Truly (New York 1)

“You’ve never had it,” Ben said.

“I have, too,” she insisted. “You gave me some at Figs.”

“Oh, that’s right. But that doesn’t count. You had it on cheese.”

She met his eyes. “It was amazing.”

“I can do better.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Allie cleared her throat, and Ben snapped out of it. Not the time to be not-talking-about-honey with May. Not with her mom around.

Allie jumped in with another question. “How do you make people pay that much? Is it organic?”

“Nah. You can’t do organic honey in New York, because you can’t control where bees get their nectar. No, it’s expensive because of the way I produce it.”

“Which is …?”

“Any honey you buy in the store is from a whole bunch of hives mixed together. Homogenized—like milk, right? And it’s usually pasteurized and filtered until it’s barely honey anymore. But the bees in a single hive, they’ll go to the same place for nectar over and over again. There might be another hive right next to theirs, and all the bees in that hive go some whole other direction and get their nectar a different place. It’s different honey, even if the boxes are two feet apart.”

“You’re saying honey tastes different depending on what the bees eat?” Allie asked.

“Sure,” Nancy said. “You know that. There’s clover honey and buckwheat honey. Orange blossom honey.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, “but that kind of honey—that’s not coming from one hive. That’s coming from a big operation where the farmer trucks the hives to a field of clover, and there’s clover for miles around, so that’s where the bees get their nectar.”

“You’re running more of a boutique operation,” Allie said, with dawning understanding.

May turned to face him. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“You didn’t ask. Every batch of honey has its own flavor. The way I harvest it, crank the extractor by hand, put it through a filter that leaves in the pollen and all the other good stuff—it takes a lot of work, but it lets each batch keep its individual flavor profile.”

“You make it sound like wine,” Allie said.

“It is like wine, a little bit. Plus, the honey’s different at different times of the season, depending on what’s growing. Spring honey is different from summer honey, which is different from fall honey. Bed-Stuy honey is different from Park Slope honey is different from Hell’s Kitchen honey. I don’t mix them. Every batch gets bottled separately. And I don’t use any chemicals to treat the bees—keep away mites, kill off fungus, that kind of thing—so I lose a lot of hives. Maybe a third die off every year. It’s unpredictable, expensive. But what you get is amazing.”

He couldn’t make out what the expression on May’s face meant. Dreamy, abstracted, but in a good way.

“What’d I say?” he asked her.

“It’s not honey.”

“Of course it’s honey.”

“I mean it’s not only honey. It’s food. It’s … you’re cooking. With bees.”

He laughed. “The bees do all the work. I just harvest it and make money on it.”

May ducked her head and looked away right as he noticed the color coming up in her cheeks. He didn’t know what she was so all-fired excited about, but he recognized the flush on her skin from their time in bed.

He shot a guilty look at Nancy. She didn’t seem to have noticed. “You want to taste it?” he asked.

Allie perked up. “You brought some?”

“Of course.” He stood. “Stay put, I’ll get it.”

He felt three pairs of eyes boring into his back as he left the room. Out at the van, he found the box in the back where he’d packed up a dozen jars of honey. When he emerged, cradling it in his arms, a car drove past, and the driver—an older man in Packers green and gold—waved at him. Ben grinned and kicked the van’s panel door closed with his foot. The sun cast the driveway in bright light, a cool fall breeze rustling the leaves of a small maple tree in the front yard. Somewhere nearby, a leaf blower buzzed away.