He’s beautiful.

And familiar?

I struggle to place him in my memories. I’m certain I’d remember meeting someone who looks like him.

The boy lets go of me abruptly, his eyes dropping to the ground below our feet. I follow his stare, my gaze trailing along the sidewalk, until I see another iPhone, this one half-drowned in a puddle. Google Maps lights up the screen, but the spoken directions are barely coherent, his speaker sputtering.

Oh my God.

I open my mouth to—to—apologize, maybe, even though it’s just as much his fault as mine—when his brown eyes flick back up to meet mine, narrowed. The words stumble over my tongue, and suddenly I have nothing to say at all, even though everything inside me feels alert, on edge, alive.

“Is this meant to endear me to you?” he asks, his voice deep and slow, like warm molasses. “Because it’s doing quite the opposite.”

I blink, trying to make sense of the words, some of my adrenaline fizzling out. He has a British accent, lilting the vowels of his sentences, only further throwing me for a loop. Do we know each other? It would be just my luck to forget his existence.

I ignore the goose bumps spreading across my arms in favor of scanning him for clues. Nothing is clicking, even as I take in the black hair spilling across his forehead like wet ink, the jawline sharp enough to chisel granite, and the faint moles scattered across his neck. Something about the three piercings in his left ear tugs at my memory, but it’s not quite enough.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I say finally, and the words are lifeless, even though I don’t mean for them to come out that way. Maybe if I was a little less exhausted, maybe if his stare was a little less harsh, maybe if the world had been a little kinder today, I could offer this boy as a smile.

But I can’t.

The boy’s mouth presses into a thin line, a dimple indenting one of his cheeks. “You’re going to lie to me?”

I stare at him in bemusement. “Excuse me?”

“I know you’re angling for a picture,” he says darkly. “You could’ve been straightforward about your intentions, instead of pretending to bump into me.” He leans down, picking up his phone with a disgusted look on his face. “It would have at least saved me the trouble of purchasing a new phone.”

Something shifts in my chest, uncomfortable and obtrusive, leaving me distinctly off-balance. “Right. It’s not as if my phone is also currently lying on the wet sidewalk. Let me go ahead and take a picture of you with my brain. Click. How was that? I’ll save it to my folder of random strangers I’ve never met in my life.”