Rafe Mendoza, 53, spent 22 years leaping out of planes into wildfires before he traded his jump suit for a leather stitching awl and moved to the hills outside Knoxville. His biggest flaw, the one he’d never admit to out loud, was that he’d spent the seven years since his divorce treating any attempt at casual human connection like a blazing treeline he had to contain. He only agreed to set up a booth at the county fall beer festival because his 19-year-old niece had begged, batting her eyelashes and saying his custom work belts and wallets would sell out to the construction crews that flooded the event every year.
The drizzle started an hour in, cold and fine, sticking to the collar of his faded Carhartt. The pickle vendor in the booth next to him wouldn’t stop rambling about his prize-winning dill recipe, and Rafe was ten seconds from packing up early when a shadow fell across his table of tooled leather goods.
He looked up. Lila Hale, 42, the new county library director, was leaning against the edge of the booth, her rain-speckled flannel unbuttoned over a faded Dolly Parton tee, mud caked on the toes of her work boots. He’d ignored three handwritten notes she’d slipped under his studio door in the last month, all asking if he’d repair the library’s 1892 leather-bound atlas of Tennessee, its spine split down the middle, its pages frayed at the edges. His ex-wife had spent their entire marriage talking trash about Lila, her younger half-sister, calling her a flighty drifter who couldn’t hold a job or keep a commitment, so Rafe had written her off before he’d ever said a word to her, half-disgusted by the idea of getting tangled up in any of his ex’s family drama.
“Figured I’d catch you here,” she said, her voice low and rough, like she spent half her days yelling over noisy storytime crowds. She held out a paper cup of spiced apple cider, still steaming, and when he reached out to take it their fingers brushed for three full seconds, warm callus on warm callus, and he didn’t pull away first. She smelled like pine soap and vanilla lip balm, nothing like the heavy floral perfume his ex used to douse herself in.
He grunted, taking a sip of the cider, sweet and hot enough to burn the tip of his tongue. “I don’t do pro bono work for the county,” he said, leaning back against the folding chair behind him, and she laughed, the sound cutting through the twang of the bluegrass band playing at the other end of the field.
“Who said anything about pro bono?” she said, leaning in further over the table, so close he could see the flecks of gold in her hazel eyes, the tiny scar along her left eyebrow she’d gotten falling off a horse when she was 12, the story his ex had told him a hundred times to mock her for being reckless. “I got the budget approved last week. Cash, no paperwork, if you’re interested. I’ve had a pair of your work gloves for two years, used them to haul 30 boxes of books up the library stairs last month, no tears, no fraying. Figured you’re the only person who won’t mess up the atlas.”
Their knees brushed under the table when he leaned forward to grab a wallet a kid had knocked off the edge ten minutes earlier, and he froze for half a second, the heat of her leg seeping through his denim jeans. He’d spent seven years telling himself any desire for anyone other than his ex was a betrayal, that getting close to anyone would only end in the same messy, bitter divorce that had sent him running to Tennessee in the first place, but all that disgust and resistance felt like it was melting away in the warm steam of the cider, the soft sound of her laugh.
She reached out to run a finger along the edge of a custom tooled rifle sling he’d made for a local hunter, her forearm brushing his, and she didn’t pull away when he didn’t move back. “You ever get tired of hiding out in that garage of yours?” she said, so quiet he almost didn’t hear her over the crowd. “Everyone in town says you’re a hermit who hates people. But your leather work’s too warm for someone who hates people.”
He stared at her for a long minute, the rain picking up, drumming against the plastic canopy over his booth, droplets running down the edge to splatter on the leather wallets spread out in front of him. He’d spent so long hiding he’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen, to have someone look at the work he did and see something of him in it, not just a guy who used to jump out of planes, not just his ex’s ex-husband, not a cautionary tale about burned out first responders.
He reached behind him to grab his oilskin jacket, slinging it over his shoulder, and yelled over to his niece, who was manning the end of the booth, that he had a last minute work job, he’d be back later to help her pack up. She grinned and gave him a thumbs up, already holding up a tooled belt to a group of construction guys who’d wandered over.
They walked to her beat-up forest green Ford Ranger through the rain, her shoulder brushing his every few steps, the cold rain soaking through the sleeve of his flannel, and she opened the passenger door for him, the radio inside blaring old Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, the vinyl seats still warm from where she’d left the heater running an hour earlier. She climbed into the driver’s seat, turning the key in the ignition, and rested her hand on the gearshift an inch away from his knee, her knuckles barely brushing the frayed edge of his jeans.
