He turned too fast, shoulder colliding with someone holding a sloshing cup of hard cider, and a few drops splattered across his shirt. He started to apologize, looked up, and froze. He knew her. Lena Marlow, 38, his son Jake’s 10th grade math teacher. He’d sat across from her at parent-teacher conferences 15 years prior, when Jake was failing algebra and Merv was still married, still working 12 hour shifts poring over forged checks and ransom notes. She looked different now: a streak of silver ran through her auburn hair, pulled back in a messy braid, she had a thin scar curling across her left cheekbone he didn’t remember, and she was wearing a faded Grateful Dead tee and work boots caked in mud, not the blazers and slacks she’d worn at the school.
She laughed, swiping at the cider drops on his shirt with a crumpled napkin, her knuckle brushing his chest through the flannel. “Merv, right? Jake’s dad. I’d know that signature anywhere—you wrote him a million absence notes, I never saw handwriting that neat.” He felt his face warm, the way it always did when people commented on his job-related habit of writing every word like it was evidence. She stepped closer, leaning in to talk over the band, her shoulder pressed to his bicep, and he caught the scent of cedar shampoo and mint gum under the cider fumes. She’d moved upstate full time six months prior, she said, after her divorce, bought a small fixer-upper farm 10 minutes down the road from his cottage, taught math part time at the local community college now.
He kept waiting for the awkward lull, for her to excuse herself and go back to her friends, but she didn’t. She stayed, leaning into his space even when a group of rowdy volunteer firefighters cleared a path next to them, her eyes flicking from his eyes to his mouth when he talked about his contract work, about the vintage typewriter collection he kept in his spare bedroom. When they both reached for the same bid sheet for a weekend cabin rental up at Slide Mountain, her hand brushed his, and she didn’t yank it away, just held it there for half a beat, her palm warm and calloused at the edges, before she grinned and nodded at him to take the pen.
A sharp, stupid jolt of guilt shot through him then, and he pulled his hand back like he’d touched a hot stove. This is wrong, he told himself. She’s Jake’s teacher. She’s 23 years younger than you. You haven’t so much as held a woman’s hand since your wife left 12 years ago, and the first one you pick is someone you’re supposed to see as off-limits? He felt a twist of disgust at his own eagerness, made a half-hearted move to step back, to mumble an excuse about needing to get home to feed his tabby, Mabel.
She caught his wrist before he could turn, her fingers wrapping around it light, not tight, and nodded toward the tree line at the edge of the field. “The band’s gonna start playing Sweet Caroline next. Wanna go down to the creek to avoid the singalong?”
He hesitated for three full seconds, the voice in his head screaming that this was a terrible idea, that the whole town would talk, that Jake would think he was a creep if he found out. But then he looked at her, at the freckles scattered across her nose like someone had flicked cinnamon there, at the way her thumb was brushing the faint scar on his wrist from a forensics lab accident back in 2007, and he nodded.
The gravel crunched under their boots as they walked, the noise of the fundraiser fading behind them, replaced by the gurgle of the creek and the chirp of crickets waking up for the night. She stopped next to a fallen oak, leaning back against the rough bark, and looked up at him, her cheeks pink from the cider and the heat. “I had a crush on you back then, you know,” she said, quiet, like she was admitting something she’d been holding in for years. “All the other dads would yell at me for giving their kids bad grades. You brought me a coffee once, when Jake pulled his grade up to a B+, said you appreciated me not cutting him slack. I never forgot that.”
He didn’t have time to respond before she leaned in, pressing her mouth to his, soft at first, like she was waiting for him to pull away. His hands hovered at her waist for half a second, every rational part of his brain screaming to stop, to push her away, to go back to his quiet cottage and his typewriters and his records. Then he felt her hand curl into the hair at the nape of his neck, and he gave in, pulling her closer, the rough texture of her flannel shirt under his palms, the taste of cider on her tongue, the sound of the creek rushing behind them drowning out every last one of his stupid, anxious thoughts.
They pulled back a minute later, both breathing a little harder, and she grinned, tucking a strand of hair that had come loose from her braid behind her ear. “I have cold brew in my fridge, and an original pressing of Otis Redding’s *Otis Blue* that I found at a garage sale last month. You wanna come over?”
He didn’t even think about the chainsaw he’d come to bid on, or the stack of contract forgery cases sitting on his desk at home, or the voice in his head that had been yelling at him to play it safe for the last 12 years. He nodded, and she laced her fingers through his, her hand warm and solid in his. He tucked their joined hands into the pocket of his work jacket as they walked up the path back toward the road, the distant cheer of the beer garden crowd fading completely behind them.
