“Water,” Sam grumbled at nothing in particular. “Ijustwanted water.”
“Thirsty ka, girl?” Kira asked, wiggling her brows at her friend, who gave her a massive eye roll.
“Okayfine,I am a little thirsty, but there is no need to rub it on my single ass!”
And it was while Kira continued to egg Sam on that she noticed the light fading a little from Santi’s eyes. And while they lay together in bed that evening, too exhausted to do anything more than wrap their arms around each other and sleep, Kira didn’t comment on Santi pulling her even closer.
Hours later, sometime between midnight and sunrise, Kira sat bolt upright on Santi’s bed. It wascold.They had left the window open again, and the cold had seeped into the room, into Kira’s skin. The wind whistled and made the trees look like they were content to party all night long, a branch in particular kept slapping against the window, telling her to wake the fuck up.
“Bitch, it is not even seven am,” she groaned, blinking at her phone as it very aggressively informed her of the time. The sun had barely risen. “Santi...?”
She turned to Santi’s side of the bed. It was those blessed few hours in the day where they were both usually asleep, but she was surprised to find his side of the bed empty. Frowning, Kira grabbed the blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders, wincing as her bare feet met the cold floor.
She slipped on her tsinelas and padded out to the living room, where she found Santi sitting on the floor, his back against his couch and his legs tucked under the new coffee table they’d picked up in Taguig. A now cold cup of barako was sitting on a coaster on the coffee table, seemingly untouched.
He was still just in his boxers, absently looking up at the Oscar Salita painting he’d brought to Lipa from his place in Ortigas. The painting was an abstract, soft, colorful shapes that took the shape of a woman with a basket of mangoes, and a man playing with a small child, another child in the background. The painting was vibrant and colorful, almost like the characters were constantly moving. But they seemed to carry a sadness about them, something in the painting’s cool blues that made it less than perfect.
Santi looked more exhausted than Kira remembered, bruises under his eyes, looking at the painting while he absentmindedly stroked...a cat. The same cat that Kira had seen on his couch, apparently not an illusion. Because there it was, a fluffy white, brown and orange cat with green eyes, glaring at her like she wasn’t worthy. And there he was, stroking it like the cat had owned him all his life.
“Santi?” Kira asked, and he jerked back to the room, blinking at Kira, narrowing his eyes a little, as if making sure it really was her.
“Kira, go back to sleep.” His voice was strained and just...tired. Did he sound this tired earlier? “I’m...almost done with this.”
“Done with what?” she asked, taking a tentative step forward. The cat glared at her, as if daring Kira to take it away from her current human scratching post. “Um, is that your cat?”
“I don’t know who owns her.” He shrugged as it (sorry,she)continued to blatantly nuzzle up against him. He may not know who owned her, but the cat seemed to definitely know whom she owned, if that made sense. “She just shows up at my door sometimes, asking for food and affection.”
“Sounds familiar,” Kira chuckled, sitting next to him on the floor, throwing the other end of her blanket over his shoulder. At least now Santi had a nice rug and a nice couch to lean against; she remembered the living room being particularly bare less than a month ago. “What’s going on?”
He turned to her then, as if seeing her for the first time that evening, morning, early dawn, whatever.
“I can’t fix it. I’m out of options, and I’m running out of time, and I don’t want to run out of time,” he admitted, pressing the heel of his hand over his right eyelid. She took his hand, and squeezed it lightly. She wanted to encourage him, to say, “yes, and...?” He looked so lost and defeated. She hated seeing him like this.
But he seemed to change tracks, and shook his head.
“Would you like to go to the beach?”
“We don’t have to, Santi.” She shook her head. The beach was a distraction, a shiny thing to dangle in front of Kira’s eyes so she didn’t notice that something was going on. She knew that, and she wasn’t going to fall for it.
“Please. I just need to see something. And I think you need to see it, too.”
The tension in his voice was all she needed to hear. That despair that he’d sunk into the word “please” undid her.
“Okay.” She nodded. Then she looked at the cat again. “You’renot coming.”
Kira had a few things she left over at his house, clothes and underwear, and he had hotel toothbrushes, so they packed all of that. She got dressed, he got dressed, and they got in his flashy red Mercedes to drive two hours to Nasugbu.
“We’re going where?” she echoed when he told her.
“Nasugbu,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “We have a house in Playa Loro.”
Of all the beaches in close range to Lipa, Nasugbu was not the most likely. They could have gone to Laiya two hours away, or Lobo. It was almost a three-hour drive to get to Nasugbu, the westernmost point of Batangas, and they could have driven to Manila in that time.
But no. Santi insisted that it needed to be Nasugbu. There was something they needed to see in Nasugbu.
So two, almost three hours later, they arrived at the gates of Playa Loro, the über-exclusive beach club for Manila’s elite, a village full of beach houses and vacation homes, all facing the South China Sea. Kira didn’t ask questions, not even when the guards waved them in without protest, when he drove through the streets like he had planned to come here all along.
They pulled up at a house at the very end of a road, a lovely, Spanish villa-esque three story, with a little circular driveway, marigold yellow walls and bougainvillea spilling over the walls in waves of magenta. There was even a tiled fountain in the driveway, beckoning people in.
