Chapter 14
“This,” Allan said, “had better be worth losing an entire night of sleep for.”
“Trust me,” Robby said, already loading a thermos and two motorcycle helmets onto the porch railing before the sun had even considered coming up. “This only happens once a year.”
“That’s what you said about the fireflies. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, were just fireflies.”
“They’re still beautiful,” Robby said, unfazed. “But yeah, this one’s better.”
They left before five, the whole barangay still dark and hushed, Oryo trotting a few sleepy circles around Allan’s ankles before Cora firmly herded him back inside. “You’re not coming, you’re guarding the house,” she informed the dog, who accepted this demotion with visible betrayal.
Robby drove them toward Baras on his old motorcycle, Allan’s arms wrapped around his middle, then left it parked at the bottom of the trail so they could climb the rest of the way on foot, both of them not talking much over the wind.
Just the cool predawn air and the smell of salt getting stronger the higher they climbed.
They reached the cliffs of Binurong Point just as the sky started to lighten, rolling grass hills dropping away into bare rock and the open Pacific beyond, the same highway of storms Allan had watched from the ferry three weeks ago.
Except now the horizon was doing something extraordinary: a band of towering, sculptural clouds lit from within by lightning too far off to hear, glowing amber and violet where the earliest sun caught their edges.
“Anvil clouds,” Robby said, setting the thermos down and dropping onto a flat rock, patting the space beside him.
“Baging mabagyo, the elders here say, when the clouds look like this. The storm is still whole out at sea, still far off, but you can already see it from here, when the wind’s direction is right, how it’s taking shape. ”
He pointed further down the coastline, to a small white shape perched alone on its own hill. “Bote Lighthouse. From up here you can see three barangays and about half our problems.”
“That’s beautiful and slightly terrifying,” Allan said, sitting beside him, already fishing the battered sketchbook out of his bag without quite deciding to.
“You want to hear something actually terrifying?” Robby pointed further out, past the anvil clouds, to a second, smaller smudge of grey near the edge of the sky. “There’s two weather systems out there, not one. PAGASA’s been tracking both since Tuesday.”
“Is that bad?”
“Depends what they do next.” Robby traced a slow circle in the air with one finger, then a second, tighter circle around it, like two coins caught in the same current.
“Get close enough to each other, storms stop moving on their own. They start pulling on each other instead, spinning around some center point that isn’t really either one of them.
There’s a name for it. The Fujiwhara Effect. ”
“That sounds like a wrestling move.”
“It’s named after a Japanese scientist who noticed it first.” He kept his eyes on the horizon, like it was easier to face the weather than Allan directly.
“Sometimes the two of them just dance around each other for days and drift apart again. No harm done.” He paused, turning the thermos cap in his hand.
“Sometimes one just swallows the other. Or they merge. Become one thing. Can’t even tell anymore which storm you started with.
” He shrugged, like that was the whole science of it.
“You don’t know which until it’s already happening. Annoying, honestly.”
“You’re describing a weather pattern like it’s a breakup podcast, Robby.”
“I’m describing a weather pattern,” Robby said, entirely too innocent for someone who’d clearly chosen every one of those words on purpose. “You’re the one bringing subtext into it.”
“That’s basically my job too,” Robby said, after a beat, relenting into the easier joke. “Looking at beautiful things, then telling people who should be scared.”
“Very romantic career.”
“If you say so,” Robby said, dry, but there was something soft underneath it, watching Allan’s pencil start moving across the page, quick, sure, chasing the light before it changed.
Allan sketched in silence for a while: the layered clouds, the dark spine of the island falling away below them, the lighthouse standing its lonely watch down the coast, and the small orange dot of a fishing boat already out on the water despite the looming storm.
Robby watched, quiet, close enough that his shoulder pressed warm against Allan’s, not saying anything, just being there in the specific, patient way he’d been since the library.
“This,” Allan said eventually, not looking up from the page, “this is what I wanted to come back to. Not the Manila life. This.”
“This what?”
“This,” Allan said, gesturing vaguely at the sketchbook, the light, the whole impossible sky. “Looking at something, then drawing it, no deadline, no manager telling me to ‘stretch’ myself. I missed this feeling.”
“Is it just this you missed,” Robby asked, “or was it the whole island?”
Allan finally looked up from the page, meeting his eyes in the strange, beautiful half-light.
“I missed you too,” he admitted. No joke loaded behind it this time. “Even when I shouldn’t have. Ten years, Robby. I tried not to.”
“Didn’t work for me either,” Robby said, voice low.
The distance between them had been shrinking all morning without either of them officially deciding to close it: shoulders touching, then knees, then Robby’s hand finding Allan’s free one and simply staying there, thumb tracing slow, absent circles against his knuckles.
“Is it okay now,” Robby asked, so quietly it nearly got lost under the wind, “or is it still too soon?”
“Okay for what?” Allan asked, though he knew exactly what, his heart already answering the question before his mouth caught up.
“This,” Robby said, and closed the last of the distance himself, slow enough that Allan had every chance to pull back and didn’t.
The kiss was soft, gentle, faintly tasting of instant coffee from the thermos and the salt-heavy morning air, nothing like the frantic, doomed thing Allan had imagined at sixteen, and somehow so much better for being unhurried, deliberate, and chosen.
When they broke apart, Robby was smiling in a way Allan felt deep behind his ribs.
“Ten years late,” Robby said.
“Better late,” Allan said, “than a rerun of the same mistake.”
“That’s appropriately poetic for someone who just got kissed on a rock at dawn.”
“I contain multitudes,” Allan said, and kissed him again, just because he could, just because ten years of being not allowed had finally, quietly, become allowed.
“I’ve been thinking about what happened to us 10 years ago, how I didn’t say anything and you didn’t say anything too, and then we just moved away from each other—I don’t think we should do that again.”
“Deal,” Allan said, and the word came out steadier than it had any right to, like saying it out loud had made it a little more true.
Robby’s phone buzzed against the rock between them, breaking the moment just slightly. He glanced at it, and something flickered across his face, quick and calculating, before he visibly decided not to let it win the morning.
“Kapitan,” he said, in answer to Allan’s raised eyebrow. “Grant committee moved the site visit up. October to mid-September. Three weeks, not eight.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s tight,” Robby admitted. “The mural needs to be further along than it is. And I need to be here for it, not chasing mangrove surveys two towns over.” He exhaled and reached for Allan’s hand again like it was the thing steadying him rather than the thing he was worried about losing.
“Sorry. I didn’t want to bring work up here of all places. ”
“You can bring it up,” Allan said. “I live here now too, apparently. And that one deliverable is mine. Might as well know the deadlines.”
Below them, the storm clouds kept building on the horizon, distant and enormous and, for once, not something either of them needed to be afraid of watching.
They hiked back down and rode home as the sun properly rose, Allan’s sketchbook tucked against his chest, one new drawing added to it that he had no intention of showing anyone but privately intended to keep forever: two small figures, hands linked, on a cliff above the Pacific, a lighthouse keeping watch in the distance, and dwarfed by an impossible sky.
Cora took one look at both of them stumbling into the kitchen, windblown and grinning and standing slightly too close together, and set down her coffee cup with the specific weariness of a woman who had, apparently, been expecting this for slightly longer than either of them realized.
“Finally,” she said, and went back to her coffee without further comment, which from Cora was practically a wedding blessing.
“That’s it?” Allan asked. “No interrogation? No list of eligible pig farmers as backup?”
“Why would I do that,” Cora said, unbothered, “when it’s obvious you already picked the right one.” She glanced at Robby over the rim of her cup, not unkindly. “Robby. Have you two eaten?”
“Not yet po, Tita.”
“Sit,” she said, already reaching for a plate, the matter, as far as she was concerned, completely settled. “And Robby: if you hurt him, you already know, it won’t just be me you have to answer to. Lagot ka sa BEBES.”
“I know po,” Robby said, with the grave solemnity of a man who understood exactly what kind of tribunal that would be.
“Good,” Cora said, and served him rice like it was both a peace treaty and a warning.
Allan watched them settle into an easy, teasing rapport that felt like it had been building for years without his notice, and thought that maybe this was what home had been quietly waiting to become the whole time he'd been too scared to come find it.