He stared at her for a moment longer, not quite understanding what she was talking about. She had spoken, hadn’t she – the lips had moved, it was certain, couldn’t have missed that. Word by word it all started to make sense. He blinked and then, in a heartbeat, the eerie inner silence turned into chaos, his thoughts accelerating from zero to infinity and colliding with each other in a way that made concentrating no less harder than it had been. It felt like a fission reactor of thoughts inside the confines of his head. Not fusion – fusion was good and productive. This wasn’t.
Tico felt his cheeks warming and, without thinking, he pushed himself away from the girl. The sudden movement extracted grunts of annoyance from the people around them but he ignored their protests, dropping his gaze to his feet. It would’ve probably been too much to ask that his limbs co-operated, just for this once.
“I – I’m so sorry, señorita,” he stammered. “I didn’t – didn’t mean to…Um…”
There was a pause and he braved a single look at the girl but then, obviously regretting it, dropped his eyes right back to the ground. Now, little more distanced from the eyes, he was noticing her attire. “Didn’t mean to hurt.”