Chapter 16
Word traveled through Barangay Espiritu Santo just like it always had, not through any one dramatic announcement, but through the sheer, unstoppable osmosis of tita-to-tita transmission, until by the third day nobody could quite remember who had “found out” first and everybody agreed they’d known all along.
“I knew it all along,” Tita Yolanda announced at breakfast, with the serene confidence of someone rewriting history in real time. “The first time I saw you two together, I said, ‘there’s chemistry.’”
“You literally tried to set me up with a seaman when I got here,” Allan said.
“Can’t I have both,” she said, unbothered. “Just a backup plan.”
Tita Becky and Tita Gemma had already, apparently, settled a bet, the specifics of which no one would explain to Allan directly, though it involved a sum of money and something called “the June deadline,” which made him deeply afraid to ask further.
Jake, predictably, made the most noise about it. He arrived at the cinema the morning after the karaoke night, already holding two mugs of coffee, one of which he presented to Allan with the ceremony of a man bestowing a medal.
“Congratulations,” he announced. “You two are officially gossip-worthy. You know, we used to have a separate group chat, ‘Robby Watch 2013.’ We shut it down when Ver said you weren’t planning on coming back. It’s alive again.”
“You had a group chat monitoring Robby’s crush on me? Did everyone know except me?”
“We’d been, what’s the word kids use these days—shipping—you two since high school,” Jake confirmed, entirely unashamed. “And it wasn’t just us. Our guidance counselor was in on it too, secretly. The whole faculty room too—they just thought we didn’t know they were.”
“This is deeply invasive.”
“That’s the barangay for you,” Jake said, shrugging. “No privacy, way too much love. Package deal.”
“I genuinely don’t know how to feel about this.”
“Just accept it,” Jake said. “It’s easier. Look at Robby—he’s been accepting it for more than ten years already.”
Robby took the sudden, cheerful surveillance of the entire barangay with far more grace than Allan expected, mostly by leaning into it: showing up to help with mural supplies and staying for dinner without being asked twice, letting Tita Gemma fuss over whether he was eating enough, enduring Tita Becky’s increasingly unsubtle questions about “intentions” with the patient good humor of a man who had, apparently, decided the whole barangay’s opinion was a price worth paying.
“Doesn’t it embarrass you?” Allan asked one evening, watching Robby field yet another round of interrogation from the porch while pretending to fix a fence post that did not, as far as Allan could tell, need fixing.
“Why would it embarrass me?” Robby asked, setting down his hammer. “I spent so many years too scared to show it. I’m done with that. If I got scared now, what is all this even for?”
“That’s disgustingly mature of you.”
“I’ve been practicing,” Robby said. “Also, I have a therapist. In Legazpi.”
“You have a therapist?”
“My job is rescue and disaster response,” Robby said, like this should have been obvious. “If I didn’t have a therapist, I’d have fallen apart a long time ago.”
Something about the plain, unembarrassed way he said it, no joke buried in it, no deflection, made Allan fall for him a little harder, right there on the porch, hammer forgotten between them.
The mural, meanwhile, was actually starting to look like something.
Allan had spent the better part of two weeks scraping, priming, and sketching, and the wall above Cine sa Isla’s old screen now carried a rough but unmistakable shape: the same mountain his lolo had painted decades ago, but wider now, wilder, two separate systems of storm cloud rolling in from the Pacific side, close enough that their edges had started to bend toward each other, curling into the same slow spiral instead of two, exactly the way he’d seen it that morning on the ridge, a small dog trotting along the shoreline below, two tiny figures standing at the edge of it all, hands linked, faces turned up toward the sky instead of running from it.
“You put us in it,” Robby said, the first time he saw that part, voice caught somewhere between amused and wrecked.
“Artistic license,” Allan said, trying for casual and failing. “Also, I ran out of ideas for what else to put there. Figured if I was going to steal your weather term, I should at least paint it right.”
“Liar,” Robby said, but he was smiling too hard to sound properly accusing and pulled Allan in by the paint-stained collar of his shirt to kiss him right there on the scaffolding, ignoring Jake’s delighted, undisguised applause from the doorway.
“Finally,” Jake called. “Grant deliverable achieved. Community engagement: maximum.”
“You are the worst business partner,” Allan said, not moving from where he was still very comfortably tucked against Robby’s side.
“But the best one,” Jake said, utterly unrepentant, already photographing the mural for the funding report with the enthusiasm of a man who fully intended to caption it something unbearable.
That night, walking Allan home along the dark, familiar road, Robby slowed his steps deliberately, in no hurry to get anywhere.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About what’s next. After the mural, after Ver’s wedding.”
“What’s next?”
“I don’t have a plan,” Robby admitted. “I just hope this keeps going. You, me, here. I just don’t know yet what that looks like.”
“We could just…keep going,” Allan said, testing the words, finding he liked how simple they sounded out loud. “No big plan. Just one day at a time.”
“I can do that,” Robby said, and squeezed his hand once, certain.