Chapter 27
Inside, the house felt smaller without the BEBES, like it had exhaled.
The living room lamp cast a warm puddle on the floor. A fan whispered lazily in the corner. Somewhere in the kitchen, a single plate waited in the drying rack, haloed by the faint smell of dish soap and garlic.
Cora had left the porch light on for them and a note on the kitchen table, in her precise teacher’s handwriting:
Eat if you’re hungry. Don’t be loud. I love you both.
“Your mother left us a curfew note,” Robby said, reading over his shoulder, equal parts touched and mortified.
“She’s efficient,” Allan said. “Threat and blessing in one paragraph.”
Oryo trotted in ahead of them and made a beeline for Allan’s room, as if this were the natural order of things.
“He looks like he’s got an agenda,” Robby said.
“He thinks this is his show,” Allan replied. “We’re just guest stars.”
They toed off their shoes by the door. For a second, both of them hesitated in the hallway, like they were sixteen again and might get caught out of their rooms past curfew.
“Allan?”
“What?”
“If we go in there,” Robby said softly, nodding toward the bedroom where Oryo had already disappeared, “I don’t want you feeling like you owe me this. This isn’t happening because of my apology. If you don’t want to, that’s completely okay.”
The care in his voice made Allan’s chest ache in the best possible way.
“I’m not a rewards card,” Allan said. “You can’t redeem a kiss for sex.”
“That’s why I’m asking,” Robby said.
Allan looked at him properly then, hair still a little messy from the long day, eyes tired but open, shoulders not quite so hunched as they’d been when feelings got too close, back when they were still practicing at all of this.
“I want to,” Allan said. “And I’m scared too. But that’s kind of my trademark at this point.”
“Same,” Robby said. “Both counts.”
They stepped into Allan’s room. The posters from his teenage years still clung stubbornly to the walls: Xtina, the Backstreet Boys, faded corners curling. The bed was made, lumpy but familiar. Oryo had already claimed a spot at the foot like a judgmental throw pillow.
“Romantic,” Allan said. “Very curated nineties aesthetic.”
“This is so you,” Robby said. “Nineties nostalgia with unresolved potential.”
“Rude but accurate.”
They stood there for a heartbeat, the air thick with nerves and the faint smell of fabric softener. Allan’s instinct was to crack a joke, or run, or both: the same old exits, still tempting even now. Instead, he took one step closer and cupped Robby’s jaw with gentle fingers.
“Can I kiss you again?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer. It still felt important to ask out loud.
“Please,” Robby said.
The kiss picked up where the ridge, where every tentative, unhurried moment since the library, had left off. Familiar and new at once. Less “are we allowed?” and more, “what happens if we lean in further?”
Allan tasted mint and something warm and uniquely Robby. Robby’s hands found his waist, then slid up to his back, fingers splaying like they were trying to memorize the shape of him.
When Allan’s body pressed closer, muscle memory made him tense on instinct.
Robby broke the kiss just enough to look at him. “Hey. You okay?”
Allan almost defaulted to a joke. Instead, he made himself breathe and nodded once.
“I’m not the same as I was in high school,” he admitted, words tumbling faster than he meant. “In case you hadn’t noticed. There’s more of me now. Everywhere.”
Robby’s gaze didn’t waver. “Good,” he said simply.
“Good?”
“You’re here,” Robby said. “You’re alive. You’re softer in the places I want to keep, not fix. If anyone’s making you feel like you need to apologize just for living comfortably in your own skin, I want to have a word with them. Personally.”
A laugh-sob caught in Allan’s throat. “You and Mama should start a union.”
“Already members,” Robby said, and kissed the corner of his mouth, easy, grounding.
He eased Allan backward until the backs of his knees found the mattress. They sat down together, the bed creaking but holding, Oryo huffing once in mild offense before wisely relocating to the floor.
At some point between one kiss and the next, practical and unglamorous and entirely necessary, Allan reached over and pulled open his desk drawer.
“Got a question?” he said, only half joking, setting a small box of condoms and lube on the nightstand where Robby could see it. “Before we get into anything deeper.”
Robby glanced at it, then at him, something warm and grateful crossing his face, not surprised exactly, more like relieved that he didn’t have to be the one to bring it up.
“You’re ready,” Robby said.
“I told you, I have a CV,” Allan said. “With footnotes.”
Robby laughed, low and real, and any last nervous edge between them softened into something easier, gentle hands, murmured check-ins, tell me if you want to stop said more than once and meant every time, a plain, patient honesty neither of them had known how to offer each other a decade ago.
The fan in the corner kept turning, doing nothing at all against the heat building between them.
Robby undressed him slowly, like he was translating something instead of unwrapping it, mouth following the trail his hands had already mapped: along his collarbone, the soft, unhidden curve of his stomach, the old office-chair softness Allan had spent a decade being embarrassed about and Robby clearly had no complaints about whatsoever, if the low, appreciative sound he made against Allan’s hip was anything to go by.
“Still with me?” Robby murmured, glancing up, and Allan, who had lost several complete thoughts in a row, managed a strangled “Extremely,” which made Robby laugh against his skin, warm enough that Allan felt it more than heard it.
When Allan reached for him in turn, it wasn’t practiced, hands a little unsteady with wanting and more than ten years of not letting himself, but Robby met every clumsy attempt with patience instead of correction, guiding without taking over, breath catching sharp and honest when Allan finally got it right.
They fumbled through the condom together, half laughing, half reverent, Robby’s forehead dropping to Allan’s shoulder on a rough exhale when Allan’s hand finally, finally closed around him properly.
“Okay?” Allan asked, because it seemed only fair, after how many times he’d been asked already.
“Very,” Robby said, voice wrecked in a way Allan intended to think about for the rest of his natural life.
When Robby finally settled over him, it wasn’t rushed, not even now, both of them taking a beat just to look, to breathe, to let the weight of more than a decade and one whole storm system settle into the same small room.
The first slow slide of him inside pulled a sound out of Allan he hadn’t planned on making, half his name, half something wordless, and Robby went still immediately, checking, always checking, until Allan hooked a leg around him and said, rough, “Robby, if you stop right now I will actually fight you,” which got him moving again, unhurried at first and then considerably less so, an elbow that landed wrong on the mattress making them both huff out a laugh mid-kiss before finding their rhythm again properly, chasing something that had been over a decade and one very memorable bathroom door in the making.
Every small sound felt loud in that cramped, fan-humming room, Oryo shifting, offended, on the floor below, the mattress answering their every movement with an increasingly undignified creak, both of them laughing softly, once, right in the middle of everything, before neither of them could think of anything else to say at all.
“Still okay?” Robby asked again, voice rough, sometime later, the room soft and dim around the edges, Allan’s whole body loose and lit up under his hands.
“Yes,” Allan said, and found he meant it completely, wrung out and grinning at the ceiling like an idiot. “Finally, yes, really.”
They lay tangled together afterward, sweat-damp yet unbothered by it, Robby’s fingers tracing slow, absent shapes against Allan’s spine, and Allan thought, distantly, that ten years of imagining this had gotten absolutely nothing right except how much he’d wanted it.
Sometime after midnight, Oryo leapt back onto the bed, wedged himself into the narrow space between their legs, and sighed like he’d seen too much.
“If you tell anyone about this,” Allan mumbled, poking the dog’s side, “I’m going back to calling you Oreo.”
Oryo snorted and went boneless. Robby’s quiet laughter washed warm against Allan’s shoulder.
They fell asleep like that: three bodies crowded onto one old mattress that creaked every time someone breathed too deeply, the fan chopping the air overhead, the sea a faint rumor beyond the window.
For once, Allan’s dreams didn’t start in a locker room, or on a night bus out of Manila.
They started right here, in this small, cluttered room, paint stains still on the floor, a boy he’d once written a whole secret notebook about now written, finally, into the plain shape of his actual future.
The next morning, the sky pretended to behave, clouds lazing instead of marching, the air heavy but not angry yet.
Allan and Robby walked Oryo down to the fishball cart near the corner, a small, greasy ritual that had quietly, somewhere in the last seven weeks, become completely theirs.
“Three sticks,” Allan told Manong. “Two for the dog.”
“He doesn’t need fishball,” Robby said.
“He needs the experience,” Allan countered.
They ate standing up, plastic cups of vinegar in hand, watching kids race tricycles made of scrap wood along the gutter. Every so often their fingers bumped reaching for the same stick. Every so often they let them.
“Remember how I used to say I wanted to leave every time it rained?” Allan asked.
“Yeah.”
“I just realized I also wanted to leave whenever things got boring,” Allan admitted. “Equal opportunity escape plan.”
“And now?” Robby asked.
“Now,” Allan said, watching Oryo attempt to charm a second fishball out of Manong purely with eye contact, “this isn’t bad. Standing here. With you. Nothing dramatic happening.”
“I’m flattered,” Robby said.
“Don’t get too full of yourself,” Allan said. “You still owe me three arguments about John Lloyd.”
They strolled back slowly, Oryo trotting ahead, grease on their fingers, no audience, no big conversation, no big moment, just a small, ordinary one Allan would have sprinted past a decade ago, too busy performing a bigger life to notice how good the small one already was.
Sunlight was starting to needle through the clouds by the time they reached the gate again.
“So,” Allan said, watching Oryo make one last aggressive lunge at a stray fishball stick, “what happens next?”
“Depends,” Robby said. “Next as in tonight, or next as in—”
“The far future,” Allan said, turning to him. “The scary kind.”
Robby held his gaze. “Honestly? I used to not let myself think about it. Figured if I didn’t picture it, it couldn’t disappoint me if it fell apart.”
“And now?”
“Now I think about it. Little by little.” Robby bumped his shoulder against Allan’s, easy, like it wasn’t a big confession at all, even though it was. “Wherever you end up going, whatever that ends up looking like, I’m coming with you. I’ve already said it, but I don’t mind saying it again.”
“Dahan-dahan,” Allan said, because that was their word now, less caution than promise.
“Dahan-dahan,” Robby agreed.
By that evening, the radio was already hinting at a new system forming over the Pacific. Allan didn’t flinch at the thought the way he once might have.
“Any Fujiwhara pairs out there tonight?” he’d asked Robby, mostly joking.
“Just the one I know about,” Robby said, not joking at all, and didn’t elaborate, because after everything, he didn’t have to.
Because whatever storm was coming, Allan already knew exactly who he’d be facing it with, hand in hand, eyes open, ready. Two systems, one center. That part, at least, was never going to drift.