With no customers to serve, he pulled out his laptop computer and went back to his schoolwork until out of the corner of his eye he caught the silhouette of someone about to come through the door. Omkar felt an alarm go off inside himself, the ecstatic shock of seeing her again. It was the girl who had come into the store a week or two ago. Despite his shyness, he stood up and immediately welcomed her back.

Aria was almost upset to discover that the strange feelings she had felt for the man who stood before her were back. She afforded him a bashful smile and began looking through the aisles. It felt wrong to have come back there, but once again, Aria was desperate. Her period, being predictably unpredictable as usual, had rebounded back into her life. Aria was mad at herself for not having spent some money on provisions when she had it. But since it had not been an immediate need, she had not prioritized preparing for it.

Having used her socks again and spent most of the morning sitting still, she imagined that the woman at the church, Imani, might have some way to help her out. But she had arrived too late for the meal service and Imani was nowhere to be found. That was when the idea of coming back to the little market had popped into her mind. Aria had hoped that, in keeping with the first day she had visited, the store would be untended long enough for her to steal what she needed. There was a deeper part of her that wanted the man who had been there on the first day to be there again. But necessity trumped the degree that she currently cared for him.

Omkar desperately searched for the least awkward way to approach her to ask for her number as Aria scanned the aisles until she found what she was looking for. Resorting to her goto technique of looking at an item with one hand and putting another in her pocket with the other, she took a mini-pack of tampons and slid them in her pocket. That jolted Omkar out of the romantic interlude he was planning for them in his mind. Because he liked her, he was paying special attention to the security mirror in the corner of the room, hoping to learn something about her from her purchase choices. And so he had seen her take the item off of the shelf.