Y/N stood in Aisle 4 of the local Super Mart, staring blankly at a wall of aggressively pink cardboard boxes, while her uterus attempted to wring itself out like a wet towel.

It was a Tuesday evening, raining, and she was in pain. The kind of deep, twisting period pain that made you want to lie down on the cold linoleum floor of the grocery store and wait for the end of the world. But she was a modern woman, and modern women do not lie on grocery store floors. They stand under flickering fluorescent lights, listen to terrible elevator music, and try to decide if they need the pads with wings, the pads without wings, or the pads that promised to make them feel like they were running through a field of daisies in white pants.

She gripped the handle of her shopping cart until her knuckles turned white. At home, her husband, Jaehyun, was currently sitting on their grey sofa, staring at their grey television, being absolutely grey.

Jaehyun was not a bad man. He did not yell. He did not throw things. He just did not do much of anything. He was a human brick wall with a very nice jawline. If you told Jaehyun you were dying of a broken heart, he would blink, say "Oh, that sucks," and ask if we were out of ketchup.

Marriage, Y/N had recently realized, was mostly a scam invented by society to make sure women never truly relaxed. You sign a piece of paper, put on a fancy dress for one day, and suddenly you are legally bound to be the emotional manager for a grown adult who does not know where the nail clippers are kept in his own house. She loved him, maybe, out of habit. But right now, bleeding and cramping, she hated him with the fire of a thousand suns. When she had told him she felt sick and was going to the store, he had simply nodded without looking away from his video game. No "Can I go for you?" No "Are you okay?" Just the empty, dead silence of a man who thought emotional support meant sitting in the same room as you in silence.

She tossed a violently pink box of ultra-absorbent pads into her cart. Sixteen dollars, the price tag cheered. Sixteen dollars for the privilege of basic biology.

"It is, quite frankly, institutional theft."

The voice floated over from the next aisle. It was a nice voice. Smooth, rich, and vibrating with exactly the kind of righteous indignation Y/N was currently feeling.

She paused, her hand hovering over a bottle of ibuprofen.

"I mean, look at this," the voice continued. It belonged to a man. "It’s a luxury tax on a bodily function. They price these things like you are buying imported silk, not basic cotton and rayon. And don't even get me started on the 'pink tax'. I saw the exact same razors in the men’s aisle for four dollars less. Just because they made the plastic handle lavender, they think they can rob you blind."

Y/N froze. She blinked at the metal shelving separating her from the next aisle.

Y/N dropped her box of pads into the cart. It landed with a dull thud. Did she hear that right? Was she hallucinating from the blood loss?

She took two quiet steps forward and peeked through the narrow gap between a stack of tampons and a row of panty liners.

There he was.

He was tall, with hair that fell perfectly across his forehead in a way that said he didn't try, but definitely tried. He wore a soft, slightly oversized knit sweater that screamed, I read poetry, I respect boundaries, and I always ask for consent before I hold your hand.

Standing next to him was a girl, Clara, who was looking up at him with big, watery eyes, like he was the actual inventor of oxygen.

"It is entirely unfair that the financial burden of reproductive biology falls entirely on women. Men get to walk around completely unbothered, while you have to budget for the privilege of not bleeding on your own clothes. It’s absurd. Here, let me hold the basket. You shouldn’t have to carry anything when you're in pain."

Y/N actually stopped breathing for a second.

She leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the shelving unit. She closed her eyes. Who is this man? she thought, her heart giving a pathetic, tragic little flutter. Where did they build him? In a secret laboratory for perfect husbands?

She pictured Jaehyun. Just yesterday, she had asked Jaehyun to pick up a box of tampons on his way home from work. He had called her in a panic from the store, treating the feminine care aisle like an active minefield, and ended up bringing home a box of pantyliners because "they looked the same and were cheaper."

And here, one aisle over, was a man offering to carry a shopping basket out of sheer solidarity with the female reproductive system. He was speaking about the pink tax. He was outraged on behalf of women. He was the unicorn. The mythical, emotionally intelligent, perfectly evolved man.

Y/N felt a sudden, crushing wave of sadness. It was a heavy, quiet grief. She mourned for herself. She mourned for the fact that men like this actually existed out in the wild, walking the earth, carrying baskets, understanding the concept of structural inequality, while she was tethered to a man who thought feminism was a typo for femininity.

"I'm going to run to the washroom near the entrance," the woman said, pointing toward the front of the store. "Go ahead and get in line. I'll meet you at the register."

"Take your time," the man said softly. "I've got it all handled."

Y/N watched the woman walk away. The man—this feminist god—turned and pushed his basket toward the checkout lanes. Y/N grabbed her box of ibuprofen, abandoned the rest of her shopping list, and followed him. She felt like a stray dog following a butcher, desperate for just a scrap of decency. She queued up in the lane right behind him.

Up close, he was striking. He had sharp, intelligent eyes, a strong jawline, and the kind of effortless, careless grace that made people look twice. He was placing the items on the conveyor belt: chocolates, a heating pad, two boxes of tampons, and a carton of ice cream. A care package.

Y/N looked down at her own lonely box of pads and her single bottle of painkillers. A fresh wave of pathetic, angry tears pricked the back of her eyes.

The cashier was an older man with a face like a dried prune and a name tag that read Gary. Gary looked at the conveyor belt. He scanned the tampons. He scanned the heating pad. He scanned the chocolate. Then, Gary looked up at the handsome man. Gary’s mouth twisted into a sour, mocking smirk.

"Got you trained well, huh?" Gary muttered, his voice a gravelly sneer.

The man paused. He looked at Gary.

"Excuse me?" the man said.

"I said, she’s got you whipped," Gary snorted, tossing the chocolate into a plastic bag with unnecessary force. "Trying real hard, aren't ya, buddy? Pandering to the little lady with all that big talk back there by the soap. Oh, the patriarchy. Oh, the pink tax." Gary mocked, raising his voice to a high-pitch whine. "Grow a spine, kid. You're making the rest of us look bad. Simping over a girl in a grocery store just to get some action." 

Y/N felt her blood boil. She gripped the handle of her cart, her jaw tightening. She waited. She waited for the unicorn to strike Gary down. She waited for the grand, sweeping defense of women. She waited for the sharp, intellectual takedown of Gary’s toxic masculinity.

The handsome man stared at the cashier for a long, quiet moment.

And then, slowly, a grin spread across his face.

It was not a nice grin. It was not the smile of a feminist hero. It was a lazy, cunning, fox-like smirk that completely altered the geometry of his face. The soft, empathetic aura vanished instantly, replaced by something sharp and terribly cynical.

He leaned an elbow on the checkout counter, resting his chin in his hand, looking at Gary like they were two men sharing a joke at a pub.

"Hey, don't hate the player, uncle," the man chuckled, his voice dropping an octave into a smooth, conspiratorial drawl. "You gotta do what you gotta do."

Y/N froze. Her heart stopped its tragic little fluttering and dropped straight into her stomach.

The old man looked up, his nasty smirk mirroring the cold grin on the other man's face. "Yeah?"

"Oh, totally," he said, smoothly pulling his credit card from his wallet and tapping it rhythmically on the counter. "You can't just buy them dinner anymore, Gary. That doesn't work in this economy. Now? You have to buy into their trauma."

Y/N froze.

The cramping pain in her stomach was suddenly replaced by an icy, hollow feeling spreading rapidly through her chest.

Gary let out a harsh bark of laughter. "No kidding?"

"It keeps them happy. It keeps them compliant. If I pretend to care about the price of her tampons for five minutes in a grocery store, she will let me pick the movie tonight, she will skip her annoying friend's dinner party without complaining, and it makes my entire weekend a hell of a lot easier. It is just an investment, Gary. Return on investment. Basic economics."

He swiped his card, grabbed his receipt, and gave Gary a sharp, knowing wink.

"Have a good one, boss."

It was worse than if he had just been a jerk from the start. A jerk was honest. A jerk was Jaehyun—a brick wall that never pretended to be a door.

But this man? This man was a chameleon. A parasite who wore the skin of decency just to get a discount on human effort. He wasn't a feminist. He was a fraud. He had weaponized empathy. He knew exactly what women wanted to hear, he knew exactly how much they were hurting, and he used that knowledge not to comfort them, but to manage them. To handle them like a PR crisis.

He was worse than a misogynist. He was a tourist in women's suffering, buying a souvenir to get laid.

The sadness hit her then. It wasn't the sweet, tragic sadness of before. It was a sharp, punchy, suffocating sadness. She felt stupid. She felt humiliated for having spent three minutes idolizing a man who thought her pain was just a puzzle he had learned to solve for his own convenience.

He paid his bill, thanked Gary with a charming, easy wave, and picked up his bags. He turned around to leave.

As he turned, his eyes briefly flicked to Y/N standing right behind him. He saw her staring at him. He saw her pale face, her clenched jaw, the white-knuckled grip on her shopping cart, and the single box of painkillers sitting miserably on the belt.

"You," Y/N said. 

The man paused. He was halfway through picking up his grocery bags. He turned his head, his dark hair falling slightly over his forehead, and looked at her. Gary the cashier also looked at her, pausing with a carton of milk in his hand.

"I beg your pardon?" the man asked. His voice was smooth, polite, and entirely unbothered. He looked around, as if checking to see if there was another, crazier person standing behind her. "Were you speaking to me, or to Gary?"

"I am speaking to you," Y/N said, stepping forward. Her hands were shaking, so she gripped the handle of her shopping cart until her knuckles turned white. "You are an absolute disease."

Gary’s eyes went wide. He slowly lowered the milk carton.

The man did not look offended. Instead, one dark eyebrow arched upward in mild, genuine curiosity. He turned fully toward her, giving her his complete, undivided attention. It was a terrifying amount of attention. "A disease?" he repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth as if tasting a fine wine. "Madam, I assure you, I am perfectly healthy. I even take vitamins. Occasionally."

"You think this is a joke," Y/N said, her voice rising now, the heat rushing to her cheeks. The dam had broken, and all the bitter, rotting water of her marriage was rushing out, aimed directly at this stranger. "You think you’re so clever. You think playing the 'soft, empathetic boy' is just a fun little strategy. A neat trick to get a woman to trust you so you don't have to put in any real effort."

"Well," the man started, leaning casually against the checkout counter, "when you put it like that, it does sound a bit villainous—"

"It is villainous!" Y/N snapped, her chest heaving. "Women like her," Y/N aggressively pointed toward the washrooms, "fall for men like you, and then five years down the line, she is trapped in a house doing all the emotional labor, wondering why her feminist king does not know how to turn on the washing machine! You are the reason women live in regret!"

For a long, highly uncomfortable moment, nobody spoke. The terrible elevator music played a tinny version of a Michael Bolton song.

He looked at her. He looked at her flushed face, her white-knuckled grip on the counter, and the giant box of nighttime pads sitting next to her hand. A deeply knowing, highly amused spark danced in his eyes. He did not look insulted. He looked like a detective who had just solved a very easy murder.

"Fascinating," he murmured, raising a single, elegant eyebrow. He leaned in just an inch. "Tell me, darling... this man you are married to. Does he blink normally, or is it more of a slow, dead-eyed stare at a television screen?"

All the air rushed out of Y/N’s lungs. The heat of extreme, soul-crushing embarrassment instantly replaced her rage. She had just screamed her entire marital trauma at a stranger in a SuperMart. She was unhinged. She had lost the plot.

"Keep the change," Y/N squeaked to Gary, though she hadn't handed him any money yet. She grabbed her box of pads, turned on her heel, and practically sprinted out the sliding glass doors into the cool night air.

She power-walked through the parking lot, cursing herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she chanted in her head. You have lost your mind. Jaehyun has finally driven you completely insane. Tomorrow you are going to end up on a viral internet video titled 'Crazy Lady Loses It Over Tampon Man.'

"You really move fast for someone carrying a mattress in a box."

Y/N yelped, nearly dropping her keys.

She spun around. There, leaning comfortably against the side of her car, completely unbothered by the drizzle, was the stranger from the store. He had his arms crossed over his chest, one foot crossed over the other, looking as if he had been waiting there for a bus for the last twenty minutes.

Y/N pressed her back against the car door, clutching her chest. "Are you insane?! Where did you come from?"

"I walked," he said simply, gesturing loosely toward the store.

"Are you following me?" Y/N demanded, trying to summon her previous anger to cover up the fact that she was currently having a minor heart attack. "Because if you are, I have pepper spray. Somewhere. Under the receipts."

"I am not following you," he said, uncrossing his arms and holding his hands up in a gesture of peace. The fox-like grin was back, dancing around the edges of his mouth. "I merely came out to make sure you didn't accidentally walk into traffic with all that hot anger escaping in fumes from your ears."

"I am fine," Y/N snapped, bending down to snatch her purse off the ground. She finally found her keys. "I am leaving. You can go back to manipulating women and agreeing with misogynist cashiers."

"Ah," he said, holding up one long finger. "Now that is exactly why I am here. We need to clear the air, darling. You have cast me in the role of the villain, and while I do look fantastic in black, I must protest the accusations."

"I don't care," Y/N said, unlocking her car door. "Have a nice life."

"Look," he said. He didn't move toward her, but his voice sharpened, demanding her attention. He pointed a finger across the parking lot.

Y/N followed his gaze. A small silver car was pulling out of the lot. Clara was in the driver's seat. She gave a quick honk, waved out the window, and drove away into the night.

"There she goes," he said, sighing dramatically, putting a hand over his heart. "Clara. Tragic taste in men, wonderful taste in chips. We went to university together. She copies my notes, she eats my fries without asking, and she currently owes me forty bucks.”

Y/N frowned, confused. "She's not your girlfriend? Or your... target?"

"Target?" he laughed, a bright, clear sound that bounced across the asphalt. "Darling, I am buying groceries, not running a cult. She had a stomach bug. I offered to stand in line for her. That is the entire epic saga."

"And the cashier?" she challenged, though her voice lacked its previous fire. "You told him it was all a performance. You agreed with him."

The grin returned to the man's face, slow and wicked. He stepped slightly away from her car, adjusting his jacket.

"Darling," he sighed, as if explaining gravity to a toddler. "Gary the cashier is a man who thinks the peak of human comedy is a loud burp. Gary is angry at the world and stuck in 2026 with the opinions of 1952. If I stand there and try to debate feminist theory with Gary, what happens? Gary gets loud. Gary argues with me. Gary tells me about the good old days. Gary scans my chips very, very slowly."

He  stepped back, doing a neat little spin on his heel.

"But," he continued, holding up a single finger, "if I agree with Gary? If I tell Gary exactly what his shriveled little heart wants to hear—that I am just a sly scoundrel playing a game? Gary feels like a genius. Gary thinks we are brothers in arms. Gary scans my chips in ten seconds, I pay, and I get to go home and eat my chips in peace."

Y/N stared at him, completely derailed. "You... you lied to him just to check out faster?"

"It is not performative feminism, love," he grinned, tossing his keys in the air and catching them effortlessly. "It is aggressive time management. If you wrestle with a pig, you both get covered in mud, but the pig enjoys it. I prefer to stay clean." 

Y/N stared at him. She hated that it made sense. She hated that his logic was flawless. But most of all, she hated how effortlessly charming he was while explaining his own moral bankruptcy.

"So you just lie," Y/N said flatly. "You just tell people exactly what they want to hear, to get what you want."

"I prefer the term 'curated honesty'," he countered, his eyes shining with absolute delight at the banter. "I simply hand people the version of the truth they are most capable of digesting. It’s a public service, really."

Y/N let out a breath that was half a scoff and half a sigh. She looked at him, really looked at him. He was ridiculous. He was a fox in a human suit, spinning webs of words to avoid the slightest bit of friction. He was exactly the kind of man her mother had warned her about.

And yet, standing here in the miserable drizzle, arguing with this absolute lunatic, Y/N realized something strange.

Her cramps still hurt. Her marriage was still a disaster. Jaehyun was still sitting at home, staring at a wall.

But for the last ten minutes, she hadn't felt hollow. She hadn't felt like a ghost. The sheer, absurd gravity of this man’s personality had dragged her out of her own head.

"You are unbelievable," she muttered, finally pulling her car door open.

"I get that a lot," he agreed cheerfully. "Usually from people who are about to thank me."

"I am not going to thank you."

"Give it time, madam. The night is young."

Y/N had one foot inside her car and one foot on the wet asphalt. She had fully intended to slam the door, lock it, and drive away from this walking theatrical disaster forever. But as she reached into the cup holder to grab her travel mug—a lukewarm, tragic cup of black coffee she had abandoned three hours ago—the man did not step back.

Instead, he leaned casually against the open door frame of her car, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was preventing her from leaving.

"You know," he said, his tone shifting back to the conversational, breezy rhythm they had started with, "returning to our original debate regarding the absolute extortion of feminine hygiene."

Y/N paused, her hand wrapped around the lukewarm coffee mug. She looked up at him, exhausted. "Are we still doing this? I thought you already proved you don't actually care about the pink tax."

"I care about economics," he corrected smoothly, raising a finger. "And it deeply offends my financial sensibilities that you are forced to pay a monthly subscription fee just to exist in your own body. It is a terrible business model. But, as a pragmatist, I feel it is my duty to inform you that you are overlooking a massive loophole in the system."

Y/N squinted at him. The streetlamp caught the wicked, playful glint in his dark eyes. She knew she should just close the door. She knew it. But the sheer, morbid curiosity of what ridiculous thing he was going to say next rooted her to the spot.

"A loophole," she repeated flatly. "What, a coupon code? A secret underground market for cheap cotton?"

"Better," he said. He took a fraction of a step closer. The gap between them narrowed, and the sudden drop in his voice made the air in the damp parking lot feel very still. 

Y/N blinked. "How?"

His eyes gleamed. A slow, devastatingly confident smirk spread across his face.

"It involves you, me, and a bed."

For exactly two seconds, Y/N’s brain went entirely blank.

And then, the joke landed.

Smack.

Y/N didn't even think about it. Her hand flew out, landing a sharp, resounding slap right on his bicep.

"You absolute menace!" Y/N gasped, her hand flying out before she could stop it. She smacked him hard on the arm. "I am married!"

He didn't even try to dodge. He absorbed the hit, letting out a rich, breathy chuckle as he casually rubbed his bicep.

"Darling, I already figured you were married," he grinned, utterly unfazed by the physical assault. "You are radiating a very specific, deeply marinated kind of crankiness. Marriage does that to women. It drains the joy right out of you."

"Excuse me?" Y/N sputtered, outraged, mostly because he was entirely correct

"Look at the institution of marriage objectively. It is a terrible scam. A woman walks into it expecting a partnership, a grand romance, a co-captain for the ship of life. Instead, she gets a grown man who does not know where the spoons are kept. She spends her twenties being told she is a queen, and her thirties picking up wet towels off the bathroom floor. Naturally, this breeds a very specific, deeply buried rage. A rage that, say, makes a woman scream at a handsome stranger in a grocery store over a box of tampons."

He delivered the entire monologue with the light, breezy air of a university professor explaining a very simple math problem.

Y/N stared at him. The social satire was so sharp, so painfully accurate, that she couldn't even find the words to be insulted. It was exactly like Jane Austen had returned from the grave, taken the form of a modern-day con artist, and decided to psychoanalyze her in a parking lot.

"You have a very horrible view of matrimony," Y/N finally managed to say, trying to maintain her scowl.

"I have a highly accurate view of matrimony," he corrected, "Which is exactly why I stay safely on the outside, observing the sinking ships from the comfort of the dry shore."

He stopped rubbing his arm. The joke had landed, the banter had peaked, and yet, he did not walk away. He stood there in the drizzle, the collar of his black jacket turned up against the wind.

The silence stretched between them for a moment. It wasn't an awkward silence. It was the crackling, electric silence of two people who had just realized they spoke the exact same language.

He tilted his head to the side. He studied her face, his dark eyes moving over her features with a sudden, unreadable focus. The playful smirk softened into something a little more curious.

"You know..." he said slowly, his voice dropping the theatrical flair, landing somewhere quiet and strangely sincere. "I have seen you somewhere."

Y/N rolled her eyes so hard they almost got stuck in the back of her head. "Oh, please. Do not ruin whatever this was with the oldest, cheapest pickup line in the history of the universe."

"I am serious," he insisted, pressing a hand to his chest as if wounded by her lack of faith. "I never forget a face of such profound, spectacular misery."

Y/N reached into the top basket of her shopping cart, wrapping her fingers dangerously around the lukewarm cup of convenience-store coffee she had abandoned there earlier.

"If you do not get in your car right now," she warned, pointing the lid in his direction like a loaded weapon, "I am going to spill this entire cup of coffee all over your very sensitive, very expensive-looking feminist sweater."

His eyes widened in mock terror. He leaped backward with the theatrical agility of a pirate dodging a cannonball, throwing his hands up in total surrender.

"Woah, hold fire, sweetheart! The sweater is cashmere, and I am far too pretty to smell like stale dark roast!" he called out, walking backward toward his car. He flashed one last, devastatingly sharp grin. "Take care of that brick wall of yours! If he forgets to blink, just water him!"

With a casual, two-fingered salute, he spun around, slid into his car, and drove off into the rainy night. 

She thought about her husband, Jaehyun, sitting at home in silence. She thought about the empty, hollow ache in her chest that she had carried around all year.

And then, she thought about a man spinning a story about a pink tax to a grumpy cashier. She thought about him comparing her to a cornered badger. She thought about the sheer, unhinged audacity of his period joke.

A small sound escaped her throat.

It was a snort.

Y/N covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes widening. But she couldn't stop it. The snort turned into a giggle, and the giggle bubbled up, breaking through the heavy, miserable crust of her heart, until she was sitting alone in her gray sedan, laughing out loud.

It wasn't a polite laugh. It was a deep, belly-shaking, breathless laugh. It was the first time she had genuinely, truly laughed in months.

She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, still smiling, put the car in drive, and pulled out of the parking lot. The storm outside was the same, her life waiting at home was the same, but as she drove into the night, the air in her lungs felt just a little bit lighter.

—