Rayford Hogue is 61, makes his living tending 42 hives of Italian honeybees and small-batch mead on 12 acres of overgrown pasture outside Asheville, North Carolina. His only consistent personality flaw, per his younger sister’s annual holiday roast, is that he’s spent the last eight years treating casual human interaction like a hive he’s scared to disturb, ever since his wife Elaine passed unexpectedly from a stroke mid-harvest. He only showed up to the county fire department’s annual summer barbecue because his wildflower mead took home the blue ribbon at the fair the week prior, and the fire chief begged him to bring sample pours as a fundraiser draw.
He’s leaned against the dented tailgate of his 1997 F-250, wiping sweat off his sunburnt neck with the edge of a faded flannel tied around his waist, when she walks over. The air smells like charred bratwurst, cut clover, and the first faint tang of citronella from tiki torches strung between pine trees, crickets starting their hum as dusk bleeds purple over the Blue Ridge ridgeline. She’s the new county extension agent, 48, moved up from Georgia three months prior to run the local pollinator protection program, and Ray’s avoided every single one of her outreach emails because he hates sitting through meetings more than he hates hive mites.
She leans in close enough that her shoulder brushes his bicep when she squints at the handwritten label on his mead bottle, and he flinches like he’s been stung. He hasn’t been that close to anyone who wasn’t a blood relative in half a decade, and the scent of lavender hand salve and citrus sunscreen hits him sharp and warm, tangled with the faint dirt under her chipped forest-green nail polish, proof she spends as much time in the field as she does behind a desk. “The wildflower one, right?” she says, nodding at the bottle, her voice low with a soft southern lilt that sticks to his skin like humidity. “I heard it tastes like summer in a cup.”
He grunts, pours her a two-ounce sample, passes it over. Their fingers brush when she takes the cup, and he yanks his hand back fast, cheeks hot, suddenly guilty like he’s cheating on Elaine, like he’s not allowed to feel that little electric tingle run up his wrist, settle low in his chest. She smirks, takes a slow sip, doesn’t comment on his skittishness. They talk for 20 minutes, first about hives, then about new state regulations making it harder for small beekeepers to sell honey across county lines, then about the raccoon that broke into three of Ray’s hives last month and ate 12 pounds of honey before his border collie chased it off. She laughs loud at that, throws her head back, and he catches himself staring at the freckles across her nose, the silver streak in her dark hair that runs just above her left ear.
The fire department sets off a round of cheap fireworks for the kids clustered on the grass, and a particularly loud cherry bomb goes off directly above their heads, so loud it makes the truck rattle. She jumps, grabs his forearm hard to steady herself, doesn’t let go for three full beats, her palm warm through the thin cotton of his work shirt. He doesn’t pull away. He looks down at her hand on his arm, then up at her face, fireworks painting pink and gold streaks across her cheeks, and the guilt he’s carried for eight years feels a little lighter, like someone lifted a heavy hive box off his chest. He admits out loud that he hasn’t talked to anyone this long without wanting to run home and lock the door since Elaine died, and she nods, like she already knew. “I noticed you hiding over here,” she says, thumb brushing the edge of a bee sting scar on his forearm by accident, soft, like she’s testing to see if he’ll flinch again. “Everyone talks about the reclusive mead maker, no one ever gets to actually meet him.”
He doesn’t flinch this time. He asks her if she wants to come out to his farm tomorrow afternoon, if she wants to see the hives, try the oak-aged mead he’s been cellaring for two years, the one he only brings out for people he actually likes. She nods, pulls a crumpled grocery receipt out of her jeans pocket, scribbles her cell number on the back in blue ballpoint, shoves it into the front pocket of his work pants slow, her fingers brushing the denim over his hip intentional, not accidental. She says she’s got to go talk to the fire chief about planting pollinator gardens on the department’s empty lot, gives him a small smile, walks off.
Ray stands there for another ten minutes, leaning against the truck, sipping the last of the mead, watching her laugh with the group of firefighters by the grill. The faint burn of her hand is still on his forearm, the crumpled receipt with her number is heavy in his pocket, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel guilty for looking forward to tomorrow. He pops the cap off another mead bottle, takes a long sip, and grins when she glances over at him, raises her own cup in a quiet toast.
