“Hija,” Ate Nessie said. “If you value your life, you will—”
“Throw in a free dessert? Sure, why not?” Kira asked brightly. “What do you say, Mang Roldan? Tsokolate and a brownie?”
“Well,” he said, and she could tell that Landi City, population Nessie and Roldan, was about to happen really soon. “If Rosanna says yes...”
“Oh yes, go ahead,” Ate Nessie said. “I...would not be mad.”
“Great!” Kira clapped her hands together excitedly. She asked one of her staff to make sure Ate Nessie and Mang Roldan “get cozy” before she disappeared to the back of her shop, giggling all the way. She tied her hair back into a ponytail, threw on a bandana and an apron. Putting on another song (Carly Rae Jepsen this time, because she always sang into Kira’ssoul), she was humming along and pulling the tartufo from the ref.
Kira carefully got out her cooled ganache, her dark chocolate ice cream, her still-warm brownies and strawberry jam while she played her favorite song, danced along when she could. She really should take a photo, because marketing. A before-and-after shot, maybe a time-lapse? That would be interesting. But all her countertops were taller than her hip, and it was really hard to get a good angle...
In retrospect, using the rolling chair and standing on tiptoes just to take a photo wasn’t the wisest decision Kira had ever made. But, as soon as that chair started wobbling, and she felt herself losing balance, she knew it was pointless to think about it.
But thank god for guys with strong arms and quick reaction times, because the next thing she knew, she was safely off the ground, her and her arms naturally looped around Anton Santillan’s neck.
Oh god, his eyelashes are even longer up close,was the first thing she thought, and her face immediately heated up, like a “kilig” switch had been flipped to its maximum, and now the butterflies that lived in her stomach were creating a huge typhoon of heart emojis that threatened to burst out of her, and she was going to start laughing, because apparently experiencing maximum kilig made her laugh and clench every muscle in her body...help.
Was she breathing? Probably not.
Santi was completely stone-faced, his lips pressed together in a hard line, his hands practically clamped to the back of her knees and shoulders. He didn’t look like it was any burden, carrying her like this, but seemed more upset that he had to do it in the first place. The entire room went still, as if the whole world was in shock or in too much kilig that this had actually happened, and time stopped, holding its breath, just for Anton and Kira. Just like that night in the gardens, that moment in the Carlton lobby, that night in the convenience store.
Their little moments were building. Kira liked that they were building.
“What were you doing?” he asked her, like catching her like this was something that happened every day.
“Taking a photo,” Kira explained, wrapping her arms a little tighter around his neck. Wow, he smelled really nice. Like something clean and fresh. Actually, he smelled a lot like her vetiver and tea tree bodywash. Oh god. “Not my smartest moment.”
“Correct,” he said.
“You’re an hour early.”
“Also correct,” he said, and a tiny part of Kira wished someone else could see them, because she wasn’t sure if she was going to believe that this actually happened. “I think I should have gotten you a ladder for Christmas.”
“You can still give me a gift for Rizal Day,” Kira joked. “Also I had a ladder. It just had wheels. Can you let me down now?”
“That depends. Can you be trusted on solid ground now?” he asked, raising a brow in response, but set her down carefully anyway, and she wasn’t too proud to admit that she already missed the feeling of his arms on her, that the places where his hands had been were absolutely tingling.
“Thank you,” she managed to say. “For the rescue.”
“Anytime,” he said back, his palm very suddenly on the back of his neck, rubbing the spot where Kira was sure her hand had been. He was trying very hard not to look at her, she realized, and her fears about him withdrawing were somewhat allayed when she realized that his cheeks were flushed. She pressed her lips together before a little kilig-induced giggle threatened to escape her. Anton Santillan was blushing. He was blushing because ofher, and could she just explode into a storm of butterflies and heart emojis now?
“Um,” she said, looking around the kitchen. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“How?” There was hesitancy in Santi’s voice that Kira ignored as she put her phone down on the first empty spot in the counter she could find. To be honest, there wasn’t a lot left. Between unmolding the chocolate and prep ingredients, catching up on her post-Christmas orders and her insistence that she be the one responsible to keep the back kitchen clean, she’d fallen just a little behind.
“Kira, how do you find anything in here?” Santi asked, walking around a sack of fermented beans, around the plastic storage boxes she used to store the roasted beans, the immersion circulator that was plugged into the last remaining socket under the counter.
“I...figure it out,” she sniffed defensively, setting up the mixer, and crap, where did she put her measuring things?
It was like watching a cat (or a fox? She’d never seen a fox in her life.) stalk around the room, looking for something that wasn’t messy or knocked over. He walked toward the back wall where she had three toaster ovens set up with a rotisserie drum for roasting beans. Then to the melangers (Astroboy was doing much better, thanks), all happily grinding down nibs and sugar into chocolate. She watched him carefully, wondering what he was going to say next.
“Look, you can come back in an hour, and everything will be fine,” Kira assured him. “I just want to—”
“These are your melangers?” he asked, pointing at the machines.
Kira heard herself say, “oh,” in total surprise, felt her back straighten very suddenly. A wave of defensiveness washed over her, and tension seeped into her fingers. “...yes. You know what a melanger is?”
“I’ve been doing some reading. After you told me about it in Osaka, I wondered what it entailed, so...” He shrugged. And she knew that he didn’t mean that to sound sexy, but it did to her. Since when was she into a man who could throw around terms like melanging? Who read up on things because they wanted to understand what you do a little better? “Melangers are the machines that grind and break down the nibs and ingredients into chocolate. Do you use a winnower to separate the cacao shells from the nibs?”
