He was just about to slip out to the parking lot when he realized he’d forgotten to grab a beer first, so he cut through the crowd to the nearest booth, which had a hand-painted sign saying all proceeds went to the county library system. The woman behind the counter reached over to pass a hazy IPA to the teen in front of him, her sun-warmed forearm brushing his bare bicep, and he caught a whiff of coconut sunscreen and pine hand soap, sharp and sweet over the smell of grilled salmon and fried dough. When she looked up at him, he recognized her immediately: Mara Hale, 58, the new librarian who’d moved to town from Portland six months prior, the one who’d left a stack of out-of-print maritime memoirs on the bench outside his reel repair shop three weeks earlier, with a note saying she’d heard he liked old sea stories. He’d avoided her ever since, assuming she was the stuffy, cardigan-wearing type who’d nag him about late fees he didn’t even have, but today she was wearing worn high-waisted jeans, a faded 1977 Fleetwood Mac tour t-shirt, and a flannel tied around her waist, a smudge of charcoal on her left jaw from painting the event signs that morning.
She grinned when she saw him, crinkles fanning out at the corners of her hazel eyes, and teased him for finally showing his face somewhere that wasn’t his shop or the dive bar down the road. He felt his ears go pink, caught off guard that she’d even paid enough attention to know his routine, and mumbled something about his friends dragging him against his will. She laughed, a warm, throaty sound, and leaned forward on the counter, her hand brushing his when she passed him the cold pint he’d ordered. He froze for half a second, part of him screaming that he was being disrespectful to Eileen by even noticing how good her laugh sounded, how soft her hand was when it brushed his, the other part of him hungry for the kind of easy banter he hadn’t had in years.
She asked if he still had the 1980s Penn International reel he’d listed for sale on the local Facebook swap group the week prior, said she’d been looking for one exactly like it for her dad, who’d fished Puget Sound his whole life and had lost his favorite reel in a storm last winter. He nodded, about to answer, when the sky opened up without warning, cold summer rain pouring down so hard people screamed and ran for the nearest cover. He reacted on instinct, reaching out to wrap his hand around her upper arm and yank her under the narrow awning of the oyster booth next to them, pressing their shoulders tight together to stay out of the downpour.
They stood that way for three full minutes, chests rising and falling fast from the rush of moving, their sides pressed so close he could feel the heat of her body through her flannel, rain dripping off the edge of his baseball cap onto her shoulder. She tilted her head up to look at him, no teasing in her expression now, just soft, unhurried eye contact, and said she knew why he avoided everyone. She told him her husband had died in a cycling accident seven years prior, that she’d moved to the coast because she couldn’t stand walking past the bike shop they’d owned together every day, that she’d spent three years avoiding any kind of human connection too, scared it meant she was forgetting him.
He felt the tightness in his chest he’d carried for eight years loosen a little, and for the first time since Eileen died, he didn’t feel guilty for wanting to talk to someone else. He told her he had the reel in the back of his truck, that it was already tuned up perfectly, that her dad would love it. She smiled, and wiped a drop of rain off his cheek with her thumb, slow and deliberate, no apology when he didn’t pull away.
The rain slowed to a light drizzle ten minutes later, and he offered to drive her to his shop so she could look at the reel, maybe grab a cup of coffee afterward, if she had time. She nodded, and slipped her hand into his when they stepped out from under the awning, her palm warm and calloused at the edges from turning book pages and hauling boxes of library books. He opened the passenger door of his beat-up Ford F-150 for her, and when he leaned over to hand her the old beach towel he kept in the glove box to dry off, her knee brushed his, and she laughed quiet, like they were sharing a secret no one else knew.
