Page 51 of Signal No. Us

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.