“And what did she tell you?” he asked, moving in a little closer. He could catch the scent from the rosal flowers behind her, could see her eyes widen slightly. Maybe she was trying to break the tension, but Kira suddenly swiped her spoon through the tartufo and stuck it in her mouth, like a barrier between them. Santi chuckled.
“They said that one of us promised the other that we would talk about what happened at the wedding,” Kira said, licking remnants of chocolate from her lips. Santi was momentarily distracted by the motion, but only momentarily. “Were you in Manila this whole time?”
“I was. I escaped,” Santi explained, pulling back. He considered the next thing to say as he plucked a little santan flower from the bush beside him.
How could he explain that he’d come back to Lipa because he didn’t want to be in Manila? That he was weighing one place against the other, deciding which to give up?
He twirled the santan between his thumb and forefinger. Santi had memories of them pulling out the filaments of the flowers to suck at the little bead of nectar inside when they were kids. Kira used to be an expert santan chain maker, if stuffing one end of the santan into another made one an expert.
“With nothing but your Mercedes and the clothes on your back?” Kira joked, and the playful smile on her face dropped when he flinched. Damn, he hadn’t meant to flinch. “Really?”
“More or less,” he said, keeping his eyes on his fingers, slowly pulling out the filament of the santan in his hand. “I can buy clothes in SM.”
“They did just open a Uniqlo.”
He narrowed his eyes her way, but he smiled, and having her smile back at him made his cold, dead heart melt a little in his chest.
“I wanted to come back,” he explained, but it didn’t feel like the right word. “Needed to come back.”
“Did something happen?” Kira asked, taking another bite of the chocolate.
“A collision of things,” he said, almost putting the end of the santan in his mouth to suck at the sap before he decided that he wasn’t a kid anymore, and tossed it aside. “My parents decided to skip the holidays altogether this year. I went to my grandfather’s house on Christmas Eve, and it was...empty. Nobody was there, or Lolo was asleep, but...did you know that Gabriel and I were supposed to sign a lease agreement with the Lai Mall after the holidays?”
“I figured,” Kira said. “You only took a year’s lease for Sunday Bakery. I thought it was weird, but Ate Nessie...”
“Knows everything?” Santi asked.
“She does,” Kira agreed. “But I’m guessing that’s not happening anymore.”
“Gabriel had a change of heart,” he explained. “Decided that we should just revisit our mall plans next year, or maybe the year after that.”
“Maybe never,” Kira said.
Santi’s business partner had all the practical reasons why they shouldn’t go through with it—they needed to gradually ramp up their production, he needed to figure out how to streamline things. But what Santi didn’t really hear was the actual reason why. A mall deal for Sunday Bakery was the way forward. The way up, in a sense.
But Gabriel just decided,nope, no thanks. Let’s overturn all of our plans.And it had nothing to do with logic, or needing time to standardize his baking, but the fact that he’d fallen in love with the barista next door, and he didn’t want to be away from her. It was that easy for Gabriel, and Santi didn’t understand why. Or how he could alter his entire life around that.
“I just don’t know how people can make decisions based on their emotions.” Santi’s brow furrowed as he remembered. “It’s unfamiliar to me.”
“Well...wasn’t moving here an emotional decision?” Kira asked, leaning back against the seat. “Not because we met in Japan, or whatever. Lipa still meant something to you, obviously, or else you wouldn’t have decided to come here. It’s the same for Gabriel. He thinks he belongs with us in the Laneways. It means something to him to stay.”
There it was.He belongs with us.And Santi couldn’t help the little surge of jealousy that sprang up from his stomach, green and nasty. Why was it that Gabriel, who had been in Lipa for all of three months, was suddenly accepted, and happy and satisfied, while Santi, who had been here foryears, was still...yearning. Wanting to belong here, or Manila, or anywhere that would take him.
“It goes against everything I was taught. Lolo would hate that, if I told him we were forgoing a deal with the biggest mall in South Luzon.” Santi frowned, ignoring his feelings. “The goal of a business is to make profit, and increase its profits until you have more money than God. Staying would be counter-productive.”
“Goals are changeable.” Kira shrugged, like it was that simple to change the way you were trained, the way you were raised. “Gabriel opened Sunday Bakery to prove something to his family, but now he realizes he did it for himself, because he just really enjoyed baking. I opened a chocolate shop because I insisted that I needed to do something for myself, by myself, but I realize I’ve mostly been using it as an excuse to meddle in people’s lives.”
She frowned then, like she’d bitten into something nasty, and Santi didn’t like that. He wondered who made her feel like her chocolate was a bad thing. It really wasn’t.
“I love your chocolate,” he told her. “And I don’t think you could run your business if you didn’t take it seriously.”
“Oh,” Kira said, and there was that blush again. He quite liked being the one to make her blush. “Thank you.”
“The 60% dark is my favorite,” he continued. “Not too sweet.”
“You would be the kind to like chocolate that wasn’t sweet,” Kira agreed, and it was good to see her smile. “Santi, what a business should accomplish should be up to the one who put it up,” she finally said. “Don’t you think?”
Talaga ba?he almost said, because that was exactly the opposite of what he thought. But then again, who was to say what good was supposed to be like?
