Rafe Mendez, 53, dragged 12 jars of his 2024 award-winning sourwood honey to the Macon County Fair at 6 a.m. that Saturday, cussing the whole drive. He’d skipped the fair 11 years running, ever since his ex-wife had made a screaming scene by the pig race stands announcing she was leaving him for the local John Deere salesman. The county ag extension had begged him to come this year, said his honey was the only local product ever to take first place at the state fair, and he’d caved, figuring 11 years was long enough to avoid a crowd that mostly didn’t remember or care about his old drama. His knuckles were still dotted with fresh bee stings from harvesting the batch two days prior, and the hem of his faded flannel was caked with pine sap from trimming the trees around his hives the week before.
The booth next to his was stocked floor to ceiling with glass jars of neon-orange and deep-red hot sauce, run by a woman with a chili pepper tattoo curling up her left wrist and a thin scar above her eyebrow. She introduced herself as Jessa when she leaned over to grab a stray napkin that had blown onto his table, their hands brushing when he passed it to her. Her palms were calloused, same as his, and she smelled like coconut shampoo and smoked paprika, the scent cutting through the fair’s base layer of fried oreos, cow manure, and cotton candy. She laughed like she smoked a pack of menthols a day, loud and unapologetic, and she kept leaning in when she talked, the side of her arm brushing his every time a family squeezed past the narrow aisle between the booths. He recognized the scar halfway through the morning, when she pushed a strand of dark hair out of her face and it caught the sun. He’d pulled a splinter out of that exact cut when she was 16, after she’d fallen off a hay bale at his farm during a Fourth of July cookout. She was his ex-wife’s niece.
The thought made him stiffen at first, old resentment pricking at the back of his throat. He’d spent 11 years avoiding anyone related to his ex, convinced they all thought he was the deadbeat loser she’d painted him as to every friend and family member within a 30-mile radius. He tried to keep his answers short when she asked him about his hives, about the sourwood trees that grew only at the highest elevations of the nearby mountains, about the way the honey tasted different every year depending on the rain. But she kept sneaking him samples of her mango habanero sauce on cracker bites, the heat burning just right at the back of his throat, and he snuck her tiny sample jars of honey to cut the burn when she tested new batches on herself between customers. When a regular customer called him by name mid-afternoon, she froze, her eyes widening. “Wait, you’re Rafe. The beekeeper my aunt married.”
He braced for the lecture, for the comment about how he’d broken her aunt’s heart, for her to pack up her booth and move across the fairgrounds. Instead she snickered, wiping a smudge of sauce off her cheek with the back of her hand. “She always said you hated fun. That you’d rather hang out with bees than people. Spent 10 minutes complaining about you at last year’s Christmas dinner.” She leaned in again, her shoulder pressed to his now, no space between them, and her voice dropped so only he could hear. “I always thought she was full of shit. The rest of the family said you were the only one who ever brought good beer to the cookouts.”
The fair wound down as the sun dipped below the mountains, the ride operators flipping off the neon signs one by one, the last of the families herding their sugar-crazed kids toward the parking lot. They’d ignored most of their customers the last two hours, too busy swapping stories about the farm, about the time he’d gotten stung 17 times trying to move a hive that had swarmed into his ex’s rose bush, about the time Jessa had gotten so drunk at that same 4th of July cookout she’d tried to ride a pig. When the last customer left, Jessa leaned against the side of his booth, her boot brushing his ankle, and reached up to brush a stray bee off the collar of his flannel. Her hand lingered on his chest for three full beats, her dark eyes locked on his, and she didn’t pull away when he didn’t step back.
He didn’t make some stupid joke about ex family being off limits, didn’t make an excuse about needing to get home to check the hives, didn’t let the 11 years of stupid grudge-holding win. He asked her if she wanted to get a drink at the dive bar down the road after they packed up, and she grinned, shaking her head. She said she had a bottle of 10-year bourbon in her truck that was way better than the bar’s watery draft, and they could drink it on his porch, because she’d always wanted to see the hives at sunrise. He helped her load her crates of hot sauce into the back of her beat-up Ford Ranger, and when he slammed the tailgate shut, she tugged the hem of his flannel to pull him down for a quick, sharp kiss that tasted like habanero and wildflower honey. A group of drunk teens yelled a crude joke as they stumbled past, and neither of them bothered to flip them off.
