Chapter 9 #2
“Would you look at that,” he said, to no one in particular. “Seems like there’s a new story happening right here. Not that I mind; just keep it down, I’m working.”
“We’re right here,” Allan said.
“I know,” Jake said serenely. “I said what I said.”
On the walk back out, the teenagers ahead arguing about which version of the legend was the “real” one, Robby fell into step beside Allan in the narrowing cave mouth, close enough that their arms brushed with every other stride.
“Thank you,” Robby said quietly, out of nowhere.
“For what?”
“For coming along. Even though you know we still have things to work out.” He hesitated. “And for being willing to be friends again. I don’t take that for granted.”
Allan considered him for a moment in the flickering headlamp light, the careful, unguarded honesty of him, so different from the boy who’d once laughed instead of speaking up, and so clearly the same person underneath, just braver now, or trying to be.
“We’re not done yet,” Allan said. “But I’m not angry right now either. That’s already a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Robby agreed, and something in his voice made it sound like a promise rather than a consolation.
They emerged back into daylight, blinking, sun-warm after the cave’s cool dark, and Allan found himself thinking, with the feeling of someone watching a wall they’d built for ten years develop its first real crack of light, that maybe this was what the legend had been trying to say all along.
Not villain and hero. Just two people, learning, slowly, how not to be afraid of each other anymore.
Jake, watching Allan and Robby with the satisfaction of a man who considered this outcome entirely his doing, announced that he was walking the kids back the shorter way and that Allan and Robby should “take your time, no rush, really.”
“He’s matchmaking,” Allan said, once they were out of earshot.
“Oh, you know Jake, always down for a good story,” Robby said. “I’m used to it.”
The detour Robby took on the way back wasn’t strictly on the way back at all, and Allan said so. It added the better part of an hour, cutting clean across to the other side of the island, and Robby didn’t even pretend otherwise.
“Trust me,” Robby said. “I know it’s a whole production to get here. But it’s worth it.”
Maribina Falls announced itself first as sound, then as mist, then, rounding the last bend, as an actual waterfall spilling into a wide, deep pool ringed in moss and pale sun finally muscling through the clouds.
“It’s like a location shoot,” Allan said. “For shampoo. Or a tragic indie film.”
“We used to train here,” Robby said, his fingers drawing air quotes. “‘Training.’ Mostly just swimming.”
Oryo, who had apparently decided the whole day had been leading up to this moment, launched himself into the shallows with the single-minded joy of a dog who believed water existed exclusively for him.
“Show-off,” Allan said.
Robby pulled his shirt over his head without much ceremony, and Allan’s brain, without his permission, stalled completely.
“I object,” Allan said. “On the grounds of public indecency.”
“You’ve seen me naked already,” Robby pointed out. “In your mom’s bathroom. We’re even.”
“That was an accident. This is premeditated.”
“I’m freezing,” Robby said, already stepping into the pool, hissing at the cold, laughing through it. “Come on.”
“I don’t have extra clothes.”
“Yes, you do. I saw your bag.” Robby surfaced from a dunk, hair slicked back, water running off his shoulders in a way that made Allan briefly forget several key facts about gravity. “Come on, Wonder Kid. Live a little.”
“I’ll have you know,” Allan said, already toeing off his shoes, already losing, “that I was not raised for this kind of exposure. Pero hindi ako pinalaki ng Sexbomb Girls para bumawi. Laban!”
Robby laughed so hard he went briefly underwater. “The what?”
“Sex Bomb! Spageti, halukay ube, Daisy Siete. Oh god, Robby, don’t tell me you don’t know who they are?!”
“Joke lang. Get in the water, Sex Bomb Allan.”
“Wait lang kasi.” He took a deep breath. “Get get aww!”
The cold grabbed him and let go. He surfaced sputtering, acutely, uselessly aware of every place the water made his old office-chair softness visible, ten years of fluorescent lighting and vending-machine dinners written plainly on his skin.
“I am not built for this,” he muttered.
“For what?” Robby said. “Existing?”
“Existing next to you, specifically, looking like that.”
Robby went very still, then smiled, small and real, no joke loaded behind it. “Stop grading yourself,” he said. “We’re two idiots in a waterfall with a delusional dog. That’s it. That’s the whole scene.”
Allan’s pulse didn’t get that memo. Every drop of water sliding down Robby’s collarbone suddenly felt like it deserved its own paragraph, and Allan spent several humiliating seconds forgetting he was supposed to be swimming and not just staring.
They swam lazily, aimless laps that weren’t really laps, Robby pointing out the rock where he’d scraped his shin at fifteen, Allan trying to float and failing and finally letting himself be steadied by two broad, careful hands under his shoulder blades.
“Relax,” Robby said. “The water’s doing the work.”
“That line sounds familiar.”
“Now it’s for you,” Robby said, and for one long, suspended second, every place they were touching and every place they weren’t became the only two facts Allan’s brain could process.
He was abruptly, acutely aware of exactly how little space separated Robby’s mouth from his own and how much of his remaining self-control was currently being spent on not closing it.
“Okay,” Allan said, unsteady. “That’s—that’s a lot of trust exercise for one Tuesday.”
Robby let him go, laughing, and the half-meter of current between them suddenly felt enormous.
They ended up on a flat, sun-warmed rock at the pool’s edge afterward, not touching, but close enough that the heat off Robby’s skin reached Allan across the stone, close enough that every small shift of breath felt like it mattered.
“Thank you,” Robby said, quiet, apropos of nothing. “For today. All of it. The boar included.”
“Especially the boar,” Allan said. “Best part.”
“I mean it,” Robby said, turning his head, serious now.
“I keep thinking about what Jake said in the cave. No villain. Just two people, scared, getting it wrong.” A pause, water dripping steadily off his hair onto the rock.
“I don’t want to get it wrong again. That’s all.
I just wanted to say that somewhere that wasn’t a library, for once.
Somewhere that could also just be good.”
Allan looked at him for a long moment: soaked, sunburned at the shoulders already, entirely unguarded in a way the seventeen-year-old varsity captain in his memory had never once managed to be.
“This is good,” Allan said. “Today was good.”
“Two weather systems,” Robby said, half to himself, watching the falls. “You know what happens to two systems that get this close.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Next time,” Robby said and didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.