I tuck my phone into the back waistband of my pants. If there’s a chance in hell it’s still on, he might see the screen and figure out who I am. My wits begin to return to me. A zero-sum game forms in my body: wit vs. a body part that rhymes with wit that starts with C and that stands for trouble.
Wit is losing.
“I must have gotten confused.” I fake-rub my eyes. “Forgot to grab my glasses on my way to class this morning.”
His eyes narrow further, staring into mine. Am I imagining it, or did his face just fall a bit with disappointment? My heart shatters into a thousand tiny shards of glass that I feel like I just swallowed.
“Class? You’re a student?” His eyes rake over me and there’s a flicker of comprehension there, like some details that didn’t gel are making sense to him.
When you trap yourself into a corner, always take someone else’s out when you can. “Sure. Yes.”
“What class?”
My heart is still jumping around in my chest like my little nephews at an indoor trampoline park after drinking a full-caf frozen mocha. Now he wants to chat while we stand in front of a toilet? And ask me questions about a class I don’t really take?
“Excuse me,” I say, gesturing with the grace of a three-legged moose on skis. “While I am certain that meeting over a toilet in the men’s room right after my hand has been in places that brothel workers in Mumbai won’t touch is scintillating, I would prefer to step out of here and escape Eau de Urinal.”
“You haven’t answered my question.” He is immutable. Heat on legs. His pulse shows on his neck, right under the sharp curve of his tight jaw, and I want to kiss it. Press it. Feel it and let my own heartbeat join in.
“I didn’t realize I was under your command, sir,” I retort, saluting him with a rush of sarcasm bigger than my pent-up frustration.
His eyes deepen as he pivots just enough for me to get past him, our bodies brushing against each other with a heat that seems to treble with each nanosecond. I move into the area around the sinks and grab a paper towel, then turn the faucet on, careful to make sure my fingers don’t touch the gleaming metal.
“What are you doing?” Declan asks. Why won’t he leave? Surely someone dressed so nicely has stocks to broker, people to doctor, or laws to lawyer. Women to wetten. You know.
“Do you have any idea how germy bathroom sinks can be? I always do this,” I explain, even as my head screams invective and tells me I don’t have to explain anything.
“Nice of you to protect the other patrons.”
“Huh?”
“If anything is germy…” His voice fades out into a low sound in the back of his throat. It sounds like something you’d hear in a locker room or at a hunting club. He gestures toward my arm.
Damn. He’s got a point. I can’t even argue, because he’s right—but that never stopped me before.
“Toilet water—clean toilet water, and that one had been flushed before I reached in—is surprisingly sterile.”
“Sterile?”
“Okay,” I backpedal. “Reasonably clean.”
“Are you from the health department?” His question sounds like a threat.
“No.”
“You just troll men’s rooms and spout microbiology statistics like a professor for…kicks.” He says it in that maddening way men have of making everything seem like it’s a fact, even when they’re really asking a question.
Which was worse: having him think I was Amy from Big Bang Theory or just some crazy woman who crashes men’s rooms and has a fetish for sticking her hand in the toilet?
(Not that there’s anything wrong with Amy.)
I finish washing my hands and turn to grab a piece of paper towel, only to find Declan holding one out for me.
“Aha! So now I understand,” I say, nodding slowly as I accept the paper towel and dry my hands. “You’re the bathroom attendant. Where’s your tip cup? You’ve definitely earned a little something.”
The air tingles between us, and it’s not the deodorizer machine spritzing the room. “I’ve earned a little something,” he echoes in a voice loaded with suggestion. It’s not a question.
Just then, the door bursts open and Mark J. rushes in, eyes wild and frantic.
He sees me and gasps, making a high-pitched noise that you would expect from a forty-something middle-aged pearl clutcher and not a guy who looks like he last starred on some cable reality television show called Fast Food Wars.
“You!” he screeches. “A customer said they saw a woman walk into the men’s room. I didn’t believe it!”
Declan reaches out for Mark J.’s arm. I lose track of time. How many seconds did it take for this to go from bad to worse? My cover cannot be blown.
“She just wandered in by accident,” Declan explains. “Or she has a fetish. We’re sorting it out right now.” I glare so hard at him the hand dryer spontaneously starts.
“Why is she covered in water?” My sleeve is soaked and the ends of my hair are wet. Mark looks at Declan and sees water spots on his jacket. “Oh!” The sound is so soft I barely hear it, but from the look on Declan’s face he hears it, too. His eyes close and jaw tenses. This is a man who is not accustomed to suffering fools gladly.
So why is he even talking to me?
“I see, now. Fetish.... I didn’t mean…” Mark J.’s eyes plead with Declan to help explain what is going on, because it’s clear from the worker’s panic that he has about three different theories, two of which involve me and Declan breaking public decency laws and one of which involves questions about my biological gender.
None of his scenarios, though, involve my dropping a smartphone while completing a mystery shop, so I’m safe.
“I’ll leave you two to whatever…it was…you were doing,” Mark J. says as his fingers scramble to open the door and get out.
“What do you think,” Declan says, eyes still on the pneumatically wheezing door, “he thinks we’re doing in here?”
“Twerking?” My mind races a thousand miles a minute, covering territory from remembering how many toilet paper rolls were in each stall to imagining Declan na**d with a can of whipped cream and a bowl of fresh cherries beside the bed to reminding myself I haven’t shaved in days.
I am a modern-day renaissance woman.
Maybe my eyes give me away during that nude vision of Declan, because the room rapidly becomes warmer and his eyes go dark and hooded as he takes another step toward me. Two more and we’ll touch.