Page 17 of Signal No. Us

Allan’s face went hot even now, a decade later, the memory arriving with the same physical force it always had, the fluorescent lights, the laughter, and that particular way the concrete floor had seemed to tilt under him.

“I laughed,” Robby said, and this was the part his voice actually broke on. “I didn’t; I didn’t stop them. I laughed with them. Because I was seventeen and varsity captain, and I was scared they’d think I had something to do with it, or that I knew, or I don’t know. I don’t have a good reason. I was just scared, and I chose my fear over you.”

“You didn’t just laugh,” Allan said, low, the old anger finally surfacing after years of being carefully filed away under jokes and deflection. “You didn’t say anything after. The whole summer, the whole next year, nothing. You avoided me. I ran off to Manila three days after graduation, and you never once reached out to ask if I was okay.”

“I know. I want to say I was scared too back then; that’s why I didn’t reach out, but I also know that’s not a reason. It’s just an excuse so I wouldn’t have to face how badly I messed up.” He looked down at his hands, at the scarred table between them. “I thought about you every day, at first. Then, little by little, I just trained myself to stop. Then Ver told me you weren’t coming back, that maybe you really weren’t. And I just accepted it. Wrong.”

“Ten years, Robby.”

“I know,” he said again, and this time his voice actually shook. “Ten years I’ve owed you a ‘sorry,’ and I just kept waiting to be caught off guard into saying it, because it’s easier to be scared than to actually come find you.”

“I have to tell you something else, too, while I still have the nerve,” Robby said, not quite meeting his eyes. “I liked you back then. Before the locker room, even. I used to invent reasons to walk the long way past your house. And some part of me knew, or at least suspected, that you liked me too. I was too scared of what that would mean about me, in front of everyone, to ever do anything about it. So I didn’t. And then the locker room, and it made things so much worse I didn’t know how to fix it.”

“I don’t know how to promise you it won’t hurt like that again,” Robby continued, quieter, like the admission cost him something on the way out. “I know I don’t want to be the reason it does.”

Allan sat with that for a long moment, letting it settle instead of reaching immediately for a joke, the way he usually did whenever something got too heavy to hold with bare hands.

“I blamed myself too,” he admitted, quiet, surprising himself. “Not just you.” He turned his bag a quarter turn on the table, needing something to do with his hands. “Before any of this, before you, I already had a whole system in my head for how careful I was supposed to be. I grew up hearing what people said about the boys who weren’t careful. ‘Mag-parlor ka na lang.’ ‘Ano ba, ang lambot mo naman.’ Nobody ever said it about me, specifically. But I heard it enough times about other people that I built an entire personality around never finding out if they’d say it about me too.”

Robby didn’t do the thing Allan had half-braced for, some too-smooth, therapist-careful reassurance. He just went quiet and actually listened, the way he’d learned to, apparently, somewhere in the last ten years.

“I couldn’t even say the word out loud for the longest time,” Allan went on, quieter now. “BAKLA. I’d think it and flinch. Like saying it about myself made every ugly thing I’d ever heard said about somebody else suddenly true about me too.” He laughed, short and humorless, and was immediately embarrassed by the sound of it. “Sorry. Reflex.”

“Shame,” Allan said finally, like the word had been sitting behind his teeth the whole time. “That’s—yeah. I was so ashamed of who I was that I made myself small before anyone else even opened their mouth.”

Robby just nodded.

“It took me embarrassingly long to figure out the problem was never the word,” Allan said. “It was everything I’d watched people use it to punish people like me. I just inherited the fear without ever once being the actual target of it. Which is its own stupid kind of unfair, honestly, being scared of a thing that mostly happened to other people.”

“I kept thinking, if only I’d been less obvious, if only I’d been more careful,” he said, “but I shouldn’t have had to be careful just to be respected in my own home.”

“No,” Robby said immediately, fiercely, the first flash of real heat in his voice the whole time they’d been talking. “You have nothing to blame yourself for. We—I should’ve been the one to change. Not you.”

“I know that now,” Allan said. “But you know how it is; knowing something in your head is different from knowing it in your heart. It took me a long time before I actually felt it.”

Robby reached across the table then, slowly, giving Allan every chance to pull away, and rested his hands near Allan’s without quite touching it, a question, not a claim.

“What do I need to do,” he said, “to earn your forgiveness? Just tell me. Anything.”

Allan looked at his hands for a long moment.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “You don’t need to do anything to be forgiven. You already did it: you said ‘sorry,’ and you meant it; you didn’t run from it. That’s that.” He exhaled, something loosening in his chest that had been clenched for a decade. “What’s left is I still have to decide how I move from here. And that’s on me, not you.”

“I know,” Robby said. “I don’t want to force anything. It’s just, slowly, I want to try if you’ll let me. Friends first, at least. If that’s all you can manage.”

Allan’s throat tightened, but for a completely different reason than a minute ago.

“We can be friends, sure,” Allan agreed, and let himself, finally, close the small remaining distance and rest his hand properly over Robby’s. “Anything further, we figure out as we go. I’m not saying no. I’m just saying, not yet, not all at once.”

Robby’s mouth curved, cautious and real, the first true smile Allan had seen from him since arriving that didn’t have a joke loaded behind it as backup.

“Noted,” he said. “I’ll be patient. I’ve waited over ten years, what’s a little more time?”

“Hoy! Don’t go turning your apology into a kilig moment,” Allan said, laughing despite himself, wet-eyed and unsteady. “There’s a process to this.”

“Right,” Robby said, straightening, deliberately dialing the moment back down to something they could both survive standing up. “I can do that.”

They sat there a while longer in the old, familiar library, the fan turning overhead, the ghost of every afternoon they’d spent here as teenagers finally, quietly, allowed to rest.