“Hi.”

Julia looked up from staring at the glass. She’d zoned out, the kind of zoning out you do when you look at something long enough and start to not look at it anymore but look through it. The kind of zoning out we all do when we need a short brain nap, like the brain is cozied up under blankets and it’s raining outside and it’s watching a Lifetime movie but ... not watching it. Yes. We all need brain naps.

“Hi?” She said, more to wake herself out of her mental break than to acknowledge the source of the voice.

“Hi,” the source of the voice said. It was low and growly, but with a bit of pep.

Hmm. Julia looked up. Oh. The voice was a he. Of course it was. Oh, and the voice had a nice smile.

She returned the smile.

Julia looked from his face to his shopping cart (because judging the contents of others’ shopping carts is of course what one does in a grocery store). Organic crackers. Pasta. Cereal. Milk. La Croix. Toilet paper. A bottle of grocery store boxed wine. Classy, thrifty, cute.

Julia looked over at her own shopping cart (because comparing the contents of our shopping carts to others’ is of course what one does in a grocery store). Similarly common stuff, just less of it, and less classy. Paper towels. Vegetables. Fruit. Hummus. Rosé. Oh my God, Julia thought, I’m so bach-ing it.

“I’m looking for ice cream,” said the man, his voice that low roll. He was dressed in a dark t-shirt and jeans. Middle-aged; tall, broad shoulders, face slightly chiseled, a two-day shadow. Average. But attractively average. “Dad bod,” Julia whispered to herself.

“Sorry, what?” he asked.

“You’re looking for ice cream.” Julia declared, louder, trying to recover.

“Right,” he said, “That kind right there.” And despite that she’d been staring at that section for God knows how long, she looked through the glass like it was the first time. Oh. She was the in Häagen-Dazs section. The fancy, expensive kind. She looked up and down the freezer,

God there was a ton of ice cream in grocery stores these days.

“Which flavor do you like?” she asked, realizing she was asking because she wanted to know more about this decidedly above-average man who had suddenly interrupted her admittedly zoned-out shopping.

“That kind. Lemon,” he said, pointing to a small container of lemon ice cream on the third aisle down. Julia looked at his hand as he pointed. It was a nice, clean, large, defined, hand. She imagined hi arm reaching past her to grab the ice cream, and what his arm would look like stretched out, would it look like holding the pint of ice cream. She wanted to see it happen in real-time. “That’s the kind I like,” he said, looking as if he was imagining himself dipping the spoon into the ice cream, scooping it out, and tasting it. “Mmmm. Sweet, tart. A little salty.”

“It’s,” Julia puckered her lips as she cocked her head and looked at the container, “small?”

He chuckled. “Yeah. It’s small. It is. That is. That sizing of ice cream, that one. The container. Right there. It is small,” he said, clarifying just in case but with words that seemed to be barely catching up to his thoughts.

For a minute, Julia entered the same kind of zone the man had found her in, a kind of looking through rather than looking at. She looked at, through really, the ice-cream shopping man that stood, tall, wow he was tall, in the fancy-pants ice cream section. Then, in the same spaced out zone, she imagined his hand reaching for her the same way she’d imagined it reaching for the ice cream. Grabbing it, her, holding it all in the palm of his hand.

She wanted to be his expensive lemon ice cream. She wanted to feel the warmth of his hands melt her.

“Reach for me,” she whispered, her voice low and primal, almost more of a grunt. Wait, did she just say that out loud. What was happening.

“What,” he said again, tilting his head, still holding the ice cream.

Fuck it. Let’s do this. What would I say out loud if I wasn’t going to think about it, Julia thought. I’d say:

“Touch. Me,” she growled again, She stepped forward. A small step, but clearly a forward kind of step.

He coughed a bit, covered his mouth. “Here?” he asked quietly, his thick eyebrows jumping up. She liked that his question was that of geography than probability. Of course this would happen, whatever “this” was going to be. But, “On aisle 11?” He looked up and down the empty aisle. “The frozen aisle?”

“Yes. The frozen aisle. What? You want to move to the baking goods aisle? Or maybe the meat department.” She paused and smiled at herself, “Pick up some sausage.”

He laughed, his face blushing for half a second. “Did you really just say that,” he said, smiling a big smile. She reciprocated again, this time with a slight, mischievous smile. “It wasn’t even a good pun,” he said. “You laughed at your own bad pun.” He looked her over, up and down, and said, “You’re something else. You’re short, but you’re cute. And your smile is something else. I like it.”

“It was a good pun. I did laugh. I am. It is. And I like you liking it. No. Like I said before,” She stepped closer. “Touch. Me. Here,” and with this she moved her hand down the side of her shirt and across the mid-section of her jeans and to her crotch like she was modeling what she wanted him to do, leading him with it.

Here do this, then this, then this.

She breathed out a bit when she felt her own hand skirt across the zipper of her jeans. It was nice to feel even the little bit of pressure from her own hand. You know those camera zooms in movies when the subject gets bigger and the background gets smaller? Julia felt it happening now, the grocery store shrinking, and her pussy getting bigger.

The man squinted like he was running the scenario through his head. His eyes flashed and he looked around, checking up and down the aisles. No one, just the ever-present security cameras overhead. Julia looked up at the cameras too. If someone was watching, that made this all even hotter. She kind of hoped they were watching.

“Ok,” he said under his breath, nodding, deciding. And he took one step closer, into that personal space where when people step into there’s normally a sense of danger, a voice in your brain saying “ok this is not usually where strangers should stand, we might want to do something about it.”

And Julia was hearing that voice because let’s be honest this wasn’t like her to be this forward, there was always a filter, and who was this handsome stranger, and where did he come from, and why did she lose that filter in the frozen aisle anyway, of all places. But like the possibility of someone watching this all on security camera, the danger, the unknown made it more fun.

Fun. She wanted fun.

He was close. She could breathe him in if she wanted to. No filter. So she did. And the second she did she realized she’d been smelling him this whole time without knowing it. His scent was musky like sweat (it was balmy outside) and grassy. Maybe he’d been cutting the grass in the morning. His breath was in there somewhere, a mixture of coffee and mints.

Julia was at least foot and a half shorter, and she felt his heavy coffee-mint breath push against her face. She liked it. Her eyes fluttered a bit, feeling it, fanning it. She wanted more of his breath’s heaviness. It was fueling the flush that was rising to the top of her cheeks like a boiling tea kettle.

An announcement came over the speakers. A car in a fire lane. Blah blah blah. But neither Julia or the stranger looked away. His deep green eyes were locked on her brown eyes. He was looking at her. Or was he also looking through her? Was he zoned out in her? She hoped so. She wanted to be in his zone, or him in hers, or whatever.

She wanted to be his zone.

Julia realized that some amount of indeterminable time had passed and she’d been standing next to him for a while, but had it been two seconds or two minutes since he stepped into her space? It felt like forever, and she couldn’t wait anymore. She was done with forever.