Page 26 of Signal No. Us

“Liar,” Robby said, close enough now that Allan could feel the warmth radiating off him after the stage lights, close enough that the joke in his voice had gone soft and quiet underneath. “You had fun.”

“…Fine. Yes. I had fun. Don’t tell anyone.”

“The whole barangay saw,” Robby pointed out.

“Then everyone keeps this secret.”

They stepped down from the makeshift stage together, and in the general chaos of the next act starting, one of the teenagers attempting, unwisely, a Whitney Houston song, Robby’s hand found Allan’s elbow, steadying, then simply staying there, easy, like it belonged.

“Allan,” Robby said, low, just for him.

“What?”

“I know you said, friends muna,” Robby said. “But can I look at you like this, just a little? Before we become whatever we’re supposed to become?”

Allan’s heart did something complicated and entirely unhelpful for someone who was supposed to be pacing himself.

“You’re already looking,” he pointed out, voice not quite steady.

“I know,” Robby said. “I’m just asking if it’s okay.”

The plaza noise blurred around them, the teenager still murdering Whitney, the BEBES arguing loudly about the scoring, Jake narrating something into the mic that nobody was listening to, and for one suspended second it was just the two of them, standing close, the old fear finally, visibly, losing its grip on both of them at once.

“It’s okay,” Allan said quietly.

Robby’s smile, when it came, was the kind Allan felt in his chest more than he saw with his eyes.

“Okay,” Robby said. “Dahan-dahan lang.”

“Dahan-dahan,” Allan agreed, and let himself, for once, not run from the warmth of it.

Behind them, Jake, who missed absolutely nothing, leaned into the microphone one more time.

“Next on the list,” he announced grandly, to a crowd that had, at this point, fully stopped pretending not to watch Allan and Robby, “there is no next. The show’s over for tonight, folks. The best part already happened.”

The BEBES cheered like it was a soap opera finale.

Allan buried his face in his hands, laughing, mortified, and did not, for once, feel the need to run anywhere at all.

Robby’s radio crackled once against his hip, low, easy to miss under the karaoke feedback and the BEBES’ cackling. Then again, more insistent. He checked it, and Allan watched the easy warmth in his face shutter, fast and practiced, into something more focused.

“Small flooding, Sitio Panganiban,” Robby said, already standing, already reaching for his jacket. “Probably nothing. I still have to check.”

“Now?”

“Now,” Robby said, and the apology in his face was real, even rushed. “This is the job, Allan. It doesn’t wait for a good night to end properly.”

He was gone within minutes, jacket half-zipped, waving off Jake’s offer to come along because someone needed to stay and run the karaoke machine responsibly, which Jake took, loudly, as a personal insult.

Allan sat back down amid the noise and the fairy lights, the good feeling from five minutes ago still warm in his chest and now sitting oddly next to a small, unfamiliar ache: the first real preview of what loving someone with this particular job was actually going to cost, on nights that weren’t emergencies, until suddenly, without warning, they were.

CHAPTER 12

Allan met Anna for the first time properly, not on the porch, but at the barangay health center, where he’d gone to help Robby haul in supplies for the coastal households and found the waiting area at a controlled simmer of chaos: a toddler mid-meltdown, an elderly man insisting, loudly, that he did not need his blood sugar checked “again,” and a health worker moving through all of it like weather that had learned patience.

She had the toddler settled inside four minutes flat, distracting him with a glove blown up into a makeshift balloon while she checked his temperature, and then, without missing a beat, turned to the elderly man and switched entirely into a different register, patient but immovable.

“Manong Sisoy, kung ayaw mong ipatingnan, sige, ‘wag. But I have to let Tita Ising know that you refused, and she will for sure call you tonight. We both know how that would go.”