He was wiping his mouth. Not a casual swipe. An aggressive scrubbing with the back of his hand, back and forth, like I’d smeared something toxic across his lips. Then, and I watched this happen in real time with my own two eyes, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small bottle of hand sanitizer.
He pumped it. Twice. Rubbed his palms together with the focus of a man decontaminating after a chemical spill. Then he did his mouth area again. With the sanitized hands.
Like a system. Like a protocol.
Whatever guilt I’d been carrying evaporated on the spot.
My shirt was soaked. My Americano was a puddle on the pavement. My lips were still tingling from the collision. And this stranger was standing here sterilizing himself like I carried something contagious.
"Did you just…" I pointed at the hand sanitizer, still processing. "Did you just sanitize because I touched you?"
Those gray eyes cut to mine. Up close, behind the rectangular glasses, they were sharp and cold and looked at me like I was something unpleasant he’d discovered on the bottom of his shoe.
"You spilled coffee on my shirt," he bit out, his voice clipped and precise, every word enunciated like he was billing me per syllable, "and then you put your mouth on my face. So forgive me for maintaining basic hygiene."
"I didn’t PUT my mouth on your face. You backed into me."
"I was stationary." He said it like he was delivering evidence in a courtroom. "You were the one in motion. The physics of this are not complicated."
I stared at him. "Who talks like that? Are you a physics textbook? Do you narrate your own life in scientific terms?"
He didn’t answer. His eyes dropped from my face to my coffee-soaked shirt, which was clinging to my chest in ways I hadn’t had time to worry about until this exact moment. Then his gaze came back up.
"You should be more careful," he said, "where you point those things."
My brain needed a full second to catch up. He was looking at my chest. Where the coffee spilled. Where his hand had landed approximately forty-five seconds ago.
"Excuse me?" My voice came out high enough to crack glass. "Did you just, did you, are you seriously looking at my chest right now? You grabbed me. YOU grabbed ME."
"An involuntary reflex to prevent a fall."
"That’s your defense? Involuntary reflex?"
"It’s not a defense. It’s a fact."
"You’re a pervert."
He blinked. Once. Like the word needed to be processed and filed. "I’m observing the damage to my shirt, which, I’ll remind you, was clean before you weaponized your beverage against it."
"Weaponized my…" I couldn’t even finish the sentence. "You are the rudest human being I have ever met. And I waitress at a diner in Wynwood, so trust me, the competition is stiff."
He straightened his glasses. Pushed them up the bridge of his nose with one finger, precise, the way someone adjusts a weapon before firing.
"Fascinating," he said. No warmth. No humor. Nothing. "Please never let our paths cross again."
And then he turned and walked away. Still rubbing his hands together. Still disgusted. Still treating the entire encounter like a public health emergency.
I stood there in the middle of the farmers market with iced coffee dripping down my shirt, fury buzzing through every nerve, but underneath it all, faint and completely infuriating, was the memory of his lips against mine—and the treasonous thought that his mouth had been gentler than anything that came out of it.
I found Miley three stalls down, examining a jar of artisanal honey like it held the secrets of the universe.
"Where’d you go? I turned around and you just…" She looked up. Took in the coffee stain. The expression on my face. Her eyes went wide. "What happened to you?"
I told her everything. The kid on the scooter. The crash. The accidental kiss. His hand on my chest. The hand sanitizer.
Miley lost it.
She laughed so hard she had to put the honey down because her hands were shaking. She bent over, wheezing, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. "He SANITIZED?" She gasped for air. "After your lips touched? Like you gave him a disease?"
