Page 33 of Signal No. Us

Something about the plain, unembarrassed way he said it, no joke buried in it, no deflection, made Allan fall for him a little harder, right there on the porch, hammer forgotten between them.

The mural, meanwhile, was actually starting to look like something.

Allan had spent the better part of two weeks scraping, priming, and sketching, and the wall above Cine sa Isla’s old screen now carried a rough but unmistakable shape: the same mountain his lolo had painted decades ago, but wider now, wilder, two separate systems of storm cloud rolling in from the Pacific side, close enough that their edges had started to bend toward each other, curling into the same slow spiral instead of two, exactly the way he’d seen it that morning on the ridge, a small dog trotting along the shoreline below, two tiny figures standing at the edge of it all, hands linked, faces turned up toward the sky instead of running from it.

“You put us in it,” Robby said, the first time he saw that part, voice caught somewhere between amused and wrecked.

“Artistic license,” Allan said, trying for casual and failing. “Also, I ran out of ideas for what else to put there. Figured if I was going to steal your weather term, I should at least paint it right.”

“Liar,” Robby said, but he was smiling too hard to sound properly accusing and pulled Allan in by the paint-stained collar of his shirt to kiss him right there on the scaffolding, ignoring Jake’s delighted, undisguised applause from the doorway.

“Finally,” Jake called. “Grant deliverable achieved. Community engagement: maximum.”

“You are the worst business partner,” Allan said, not moving from where he was still very comfortably tucked against Robby’s side.

“But the best one,” Jake said, utterly unrepentant, already photographing the mural for the funding report with the enthusiasm of a man who fully intended to caption it something unbearable.

That night, walking Allan home along the dark, familiar road, Robby slowed his steps deliberately, in no hurry to get anywhere.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About what’s next. After the mural, after Ver’s wedding.”

“What’s next?”

“I don’t have a plan,” Robby admitted. “I just hope this keeps going. You, me, here. I just don’t know yet what that looks like.”

“We could just…keep going,” Allan said, testing the words, finding he liked how simple they sounded out loud. “No big plan. Just one day at a time.”

“I can do that,” Robby said, and squeezed his hand once, certain.

CHAPTER 17

The email arrived on a Tuesday, while Allan was up on the scaffolding trying to get a cloud to look less like a cauliflower and more like an actual storm.

He almost didn’t see it. His phone had been buried in his paint bag for an hour, and by the time he checked it, there were three missed calls and a message that made his stomach drop in a way he hadn’t felt since the ferry.

MS. PADILLA (HR), 9:14 AM

Hi Allan! Hope you’re doing well. Leadership would like to discuss bringing you back in a senior capacity, Director, Regional Ops. Salary and title well above your previous role. Can we set up a call this week?

He read it four times, standing very still on the scaffolding, paintbrush dripping storm-gray onto his shoe.

Director. Regional Ops. The number attached to it, because of course there was a number attached to it, HR loved nothing more than leading with a number, was more than double what he’d made before, more than either of his parents had made in a year, ever, combined.

It was also, he did the math before he could stop himself, more than enough to cover Ma’s quarterly scans in Virac for the next five years without either of them thinking twice about the cost again.

“What was that?” Robby called up from below, sanding down a bench they’d salvaged from the old lobby. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“Nothing,” Allan said, too fast, sliding the phone back into his bag. “Spam. Some insurance scam thing.”

He hated how easily the lie came out. Hated more how his hands were shaking slightly as he went back to the cloud, which now, undeniably, looked even more like a cauliflower than before.

He didn’t tell Robby that night. Or the night after that.

It wasn’t exactly a decision: more a kind of quiet, private math he found himself doing at odd hours, in the shower, halfway through dinner, lying awake with Oryo snoring against his feet. Director. Regional Ops. The kind of title that would make every relative at Ver’s wedding nod approvingly instead of asking, gently, delicately, what exactly he was planning to do now that he was twenty-eight and unemployed and painting walls for free.

He told himself he was just thinking it over. That it would be irresponsible not to consider it. That nothing had actually changed.

But he found himself, that week, snapping at small things that had never bothered him before, the BEBES’ good-natured teasing suddenly grating instead of warm, the slow provincial pace of the cinema project suddenly feeling less like peace and more like standing still while the rest of the world kept moving without him.