Elias Voss, 53, spent the better part of three decades teaching high school woodshop, where he’d learned to spot a kid holding a chisel wrong from 20 feet away and talk even the most skittish freshman through building a birdhouse that wouldn’t fall apart at the first rain. He’d retired two years prior, now runs a tiny custom cutting board business out of his two-car garage, and hadn’t so much as asked a woman out for coffee since his wife packed her bags and left for Florida with a traveling pharmaceutical rep seven years ago. His biggest flaw, as his older sister never tired of pointing out, was that he overthought every single interaction that carried even a whiff of risk, convinced he’d mess it up before it even started.
He’d dragged himself to the county fair on a sweltering August afternoon to drop off a walnut and maple cutting board he’d donated to the 4H silent auction, the wood still smelling of linseed oil when he handed it off to the volunteer at the barn. The air reeked of fried oreos, cow manure, and freshly cut hay, sweat beading along the hairline under his worn baseball cap as he trundled past the carnival rides, his work boots caked in mud from the unpaved parking lot. He’d planned to head straight home, until he spotted the honey booth tucked between the kettle corn stand and the homemade jam display, remembered his 89-year-old grandma had been bugging him for raw local honey to soothe her persistent cough.
Mara looked up from wrapping a quart jar of wildflower honey when he stepped up to the counter, a grin spreading across her face before he even said hello. She was 48, her husband Mark had been Elias’s department head for 12 years before he dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of a Lowe’s lumber run three years prior, and Elias had spent nearly two decades deliberately not looking at her too long, too closely, convinced even a passing glance was a betrayal of the guy who’d given him his first teaching job straight out of college. She wiped her hands on the front of her faded denim overalls, the tank top under it slipping just enough off one shoulder to show a faint sunburn, and Elias caught a whiff of jasmine lotion mixed with thick, sweet honey that made his throat go dry for a second.
He mumbled a hello, ordered a pint of the raw unfiltered stuff, fumbled with the crumpled bills in his jeans pocket when she told him the price. Their fingers brushed when she handed him the glass jar, her skin soft and warm against the calluses on his knuckles, and Elias nearly dropped the whole thing on the splintered wooden counter. She laughed, not unkind, when he fumbled to catch it, leaning a little closer across the booth, her elbow brushing a stack of honey sticks. “I saw your cutting boards on the local craft group last month,” she said, nodding at the auction barn behind him. “That walnut one you donated? I almost bid on it myself before I remembered I can barely boil pasta without burning it, let alone deserve a piece that nice.”
He shook his head, told her he’d make her one for free if she wanted, no strings attached, and she tsked, swatting his arm playfully, her palm warm even through the thick fabric of his work flannel. “Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll pay you full price. You put the work in, you get paid for it.” She glanced over her shoulder at the teen volunteer who’d showed up to cover her shift, then turned back to him, her dark eyes holding his for a beat longer than he expected. “I get off in 20 minutes. You wanna head over to the beer tent? I haven’t talked to anyone who doesn’t care about bee mites or clover bloom all week.”
Elias hesitated, every alarm in his head blaring. The whole county knew who Mark was, knew they’d worked together for years, he could already picture the gossips at the diner talking about it, calling him a creep for moving in on his dead boss’s wife. But she was still looking at him, smiling, a little crinkle at the corner of her eye that he’d never noticed before, and he found himself nodding before he could overthink it. He leaned against the fence outside the booth while she wrapped up, watching her laugh as a little kid snuck a honey stick when she wasn’t looking, pretending not to notice until the kid was halfway across the midway before she called after him to tell him that one was free.
They grabbed two cans of cheap light lager from the beer tent, found a beat-up picnic table tucked under an oak tree far enough from the main crowd that they didn’t have to yell over the country band playing by the Ferris wheel. The sun was dipping low over the cornfields by then, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the string lights strung between the trees flickering on one by one. The can of beer was cold against his palm, condensation dripping down his wrist, as they talked about old woodshop stories, the kid who’d glued his hand to a table saw, the time Mark had accidentally set a pile of sawdust on fire with a stray cigarette.
She told him she’d been lonely the last three years, that everyone in town treated her like a fragile widow who couldn’t change her own lightbulb, that she’d wanted to reach out to him a dozen times but thought he was still hung up on his ex. He admitted he’d thought about her more times than he could count, that he’d felt guilty for even noticing how pretty she was when Mark was alive, that he’d avoided running into her for two years because he was scared he’d say something stupid. Their knees brushed under the table, denim on denim, and Elias reached over, brushed a stray strand of hair that had fallen in her face behind her ear, his fingers lingering on her cheek for a second. She leaned into his touch, and when she kissed him, slow and soft, she tasted like honey and beer and spearmint gum, and he forgot entirely about the gossips at the diner, about the guilt he’d carried for years, about every stupid reason he’d told himself not to do this.
He walked her to her beat-up Subaru 10 minutes later, the fair starting to wind down around them, the sound of the Tilt-a-Whirl’s music fading in the distance. She grabbed a pen from her purse, scribbled her phone number on the back of a honey jar label, pressed it into his palm. “Bring that cutting board over next Saturday,” she said, grinning as she opened her car door. “I’ll make lasagna. No burnt pasta, I promise.”
He drove home with the jar of honey in the cup holder next to him, the label with her number tucked under the lid, Tom Petty blaring on the old radio in his truck, and he didn’t even bother to wipe the stupid grin off his face when he pulled into his driveway and waved at his neighbor watering her lawn.
