Ronan O’Malley, 53, is a minor league baseball scout who’s logged 190,000 miles on his dented 2018 Ford F-150 in the last three years alone. His worst flaw? He’s shut down every chance at casual connection since his wife left him for a small-town high school football coach seven years prior, convinced anyone over 50 looking for a quick good time is either selling something or working through a midlife crisis he doesn’t have the energy to untangle. He’s in central Iowa on a rainy late August night, camped at a scuffed Formica bar off Main Street, picking at a basket of lukewarm fried pickles and scribbling notes on a left-handed pitcher he watched throw seven shutout innings that afternoon. His knees ache from four hours perched on splintered bleachers, his Cubs hat is still damp from the 10 minute walk from the field, and the jukebox in the corner is spitting out slow Johnny Cash deep cuts at a volume just loud enough to drown out the rain lashing the windows.
The bar is half empty, most of the game crowd having bailed as soon as the seventh inning stretch hit when the rain picked up. She slides onto the stool two spots down from him, shaking rain off a denim jacket dotted with faded bookstore logo pins, and orders a bourbon on the rocks, extra ice. Ronan catches the scent of lavender lotion cut with rain on wet cotton, and glances over for half a second before dropping his eyes back to his crumpled scout notebook. When the bartender slides her paper napkin across the bar, she reaches for it at the exact same time Ronan reaches for his sweating Pabst bottle, their knuckles brushing hard enough to make him fumble his ballpoint pen. She laughs, a low, warm sound roughened from yelling at the home plate umpire for a bad call earlier that night, and apologizes, wiping a stray drop of rainwater off his notebook page with her thumb.
He notices the faint, thick callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades, and asks if she runs the little independent shop he passed on his way into town, the one with a hand-painted sign of a cat holding a baseball bat in the window. She nods, says she brought her 12-year-old nephew to the game, dropped him off at her sister’s house 10 minutes prior, and ducked into the bar to wait out the flash flood warning that just popped up on the grainy TV behind the bar. She moves one stool closer, the toe of her scuffed white leather sneaker almost brushing his worn work boot under the bar, and teases him about wearing a frayed Cubs hat to a Reds affiliate game. He smirks, says he’s paid to be objective, not loyal, and when she laughs she leans in enough that her shoulder brushes his bicep, the rough denim of her jacket catching on the frayed cuff of his plaid flannel shirt.
The rain picks up again, rattling the windowpanes, and the bartender announces he’s closing early, since the main road out of town is flooded through the next three hours. Ronan’s motel is on the other side of that flooded stretch, and he’s just about to resign himself to sleeping in the backseat of his truck when she tilts her head, holds eye contact long enough to make the tips of his ears feel warm, and says her bookstore is two blocks away, has a covered back porch with a propane space heater, and a beat up first edition of *The Natural* she’s been dying to show someone who’d actually appreciate the weird, forgotten backstory behind the original cover art.
He hesitates for two full beats, every stubborn, self-protective part of his brain screaming that this is a bad idea, that he’s leaving town at 7 a.m. tomorrow, that he doesn’t do this kind of impulsive shit anymore, but he can’t stop staring at the faint streak of silver running through her loose auburn hair, the way she bites the corner of her lower lip when she’s waiting for an answer. He shoves his scout notebook into the pocket of his oil-stained work jacket, stands up, and holds the front door open for her as the rain slows to a soft, misty drizzle.
The walk to the bookstore takes three minutes, the concrete sidewalks glistening under the yellow glow of old cast-iron streetlights, and when she unlocks the front door, the smell of old paper, half-burned cinnamon candles, and leftover vanilla coffee hits him immediately. She flicks on the warm string lights strung above the fiction section, turns to face him with a small, quiet smile, and when she leans in to kiss him, he doesn’t pull away.
