When Su Wan’s bookstore sign was knocked askew by a construction crew working for Lu Zeyan, the owner of the tech company next door, his dismissive offer to “pay the market rate” prompted her to deliberately “extort” the out-of-print book he had been searching for.
A stickler for logic, Lu Zeyan immediately initiated an “equivalent exchange”: he made Su Wan organize his company’s hopelessly messy library. Their back-and-forth retaliation began in earnest. He complained that her bookstore was noisy, so she blasted “stress-relief songs for programmers” through a megaphone on repeat. She learned that he was afraid of cats and deliberately left a stray on the windowsill. He retaliated by sending over a whole crate of cat repellent by drone, only for it all to end up sprayed on his own houseplants.
As they kept trying to one-up each other, Su Wan discovered that the cold, aloof boss secretly read romance novels and measured the ingredients for tomato-and-egg stir-fry down to the gram. Lu Zeyan, in turn, caught the laid-back shopkeeper getting misty-eyed over a note tucked into an old book. She was sharp-tongued enough to leave anyone speechless.
When the bookstore faced malicious competition, Lu Zeyan built a digital defense with code. When his company hit a public-relations crisis, Su Wan smoothed things over with her connections and quick tongue. After the dust settled, Lu Zeyan said awkwardly, “You don’t have to pay me back this time.” Su Wan rose on tiptoe and hugged him, smiling. “Then I’ll pay you back another way. How about a hug?”
It turned out that beneath all their back-and-forth scorekeeping, there had been a spark neither of them had noticed.
