“What footstool?” I ask in a ridiculous attempt at self-preservation. I even sort of shift my body, as if blocking the footstool will somehow erase my humiliation from this stranger’s memory.

“That footstool.” They point around me. “The one you just tripped over.”

“I wasn’t talking to a footstool.” The anxiety is causing unprecedented amounts of verbal idiocy, and I wait for this person to slowly back away from me. Instead, they bite the corner of their mouth, pinning a smile in place.

“Huh. I guess I must’ve misheard,” they say with a shrug. “Someone the next aisle over must have been talking to a footstool about their shitty mom.”

I nod. “I’ve heard it’s a common situation at this particular bookstore.”

At that, they burst out laughing. They’re laughing at me, and it’s not a particularly flattering laugh. It contains some combination of honking and snorting, and it’s so loud, I’m pretty sure it can be heard all the way on the fourth floor. But the sound of this atrocious laugh is enough to loosen the tangled anxiety in my chest by a smidge, enough so that I’m able to take full stock of this other person.

They look like nineties Keanu Reeves mixed with nineties Leonardo DiCaprio, but with the subtlest hint of curves beneath their clothes. Their hair is black, shaved on one side and long on the other, so it flops over their forehead. They’re wearing heavy work boots, loose-fitting jeans, and a flannel beneath a khaki jacket—none of which is appropriate attire for the snow in the forecast. They have wide shoulders, muscular thighs, and an easy-limbed indifference I could never channel no matter how hard I tried. There’s something solid about them. Grounded. Fixed. They are also tall—at five foot ten, I don’t have to look up to meet people’s eyes often, and I find it disorienting now.

“Do you work here?” I ask, because they have the look of someone who could lift a forty-pound box of books while simultaneously scolding you for mispronouncing Sartre, some kind of hot bookstore fantasy.

“Nope,” they say, flashing me the cover of Fun Home tucked under their arm. “I just had the typical Christmas urge to read a depressing graphic novel about a lesbian.”

“Did you… um…?” I swallow. “I mean, did you just come down this aisle because you saw me crying?”

The stranger smiles then, a quarter-moon curling only one edge of their mouth. “I thought you said you weren’t crying?”

The heat creeps up my cheeks because pretty people with freckles make me oh-so-stupid.

I wonder, vaguely, if this person would protest to being called pretty.

They’re fucking beautiful. My fingers are desperate for the pencil in my shoulder bag so I can sketch the straight line of their nose and the slope of their jaw before I forget what they look like.