to post about on social media.
A kid chasing the golden retriever slams into the side of the stall, and a full jar of raw honey teeters off the edge of the counter. They both lunge for it at the same time, their hands crashing together first, then wrapping around the glass jar, and they fumble for a second before they get it steady, faces only six inches apart, breath hot against each other’s cheeks. She doesn’t pull away.
“For the record,” she says, grinning, the gold flecks in her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, “I didn’t come here for mead. I’ve been driving past your orchard every night for two weeks trying to work up the nerve to stop. The diner ladies were right, by the way. You are a grump. But you also leave really good honey on people’s porches.”
He blinks, shocked he got caught, and laughs so hard his sides hurt. He admits he’d left the jars, that he’d been watching her plant her wildflowers, that he’d avoided her because he was sure she’d be nothing like he hoped. He asks her if she wants to come back to the orchard after the market closes, says he’s got a test batch of apple cinnamon mead that’s not ready for the public yet, and he’s got burgers in the cooler he can throw on the grill.
She nods, pulls a crumpled napkin out of her pocket, scribbles her number on it, and tucks it into the front pocket of his work jeans, her fingers brushing the soft skin of his hip through the worn denim. Before she turns to leave, she leans in, presses a quick, soft kiss to his stubbled jaw, warm and sweet.
He stands there holding the honey jar, watching her walk away through the crowd, the napkin crinkling against his thigh, and for the first time in 8 years, he doesn’t feel the urge to make an excuse to bail.
