Just because he has outbreaks in his nose does not mean that he doesn’t shed orally. He likely does, although without symptoms. The nose and lips are in the same nerve group and the virus could travel down the nerve and arrive at the nose or at the lip, without or with symptoms.
I think it is unlikely that even with antivirals a true primary would last 2.5 days.
The lesion should definitely have been swab tested to determine if this was herpes or something else. Now you are left to do antibody testing to determine if you have HSV or not, but the antibody test yields some false positives, so I’m not sure you even want to do that.
terri