“I haven’t,” she agreed, chuckling. “I’m the same, people-pleasing, universe-believing Gemini you knew twenty years ago. You haven’t changed, either.”
“I haven’t?” he asked, and he wondered how, when he felt like Santi of twenty years ago was completely different from Anton Santillan, the drifting shadow person who didn’t know what to do with himself.
“You’ve always been the tall and silent type,” she said with a little shrug, walking down the aisle. “Never a foot wrong, always perfect. You’re actually wearing the right winter clothes. While I am going to die freezing in this silk jacket.”
She shivered, and Santi immediately pulled the scarf from his neck. His skin practically hissed at the warmth it released. Then, before he could overthink it, he handed it to her while she was considering which of the flavored KitKats to get. Kira turned her head and looked at the scarf before she looked up at him.
“You have to keep your neck warm,” he argued. “The base of the brain helps regulate body temperature.”
When she blinked at him curiously, Santi sighed and stepped forward, waiting for a moment for her to give him a tiny nod before he wrapped his scarf around her neck with his free hand. Her lashes fluttered as she looked down at where his hands worked, and he caught a slightly floral scent that was coming from her. He noticed her lips looked soft and pink, matching the warm flush that spread across her cheeks.
When he stepped back, she smiled at him, tugging at the end of the scarf to wrap it a little tighter.
“Like I said,” she told him. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
So they were apparently shopping together now. Santi placed a can of beer into the basket, why not. Kira continued walking forward, considering the Calpis, the Ramune, before deciding against all of that and just adding another bag of chips with her onigiri and peach beer. She was just about to add a cream bun when she suddenly laughed, and turned to look at him.
“I just realized. You broke your promise,” she told him. The little frown on her face reminded him of when he was ten years old, and he said he couldn’t come out to play today because he needed to study. “Do you remember?”
He did. He remembered the both of them sitting in the back of his family’s old pickup, frowning and scowling like sitting there was a form of protest against the Santillans’ impending move to Manila.
“You have to promise,”she’d said to him. “That you’ll come back. When I’m old, like, thirty, and when I need you most. Like a knight in shining armor. With a horse and everything!”
“Where am I supposed to get a horse?”he protested, because even back then he knew how to ask questions. It was, in his grandfather’s words, his least attractive quality.“Why do I have to come back? Why can’t you just come to me?”
“Because we’re going to live in Lipa, duh.”Eight-year-old Kira had rolled her eyes like the answer was obvious.“Where else would we go?”
Where else, indeed. Back then, Lipa City had been their entire universe. Their street near the Cathedral had been their entire planet. There was nowhere else to go, and Manila had seemed like a fantasy place you visited every few weekends, the rest of the world even more so.
But now, standing there in a convenience store in the middle of Osaka, the world had suddenly become much smaller.
“I didn’t,” he told her twenty-ish years later. “You’re still twenty-six, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Kira said, wrinkling her nose like she hated that she was twenty-six. “And you’re twenty-eight. But the statute of limitations on that promise is going to run out very soon. Which is probably why the universe thought we needed to meet up again. I’m going to assume you’re here for the holidays? A vacation of sorts?”
“Yes,” he said, if going on a one-week sabbatical to rethink his whole life could be considered a vacation. “You?”
She nodded. “I’m here with my family. I’m supposed to meet my siblings at this temple nearby,” she explained, and the amount of snacks in her basket suddenly made sense. “Actually, I just finished from a spying mission.”
“Spying mission?” Santi echoed, picking up a box of the Meiji macadamia chocolates.
“Altair Chocolates,” she said, whispering the name like someone could overhear them.
“Chloe Agila’s brand,” Santi noted, because of course everyone knew Chloe Agila’s brand. It was a name spoken in the upper-and middle-class echelons of Manila society, the land developer’s daughter from Davao who had made a name for herself as an influencer, eventually using that influence to jump start an entire industry of artisan Filipino chocolate.
She claimed she was the first to make chocolate from cacao beans grown in the Philippines. It probably wasn’t true, but Altair Chocolates took off, selling in retail stores and popping up in every gift basket in the country. More brands followed her lead since then, making Davao the epicenter of the artisan Philippine chocolate revolution.
All of that Santi just knew from periphery. Families ran big businesses, and it was hard not to know who ran what. Especially when you were supposed to run the Carlton Hotel and Resorts Group, the chain of hotels that were these rich families’ hotels of choice. Anyway.
“Yup.” Kira nodded, popping the “p” as she peered at a little nail polish bottle in the home goods section. “They just opened a store in Dotonbori, of all places, and I wanted to try it out.”
“Are you making a chocolate brand in Davao?” he asked her.
“No.” She chuckled. “Lipa. I’m starting something in Lipa.” she said, smiling at him, and in that moment, he envied her. He envied her being so sure of her place in the world. “Maybe. I’m not sure yet. I just started learning how, with Davao beans, and Altair is from Davao, so I wanted to taste it. I can already see myself wearing shiny red stilettos and a red cape, going where the wind takes me, spreading the secrets of chocolate.”
Santi had no idea what she was talking about, but she seemed completely taken by the fantasy of it.
“You remember the Tomases?” Kira asked.
