Page 30 of Signal No. Us

“That sounds like a wrestling move.”

“It’s named after a Japanese scientist who noticed it first.” He kept his eyes on the horizon, like it was easier to face the weather than Allan directly. “Sometimes the two of them just dance around each other for days and drift apart again. No harm done.” He paused, turning the thermos cap in his hand. “Sometimes one just swallows the other. Or they merge. Become one thing. Can’t even tell anymore which storm you started with.” He shrugged, like that was the whole science of it. “You don’t know which until it’s already happening. Annoying, honestly.”

“You’re describing a weather pattern like it’s a breakup podcast, Robby.”

“I’m describing a weather pattern,” Robby said, entirely too innocent for someone who’d clearly chosen every one of those words on purpose. “You’re the one bringing subtext into it.”

“That’s basically my job too,” Robby said, after a beat, relenting into the easier joke. “Looking at beautiful things, then telling people who should be scared.”

“Very romantic career.”

“If you say so,” Robby said, dry, but there was something soft underneath it, watching Allan’s pencil start moving across the page, quick, sure, chasing the light before it changed.

Allan sketched in silence for a while: the layered clouds, the dark spine of the island falling away below them, the lighthouse standing its lonely watch down the coast, and the small orange dot of a fishing boat already out on the water despite the looming storm. Robby watched, quiet, close enough that his shoulder pressed warm against Allan’s, not saying anything, just being there in the specific, patient way he’d been since the library.

“This,” Allan said eventually, not looking up from the page, “this is what I wanted to come back to. Not the Manila life. This.”

“This what?”

“This,” Allan said, gesturing vaguely at the sketchbook, the light, the whole impossible sky. “Looking at something, then drawing it, no deadline, no manager telling me to ‘stretch’ myself. I missed this feeling.”

“Is it just this you missed,” Robby asked, “or was it the whole island?”

Allan finally looked up from the page, meeting his eyes in the strange, beautiful half-light.

“I missed you too,” he admitted. No joke loaded behind it this time. “Even when I shouldn’t have. Ten years, Robby. I tried not to.”

“Didn’t work for me either,” Robby said, voice low.

The distance between them had been shrinking all morning without either of them officially deciding to close it: shoulders touching, then knees, then Robby’s hand finding Allan’s free one and simply staying there, thumb tracing slow, absent circles against his knuckles.

“Is it okay now,” Robby asked, so quietly it nearly got lost under the wind, “or is it still too soon?”

“Okay for what?” Allan asked, though he knew exactly what, his heart already answering the question before his mouth caught up.

“This,” Robby said, and closed the last of the distance himself, slow enough that Allan had every chance to pull back and didn’t.

The kiss was soft, gentle, faintly tasting of instant coffee from the thermos and the salt-heavy morning air, nothing like the frantic, doomed thing Allan had imagined at sixteen, and somehow so much better for being unhurried, deliberate, and chosen.

When they broke apart, Robby was smiling in a way Allan felt deep behind his ribs.

“Ten years late,” Robby said.

“Better late,” Allan said, “than a rerun of the same mistake.”

“That’s appropriately poetic for someone who just got kissed on a rock at dawn.”

“I contain multitudes,” Allan said, and kissed him again, just because he could, just because ten years of being not allowed had finally, quietly, become allowed.

“I’ve been thinking about what happened to us 10 years ago, how I didn’t say anything and you didn’t say anything too, and then we just moved away from each other—I don’t think we should do that again.”

“Deal,” Allan said, and the word came out steadier than it had any right to, like saying it out loud had made it a little more true.

Robby’s phone buzzed against the rock between them, breaking the moment just slightly. He glanced at it, and something flickered across his face, quick and calculating, before he visibly decided not to let it win the morning.

“Kapitan,” he said, in answer to Allan’s raised eyebrow. “Grant committee moved the site visit up. October to mid-September. Three weeks, not eight.”

“Is that bad?”