Short Stories You Can't Read Out Loud

Cara Santana was twenty-eight, a licensed architect, a cum laude graduate from UST, and a board exam passer on her third take. Well, technically third. She didn’t count the first attempt because adjustment period lang yun, and she had surgically erased the second from her memory because it was simply an off day. Both explanations were ones she had told herself so many times they had become biographical fact.

Her family owned three Santana Hardware branches in Bulacan, a government-accredited supplier with lucrative DPWH contracts, and a gated five-bedroom house in a high-end subdivision where the security guards greeted them by name, and where the neighborhood association had never once experienced flooding because they had paid to ensure it. It wasn’t just a hardware store. It was a hardware store empire. That distinction was not a detail Cara Santana would ever let anyone forget.

She had never been told no in any meaningful way. She had never been made to wait. She had never applied for something and not gotten it, never worked without a safety net, never gone to sleep worried about next month’s rent. These facts lived in her bones without her knowing they were facts at all. To her, they were simply how the world worked. You identified what you wanted. You presented yourself with sufficient confidence. The world arranged itself accordingly.

She had already designed two residential projects as a third-year student, one house in Antipolo and one bakery renovation in Marikina. Technically illegal since she had no license yet, but nobody reported her, the clients were grateful, and it permanently counted in her mental portfolio as proof of concept. After passing the boards she steamrolled through three projects in two years, all private clients, all successful, all the exact kind of polished result you post on Instagram with a crisp filter and a caption like and another one and rack up 200 likes before lunch.

And now her make-or-break project. Project 4. The project that would open her empire to foreign investors.

Halloway and Associates Philippines. A 2.3-hectare commercial development in Cavite. An international firm, international money, international exposure. She pitched, she presented, she wore her sharpest power blazer, and she won. She knew exactly what it meant if she pulled this off. Her name in the kind of magazines that mattered. Her firm in an entirely different tier.

So this project was not going to fail.

Never.

Rey Santos was twenty-six, a BS Business Administration graduate from PUP. He graduated one year late, not for lack of intellect but for lack of time. He was a working student. Convenience store nights, SM food court days, one major subject retaken after a family emergency forced him to drop out for an entire semester.

He finished. No Latin honors. No special awards. He made it, and making it had cost him things he never talked about.

He applied for corporate jobs and waited ten agonizing months for emails that never arrived. He drove Grab to keep the lights on at home. When a driver position opened at a mid-sized architectural firm, his dad said mag-abroad ka na lang and his mom said magpahinga ka muna, and he took the job anyway because pride did not pay tuition fees and he had two younger brothers to put through school.

His plan was simple. Save enough for the brothers, then go abroad, the Middle East or Canada, anywhere with a decent exchange rate and honest documentation.

For now, he drove dozens of kilometers a day through Manila traffic, opo ma’am over and over, and pure endurance. Endurance mostly because the person who signed off on his livelihood was Cara Santana, who was notoriously, exhaustingly difficult to work for and had no idea what anything actually cost. He had become her driver, errand boy, and silent punching bag for every mood that passed through her. He learned early that the best way to deal with her was to agree. There was nothing good that came from telling her things she didn’t want to hear.

Phase one of the Halloway project was simple on paper. Site clearing and preparation. Level the soil, set up the perimeter fence, connect temporary utilities, prep the ground for construction in phase two.

“This is straightforward,” Cara said at the kickoff meeting, in that tone of hers that didn’t state an opinion but declared a fact and dared the room to dispute it. “Two months max. I’ve done this three times. I know exactly what to do.”

The two Americans zooming in from Seattle nodded and thanked her.

That was six weeks ago. The only thing completed on-site was the vinyl tarp on the gate that said ON THIS SITE WILL RISE.

Week one. Three general workers didn’t show up after Monday. No call, no text. Gone into thin air.

The foreman called Cara to report it. She was in her car, being driven to a client lunch, and she did not look up from her phone.

“Irresponsible. Find replacements by tomorrow. I don’t want to hear about staffing problems again. That’s literally what site management is for. Handle it or you’re fired.” She hung up. She did not think about it again.

Week two. The electrical subcontractor changed his number and stopped replying to emails entirely.

“Blacklist him. Announce on social media he has no connection to us. I don’t care who he is or what his excuse is, I don’t deal with people who ghost. Get someone else by Friday. There are a hundred electrical contractors in this city and we pay better than most.” She said all of this while eating a salad that cost eight hundred pesos and had not the slightest comprehension of why finding a reliable licensed electrician on three days’ notice in Cavite was not a simple thing.

Rey could only nod while listening from the driver’s seat. Her pay was good, he reminded himself, and he should be grateful for it. Better than his Grab days and fewer hours. He had learned to funnel whatever she said in one ear and let it flow out the other. His mother used to say, kung anong narinig mo sa kaliwang tenga, itunghay mo sa kanan. He understood now what she meant. He had government-mandated benefits and overtime pay. Her voice had become background noise, but he needed the money.

Week three. The replacement workers walked out collectively on a Thursday afternoon. All of them. They couldn’t fully articulate why, only that the place felt wrong. One worker stayed long enough to tell the foreman quietly: “Masama lang po pakiramdam sa lugar, Architect. Parang may nanonood sa’yo palagi.” Then he left, walking faster than normal as soon as he cleared the gate.

When the foreman called Cara, she was at a furniture showroom choosing tiles for her own bathroom renovation.

“Tangina. That is the most dramatic excuse I have ever heard,” she said flatly. “Bad feelings. These are grown men getting paid a daily rate who are telling me they have bad feelings about a dirt lot in Cavite. Find me workers who can do their job without needing emotional support. Replacement crew by Monday.” She hung up and turned back to the tile samples. She did not consider, not for one second, that there might be anything worth taking seriously in what she had just been told.

She walked out of the showroom. “Rey! Get the car.”

Rey nodded and did as told. From across the parking lot he could see Cara standing on the curb, berating her phone. He had noticed things about her in eleven months that he never would have expected to notice. She probably had no boyfriend. That was the standing rumor among the staff, and looking at her now, it tracked. Her attitude was the problem. She kept bossing people around as though the world owed her constant compliance. She was tall and put-together, but her coldness neutralized everything else. Her disposition and her character made for a combination that no amount of money could fix. The body, maybe, with enough investment. But her attitude had been calcifying since birth. No procedure on earth touched that.

Week four. Meralco never showed. Fully approved application, no crew. Three follow-up calls, two sharply worded formal emails, and then the site engineer was sent personally. He came back looking pale, his voice unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with physical illness.

“Sabi nila papuntahin daw nila, Architect. Pero parang ayaw nilang pumunta. May iniiwasan sila.”

Cara leaned across her desk. She looked at him the way she looked at a load-bearing calculation that had come out wrong.

“Do you want to keep your job?” she said, her voice flat and irritated.

The site engineer looked at her. Then at the door. He stood up, said “Sorry po, Architect,” and walked out. He did not return the next day, or the day after. He did not return at all.

Week five. The concrete supplier cancelled by email with no explanation. The surveying team pulled out without billing for partial work, which was unusual enough to be alarming. And then the foreman forwarded her three separate messages, three different workers, three different numbers, sent within the same hour, word for word identical:

Sorry po, family emergency.

Cara stared at that for a long time. Then she closed her laptop and sat in her pristine, air-conditioned office and stared at her project timeline, which was now saturated in red highlight from one end to the other and looked less like a professional document than evidence of something she didn’t have a name for yet.

“Halloway’s check-in is on Friday,” her assistant reminded her softly from the doorway.

“I know.”

“You have...”

“I. Know!” she snapped, voice sharp and fast.

Cara decided to visit the site personally on Thursday morning, armed with her clipboard, her designer sunglasses, and the absolute conviction that the problem here was incompetence and nothing else.

Rey pulled the car up before she even said the location. That was how it always was now. He knew her schedule before she announced it, knew her moods before she spoke them, knew when to stay quiet and when to brace. She never acknowledged it because it was his job and that was the end of it.

The entire drive to Cavite was silent. He had been driving her for almost a year. He knew every register of her voice, that light American accent she put on for Halloway calls, the clipped precision of I will not accept this when she was at her most dangerous. He knew what this particular silence meant. He kept his eyes on the road and stayed out of it.

Six people remained on-site. The foreman. Two laborers. A carpenter. A utility man. And a teenager everyone called Boy whose job description had never been officially established. They were peculiarly gloomy, on guard, faces drawn. One of the laborers looked like he was barely holding it together.

Cara stepped out of the SUV without waiting and walked onto the lot with the energy of a woman who had come to issue sentences, not hear arguments.

She did not say good morning.

“What the hell is happening here?” The words hit the lot like a dropped tool. “Wala tayong progress. Zero. Six weeks and the only finished thing on this site is the tarp on the gate, the one that says will rise. We might as well return it to the supplier because nothing is rising here. Nothing.”

The foreman stepped forward, hard hat in hand. “Ma’am, nagpaliwanag na po kami sa mga nakaraang...”

“Two months.” She cut across him without effort. “Fucking two months. Do you have any idea what is at stake for me here? For this firm? Of course you don’t, because you are not at the level where these things mean anything to you beyond your daily rate, which by the way your performance has not come close to earning. I need one rational explanation. Just one. Why phase one has zero progress.”

“Ma’am...”

“Don’t ma’am me while the site looks like this. Give me a reason or give me your resignation.”

The six men looked at each other. They never spoke, but they understood one another perfectly.

Then, without a word, they all picked up their bags and toolboxes. Not loudly, not in anger, but with the specific quiet of people who have made a decision they are entirely at peace with.

“Wait, what...”

“Magre-resign na po kami,” the foreman said, his voice steady with the steadiness of a man who has run out of something and no longer minds. “Lahat kami. Effective immediately. Sa inyo na lang po ang natitirang sahod namin. Maayos ko pong ilalabas ang mga gamit.”

“You can’t just...”

But as she was about to continue, they were already walking. They never wasted a second. One by one through the gate. Even Boy walked out with his chin held high.

In under two minutes, the site was empty.

Cara stood alone in the middle of the dusty lot. Abandoned yellow helmets. Scaffolding baking in the sun. Idle earthmoving equipment. The vinyl tarp flapping, flapping, flapping in the wind off the highway, the scorching Cavite heat pressing down on her blazer like a hand.

She turned. Rey was standing by the car, gaze carefully lifted past her. He walked toward her.

“Where did everyone go?” The first crack of panic in her voice.

“Nag-resign na daw po silang lahat...”

“I KNOW they resigned. I asked where they went.”

“Lumabas na po ng gate.” He didn’t mention the rest: that one of the laborers had grabbed his arm before leaving, trembling, and told him to get out of there quickly. That there was a spirit living on this lot, that anyone who stayed would put their family in danger. He hadn’t argued with the man. The way they were all murmuring to each other, the way the laborer’s hand had shaken on his arm. He’d seen frightened people before but not like that.

Cara started pacing, heels on cracked dirt, clack clack clack, frantic and furious and grabbing at her own hair.

“Why? The fuck WHY is this happening? Three projects! Three flawless projects, on time, on budget, zero issues! Why this one?! What is different about THIS one?!”

She stopped. She turned to Rey.

“Rey.” It was the first time all day she had addressed him as if he were a person. “What do you think is going on here? Bakit ganyan sila?”

Rey paused. He measured his words the way a careful man measures his steps on a surface he doesn’t trust.

“May... nuno sa punso po,” he said, plainly, no irony, no hedging. “Kaya siguro.” He didn’t fully believe it himself, but then again, why would those men say it if it weren’t true.

Cara stared at him for a long moment.

Then she let out a scoff so sharp it could have stripped bark off the old mango tree. “Seriously? You’re telling me seriously?”

“Serious po ako, ma’am. Sabi nung...”

“Rey, we are in the twenty-first century. I have a PRC license. I have a structural engineering background. There is a rational, logical, completely documented explanation for everything that has happened on this site.”

“Baka lang po.”

“Don’t baka lang po me! The workers quit because that foreman couldn’t manage a crew! The contractors pulled out for better offers! Meralco is just the usual bureaucratic garbage they pull in this part of Cavite! Maybe somebody bitter is sabotaging my project. All of it has a logical explanation and none of it has anything to do with a six-inch magical creature!”

“Opo.”

“Stop saying opo like you’re agreeing! You’re not agreeing! Say what you actually mean!”

“Ituro ko lang po,” Rey said quietly, and lifted one steady finger toward the far left of the lot.

Near the base of the ancient mango tree in the corner sat a mound of earth. Knee-height. Dark and dense against the flat graded ground, the kind of mound that had clearly been there long before the subdivision was planned or the road paved or anyone thought to put a tarp on a gate. The kind of thing you could walk past a hundred times without registering, or walk past once and feel, in the back of the neck, that something inside it had registered you first.

Cara marched over. Heels on rock, clack clack clack. She squatted down and inspected it with all the warmth of a structural audit.

“It’s an anthill,” she declared.

“Punso po.”

“A termite mound. A geological formation. Do you know what this is called in actual architectural terms, Rey?”

“Punso po.”

“DIRT! It is accumulated soil! It is nothing! It has no feelings, no agenda, no supernatural authority over my subcontractors! And I am going to prove it!”

“Ma’am...” Rey hesitated and rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t want to get involved in this. But the memory of that old man’s grip on his arm was still fresh. The red, frightened eyes. The trembling hands. Something about the way the man had spoken sent a chill up his spine that he could not fully talk himself out of.

“Where is the shovel?” She was already walking to the abandoned wheelbarrow. She grabbed the heavy steel shovel leaning against it and turned back with it gripped in both hands.

“Ma’am, huwag na po siguro. Hanapan ko na lang po kayo ng bagong laborers.” Real alarm in his voice now, fully audible under the surface of his usual composure.

“Rey.” She pointed the shovel at him. “If you say one more word about a magical dwarf, I will write in your performance review that you are mentally unfit to operate heavy equipment. I have a PRC LICENSE. This is DIRT.”

“Ma’am, please...”

“HAYAAN MO KO! Gago! Wag kang sumasali sa mga bagay na hindi mo naiintindihan! You drive a car! I design buildings! This is a pile of dirt and I’m going to prove it right now so we can both stop wasting time!”

She wound up her left foot, designer shoe, pointed toe, full sweeping kick aimed dead at the center of the mound.

THUD.

The dirt caved in. The wind stopped. Every bird in every direction went silent at the exact same instant, as if the sound had been cut from the afternoon with scissors.

Rey went very still. Something was not right.

“Ma’am.” Barely above a whisper. “Ma’am, please. Tara na po.”

She raised the shovel.

“PUTANGINA NITO! You think I’m scared of dirt?! TANGINA! I have been managing construction sites since I was a third-year student! I did not survive exams and a DPWH accreditation process to be told by a PILE OF EARTH what happens on MY project!”

She swung.

PLAG.

The flat heavy steel drove into the peak of the mound. The impact shuddered up through the handle and into her shoulders and the sound of it rang out thick and final across the empty lot.

PLAG. PLAG.

“PUTANG INA MO, DIRT!” She attacked it with both hands, teeth bared, flattening the earth with the specific fury of a woman who has never once in her life been told she cannot have something. “TANGINA NG LAHAT NG ITO! Nuno?! NUNO?! I have deadlines! I have Americans waiting on this project! I have a reputation to protect!”

PLAG. PLAG. PLAG.

“GAGO! GAGO KA!” The mound was obliterated. Dirt flew wide across the dead grass. She stood over the ruin panting, shovel raised like a spear, chest heaving, blazer damp at the collar.

“There!” she gasped, trying to catch her breath. “Where is your magical...”

She stopped.

Something was sprouting from the ruined earth.

Six inches tall. A tiny pointed hat. Ancient bark-brown skin, gnarled as the roots it had lived among. And eyes, eyes older than the tree itself, older than the road outside the gate, older than anyone on this lot could count. Eyes that had watched countless humans make their small arrogant mistakes and had found all of them equally unimpressive.

The Nuno rose from the wreckage of its home and looked up at Cara Santana. Then a second one emerged beside it, then a third, then a dozen, crawling up from the broken earth like the ground itself was exhaling them.

Cara took one step back. Then another.

The leader’s wooden fingers snapped once, and the earth erupted.

From every root, every shadow, every cranny under abandoned hard hats and rusted equipment, they poured out. Dozens, then hundreds of duwende, scrambling up onto scaffolding and overturned buckets and idle earthmoving equipment, filling every surface of the lot with small grinning bodies arranging themselves for a show they had been waiting a very long time to see.

The Nuno opened its mouth and its voice was the sound of millstones grinding dry bone: “Napakayabang mo, iha. Gagawin kitang mababa at matututo kang magpakumbaba.” The way it was said left no room for interpretation. It was not a threat. It was a verdict. The others, hearing their leader’s words, grinned wider, all eyes locked on her as if they already knew exactly what was coming.

Cara dropped the shovel.

“Rey.” Her voice had gone very flat and very thin. “Rey, we are leaving.”

Rey didn’t hesitate. He had been right. The old laborer who just went home had been right. It was real, all of it, and it had been a terrible mistake to come here and an even worse one to let her swing that shovel. He learned the hard way. That is to trust your intuition.

They ran toward the gate. No looking back. They sprinted for what felt like thirty seconds, turned left, then right, a full minute of running, and when they stopped they were standing exactly where they had started, in the center of the lot, facing the mango tree.

Cara blinked. Turned. Ran again, this time faster, purposeful, heading straight for the gate she could clearly see ahead of her. She just had to turn left, it was right there.

It wasn’t. They were back to where they had started.

“REY!” The flatness in her voice had become something else entirely. “REY, WHAT IS HAPPENING.”

He was speechless. He had only ever heard about things like this in his lola’s stories. On instinct, he stripped off his outer shirt, reversed it, and put it back on. He didn’t know if it would help. It was all he could think to do.

“I KNOW IT’S THE NUNO” Her voice had begun to tremble now, something he had never heard from her before.

She ran again, leaving him behind, actually sprinting with heels be damned, cutting across the lot toward the far fence. She could see it. She could hear the road beyond it. If the trees weren’t in the way she would just run straight and she’d reach it. Everything was distorting around her, tilting and looping in a way her brain could not process or accept.

She stopped near a concrete post at the edge of the lot. The fence was just a few steps ahead. She could shout. She could shout and someone on the road would hear her.

“MA’AM!” a voice said from behind her.

She turned. Rey was there. They were at the center of the lot again, facing the mango tree.

Cara stood bent over with her hands on her knees, chest heaving. The duwende on the scaffolding were beside themselves. They slapped their tiny knees. Several had fallen off their perches from laughing. One was rolling on top of the backhoe. The Nuno sat on its root and watched all of it with the deep, patient satisfaction of something that had all the time in the universe and knew it.

“Stop laughing at me!” Cara shouted at every surface, at every spirit, at the small ancient creature on its root. “STOP LAUGHING! I am a licensed professional!”

The Nuno’s wooden fingers snapped once. Eerie silence fell over the lot. One by one, the duwende sat down, settling in as though the main lecture was about to begin.

The Nuno looked at Cara for a long moment. Then it spoke, and when it spoke this time it was not grinding stone but something quieter and more final, the kind of voice that has said the same true thing so many times it no longer needs volume.

“Alam mo ba kung bakit kaya kang layasanng sarili mong mga tauhan?” it said. “Mapagmataas” It paused. “Ang taong lumaki nang walang hirap ay lumalaki ring walang puso. Ang kabaitan ng tao ay galing iyon sa pagdurusa. Galing iyon sa pagkakataong matalo.”

It looked at her the way one looks at a cracked foundation wall, with recognition and without surprise.

The Nuno’s ancient eyes did not blink. “Kung gusto mong magtayo ng bago, kailangan mong gibain ang luma. Wala kang maialay hangga’t hindi mo winawasak ang lumang sarili mo.”

Then the Nuno’s gaze moved to Rey, standing a few feet behind her.

“Ah, ikaw.” Something like amusement crossed its bark-brown face. “Dapat ay tumakbo ka na. Pero nandito ka pa rin.” It tilted its head. “Magagamit kita.”

The leader’s finger snapped again. Every duwende in the lot rose to its feet at once. They cheered. The noise of hundreds of small voices filling the Cavite afternoon was extraordinary, like the sound of an audience who had just been told the main event was beginning.

And the lesson began in earnest.

Both Cara and Rey tried to run once more, but the magic left them slowly floating in the air, their feet lifting off the cracked earth, every instinct to bolt rendered completely useless.

The intense heat hit Cara first. A violent, spreading burn that started crawling from her chest and tore outward in all directions, and she looked down in horror as her body began to change beneath her blazer. Slow at first, then aggressive and unstoppable, her formerly modest figure swelling outward, breasts expanding to a weight and size that had no precedent in her own experience of herself, pressing against the inner lining of her blouse with a pressure that built and built until the fabric gave out.

POP!

The first button snapped off and skittered into the dirt.

“What...” She grabbed at her blouse with both hands, trying to hold it closed. “What is happening to me...”

POP! POP!

Second and third gone, and she could not hold the fabric against what was happening underneath it.

POP!

The fourth, and the blouse fell open, and the cold air of the afternoon hit her bare skin and she gasped so hard she choked on it, looking down at herself in absolute bewilderment and horror, at the impossible curve of her own chest straining against the thin fabric of her bra, at the weight of it she had never once felt before.

Each was larger than her head, rounded and full and deeply, wrongly heavy, the kind of size that pulled at the shoulders and pressed against the ribs and made itself impossible to ignore for a single second. Her bra straps bit into her skin with the effort of containing them. She felt them sway as she moved and she hated that she felt it.

“This isn’t...” She pressed her arms across herself. “This isn’t possible. This isn’t...”

She tried to cover herself but her thin arms were nowhere near enough.

Her pencil skirt split at both side seams simultaneously.

RIIIIP.

The sound of it rang out across the lot. Her hips had filled out in the same aggressive, unstoppable way, curves pulling the skirt apart at every seam, and she stood there in the ruin of her tailored clothes with both arms pressed across her chest, shaking, staring down at a body she did not recognize.

“No,” she said. “No. No, no, no. This isn’t my body. This is not my body. What did you do to me...” She turned to find the Nuno on its root, watching her with patient satisfaction. “PUT IT BACK. Put it back right now, I have a meeting next week, I have a site visit in two days, you cannot do this to me...”

A cold wind blew through the lot. She felt it everywhere, across every newly exposed inch of herself, every nerve suddenly awake and registering far more than it ever had before. Her senses had been turned up to a frequency she had no prior experience of.

She opened her mouth to issue a proper command. Something authoritative. Something that carried the full weight of her credentials and her family name and her three successful projects and everything she had built herself into over twenty-eight years.

She said, very clearly and firmly: “Reverse this. Immediately.”

What came out was a thin, high, cracked little whisper, as soft as a question and as small as a child’s voice. The words were right but the sound was completely wrong. Stripped of every quality that had ever made people listen to her. She heard it come out of her own mouth and felt the ground tilt beneath her.

She tried again. “Stop this. Stop it right now.” She pushed everything she had behind it.

It came out as a breathless squeak with a tremor in it, something that sounded less like a demand and more like the beginning of crying. She felt the loss of it in her chest, the voice that had made contractors flinch, that had made a site engineer walk out the door rather than face her a second time, just gone. Replaced by this small, fragile sound that could not threaten anything.

“Give it back,” she breathed, and even that came out thin and pleading. “Give me my voice back. Please. Please, I need...”

Her clothes dissolved. Not dramatically, no flash, no ceremony. They simply ceased to exist. Every stitch, gone in a single moment. The cold afternoon air hit every inch of her at once.

“Nghh.”

The involuntary sound escaped her before she could stop it. Her arms flew to cover herself and were forced down to her sides by something she could not fight. She stood completely exposed, bare skin in the Cavite air, and she could feel everything. The faint warmth of the dying sun, the slight movement of air across her sensitized skin, the impossible weight of her altered body, and underneath the horror and the shame, already beginning to stir without her permission, something warm and deeply wrong.

“N-No! My clothes!” It came out whispery and cracked and she hated every syllable of it. “Give me my clothes! S-Stop this! Putangina!” The curse landed like a kitten’s hiss. She sounded nothing like herself. She sounded like something that could be ignored.

She tried to cover herself again and her hands dropped. “Tangina! Tangina nito! I said stop! You stop this right now! I swear I will have this entire lot condemned and buried and turned into a parking structure...” The threats kept coming out in that soft, cracked, humiliating voice, each one smaller than the last, and all she could do was feel the air moving against her skin and that warmth still building, still building, still building without her permission.

“Shit, ma’am,” Rey said from somewhere behind her, and she turned.

Rey’s clothes were gone too. And the Nuno’s magic had remade him in a way that stopped her breath completely. The size of his', the impossible, aggressive, pulsing size of his, rigid and swollen and radiating a heat she could feel from where she was standing. She stared. Something in the back of her mind reached for a comparison and landed, absurdly, on the tin of sardines she had donated for a charity drive two years ago. The thought dissolved immediately in the heat of her own embarrassment. She felt her face go completely blank and then completely red.

Her heartbeat became audible to her. She could feel it in her throat.

“Aggggh.” His voice cracked on the word, face burning scarlet, hands at his sides with the tension of a man fighting his own body with everything he has.

Whatever this is, he thought, he should have had the courage to stop her earlier. He should have listened to that old man. He should have had the strength to say something that mattered, and he hadn’t, and now they were both here.

Her body turned on its own.

“Hnghh.” She tried to force herself to move, to override whatever was pulling her, but it was like trying to push against a current that had no source. She was floating, barely.

A sense of cold relief came when her feet began to touch the ground again. Her body bent over, palms hitting the cracked dry stack of hollow blocks her workers had prepared before they left. Presented. She could feel the exact angle of it, feel the cold air on her back, feel herself begin to shake.

Her heart beat faster than it ever had. In the back of her mind she understood what was coming. She tried to scream. She tried to wrench herself sideways. The sounds that came out of her were nothing she would have chosen.

She became aware of Rey’s shadow falling across her. Of him, approaching.

“Eeeeeh! Fuck. Don’t,” she said into the dirt. “Don’t you dare. Rey, I am telling you right now, putangina, if you—”

Rey’s hands moved against his will. They gripped her hips and his fingers dug in deep enough that she felt each one, felt the edges of his fingernails pressing against her properly maintained skin. He raised one hand and brought it down hard across her bare backside.

PLAP!

The sound cracked across the empty lot.

“Aghh. Fuck!”

The pain was sharp and immediate and hot and for one second it was only pain, just a raw shocked exhalation punched out of her lungs.

His other hand squeezed her hip tighter, fingernails beginning to leave their marks.

“Aghhh. Aray...Rey! Stop, please...”

Then the sting spread and her sensitized skin lit up along every nerve from the impact point outward, and underneath the pain was something she refused to look at directly.

“PUTANGINA!” It came out breathless and tiny. “That HURT! That actually hurt! You stop that right now...”

PLAP!

“AH!” Higher than she wanted. Much higher. This one was stronger, landed like a verdict. It made her feel, against her will, exactly how much force was behind it.

“Stop it, I said stop!” She shouted, and a sob came out with it.

PLAP!

The third one. She opened her mouth to shout and nothing came out the way she intended. The pain was there, real and sharp, but the spread of sensation that followed it was different, moving through her in a way she had no professional category for, and the next thing out of her mouth was supposed to be a threat but what happened to it on the way out was:

“Tama...” and then, “Ngggh.”

Silence from her for two full seconds while she pressed her mouth together.

“Ma’am?” Rey said. His voice was strained, pained, genuinely horrified at what his own hands were doing. “Ma’am, sorry, hindi ako to...”

“Shut. UP. Asshole!” Too breathy. Too small. “You shut up and you stop doing that..”

PLAP!

“Agghh. I...Unghhh.” What she had tried to say was I will have you blacklisted from every firm in Metro Manila. What came out instead was the first syllable of I, followed by a sound she would spend the rest of her life trying to forget. A soft, involuntary, completely humiliating exhale that carried not one trace of anger.

She clamped her mouth shut.

PLAP! PLAP!

“Mmmph. Mmph...”

She fought it with everything she had, pressing her lips together, but every impact spread through her skin and nerves in that same maddening way, and by the fifth blow she felt something clench low and deep in her body that had absolutely nothing to do with pain. The thing that came out of her mouth was not a word at all.

The duwende on the scaffolding lost their collective minds.

Then Rey’s body pushed forward. His hips aligned behind her with a terrible precision.

She could sense him near her. Hard. Hot. The tip of him pressing against hers like it already owned the space.

“Rey?...Rey! Fuck, don’t you dare! Rey! Don’t you fucking...unghhhh...”

With one powerful thrust, his full, impossible length forced its way into her tight, completely unprepared entrance, and whatever she had been saying was cut off entirely. The sound of the impact was obscene.

PLAP.

What came out of her was not a word. It was not a curse. It was not a professional utterance of any kind. It was raw and high and shocked and she could not stop it.

He continued, slowly and forcefully, working against a resistance that was both physical and twenty-eight years of accumulated certainty.

“Aghhh. I-It won’t..shit..” She gasped, her voice breaking all over itself. “It won’t fit, it’s too big, you don’t understand, something is going to, AHH...” The stretch was enormous and genuinely terrifying, her body forced to accommodate something it had never encountered, every internal wall protesting. Tears began to fall freely from her eyes. She could feel the intense, splitting pressure of him as her body struggled to adjust. She clenched her teeth and held it.

“Eeehh. AHH, I can’t, I can’t, it’s too big, get it out, get it OUT..” Tears ran unchecked down her face. “This isn’t, it’s going to tear me, something is going to...”

The Nuno clicked its fingers.

Her thoughts fragmented suddenly, running on pure sensation. The full, splitting pressure of him filling her completely, the cold air on her bare back, the dirt scraping her palms, the impossible awareness of every internal nerve stretched past anything she had ever experienced, the horrifying realization that despite all of that, her body was already doing something she had not authorized and could not stop.

The Nuno’s magic flooded her nervous system a moment later and the resistance began to dissolve, replaced by something liquid and thick and beyond anything in her experience. The horrible stretching pressure smoothed into a wet, heavy friction that drew a sound from her she would not have believed she was capable of making.

Squelch.

They stopped. He was fully inside her now. All of it. Every last inch, forced past every objection her body had tried to raise, settled into her completely and without ceremony. It did not ask. It did not need to. Whatever space had been hers alone for twenty-eight years was no longer hers. He owned it now, and her body, traitorously, already knew.

He was still inside her. She could feel it, hot, hard, wet, pulsing. The magic held them both perfectly still, suspended mid-motion, and for the first time since the Nuno had snapped its fingers, Cara could hear herself breathe. She was gasping for air, her legs trembling. Her arms had given out and only his grip on her hips kept her from folding entirely.

She could hear Rey too, ragged and uneven directly behind her, his breathing rough, his grip on her hips still tight enough to bruise. She could feel everything. Every point of contact between them, the fullness of him still inside her and unmoving now, her body adjusted around his size in a way she could feel down to her fingertips. She could feel the cold Cavite air on her bare back and shoulders. She could feel the dry cracked earth under her palms, the slight scratch of it against her knees. She could feel her own heartbeat in places she had never been aware of before.

“Rey,” she breathed. She wanted to move. She couldn’t.

“Ma’am,” he said. It was barely a sound. He was not okay either.

A silent pause. The wind moved over them both. She shivered despite the heat. It had begun to drizzle. She became aware of a deep thirst, her throat raw from constant gasping.

She closed her eyes. She tried to think of concrete things. Structural calculations. Load-bearing ratios. The Halloway check-in on Friday.

None of it worked. Her entire nervous system was occupied with other things entirely.

Just before she could gather herself, the magic released the stillness.

And it was worse.

Because now it didn’t simply hold them. It moved them. His body began to pull back, slowly, and she felt every millimeter of the withdrawal.

“Ahhh. Ngghhh—”

And before she could draw a full breath, it drove back in. Then pulled again. Then back. Her beast kept bouncing freely. The motion built on itself, slow at first, then harder, then tighter, the friction compounding with every cycle until it concentrated itself at the base of her spine and radiated outward in every direction. She felt herself rising toward something vast and specific, felt the edge of it approaching, felt it getting close enough that she could almost...

then it stopped. Completely.

A fraction of a second before she could tip over, the magic pulled everything back, and the sudden absence of it after the buildup was physically painful.

“Anghh..!” The sound tore out of her before she could stop it. She clapped her hand over her mouth.

“What the...” she thought.

The magic immediately forced her mouth open.

She stared at nothing, eyes wide, as the realization settled. She could not close her mouth. She could not muffle herself. Her own saliva pooled at the corner of her lip and she could do nothing about it.

Then the motion started again. Pull. Push. Slow. Building.

“Ahhh. Ungghhh...” She could not close her mouth. Saliva continued to drip. Other things had begun to drip too, things she was not prepared to think about. The Nuno was not going to allow her any small dignity. Everything she made, every sound, every involuntary utterance, was audible to the hundreds of duwende arranged across every surface of the lot, watching her like she was the headline act.

Which, she realized, she was.

The duwende were delighted. They were stamping their feet on the scaffold bars. They shouted things at each other she could not understand. One spirit on top of the backhoe appeared to be providing enthusiastic running commentary. The noise of them was extraordinary, the sound of an audience who had been promised something and was receiving exactly that.

It was humiliating. But the awareness of hundreds watching her sent something strange moving through her that she did not fully want to examine.

The magic built again. His body drove harder now, faster, deeper, each thrust carrying a force that sent her forward on her palms and pulled a sound from her open mouth that she had no control over whatsoever. The friction climbed, and climbed, and she felt herself rising toward that same edge...

She felt it building. “Shit. I’m..” the thought passed through her in a half-second.

The withdrawal.

“AHH....!” The sound of the denial ripped out of her, frustrated and shocked and utterly undignified, and the duwende erupted.

She couldn’t close her mouth. She couldn’t stop the sounds. Everything was out in the open, every rise, every denial, every desperate involuntary response of a body that had stopped asking her permission for anything.

“SHIT! Rey!” She half-sobbed, half-shouted, as if she could blame him for any of it.

The magic built a third time. Higher than the first two. The rhythm came back harder: pull, thrust, pull, thrust, building to that same impossible white-hot edge, and she wanted it now, she could feel herself reaching for it...

The withdrawal again. Harder this time.

The pain of the absence was real, yes, sharp and physical, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the thing she had been reaching for, the specific unbearable thing that kept getting pulled just out of her fingers at the last possible second. It was not the pain that was breaking her. It was the wanting.

The fourth time the magic built, she was past the ability to form coherent thoughts. She was aware of herself as pure sensation, pure frustrated need, and the sound coming out of her open mouth was continuous now, a low, broken, helpless stream she had no control over.

“Ah... unghh... aghhhhh..” She could hear herself. She could hear every sound coming out of her open mouth and she could not stop any of them. It was humiliating in a way she had no framework for, hearing her own voice reduced to this, hearing herself make these sounds in the open air with hundreds of witnesses. The cum laude graduate cums louder. The licensed architect. The hardware empire heiress. Making these sounds.

She could not take it anymore.

“No,” she managed, gasping. “No, I don’t, I don’t want, stop...” But even as she said it her body was leaning into him, tilting toward the pressure, her hips trying to chase the angle that would push her over the edge the magic kept denying her.

“I said no, I’m saying no, this is no, I don’t...” The magic built again and her voice cracked and the no dissolved mid-word into something that was not no at all. “I don’t... ngggh... I don’t want... please... putangina...” It was crumbling, all of it, every syllable of denial going soft at the edges, her hips moving against her will, reaching. “No... please... no, I can’t... I can’t take this, please, I can’t...”

The magic drove them harder again, his body slamming into her with a force that rattled her palms against the hollow blocks, the rhythm unrelenting, faster and deeper, every thrust sending a wave crashing through her that left her gasping. Higher than any of the previous times, impossibly high, she could feel it stacking, building, and she rose with it and this time the edge was so close she could taste it...

She couldn’t take it no more. Something deep in her, something that had nothing to do with pride or credentials or the name on her PRC card, reached its absolute limit.

The fifth withdrawal came and something in her completely gave way.

“Please.” Just that. Broken and bare and nothing held back. She didn’t know who she was begging anymore. “Please, please. Please, don’t stop. Please. I can’t, I can’t do this anymore, please just, please, I want it, I want it, please just give it to me, please, please...”

“Gusto mo na pala,” the Nuno said. Its voice echoed across the lot without effort, carrying into every corner.

Cara’s face was wet with tears. “Yes,” she heard herself say. “Yes, yes, please, I want it, I need it, please...”

“Ano ba talaga ang gusto mo?” the Nuno asked. And there was something in the way it asked the question that made her understand she was not being asked for a simple answer.

Around them, the duwende went quiet. Expectant.

“I want...” She stopped.

The Nuno separated them. She fell forward onto the muddy ground. It had begun to get dark, thick clouds moving in and pulling the light from the afternoon. She lay there gasping, cheek against the cold mud, the heat of her own body fighting it.

“Sabihin mo,” the Nuno said. “Lahat. Sabihin mo lahat ng gusto mo, sa harap ng lahat.”

She shook her head.

“I want..” The words were torn out of her. “I want him to...I want him to...” She was shaking all over.

“Sige,” the Nuno said. “Pero una, sabihin mo sa kanya mismo. Hilingin mo sa kanya.”

She felt another rise, another almost-there, building inside her like a warning. One more and she would break the rest of the way.

She looked at Rey. She could not look him directly in the eye.

“Do it.” Her voice was barely a sound. “I want...” She swallowed. “Do it inside me. Please.”

The duwende erupted. They were on their feet, screaming with approval. The noise of them filled the lot.

The magic turned her to face Rey directly.

A small duwende scurried up to her and whispered something into her ear, too fast and too low to parse, and then vanished. She swallowed again. Whatever it had said lodged in her chest like a splinter.

The magic turned her to face Rey directly.

He was wrecked. He looked exactly as destroyed as she felt, sweat-soaked and breathing hard, jaw tight, eyes dark with something that was not just the curse and both of them knew it.

“Cara,” he said. His voice had dropped to something she had never heard from him in eleven months of opo-ma’am.

She looked at him. She was past dignity. She was past the blazer and the PRC license and the LinkedIn profile and her family’s three hardware stores. She was past all of it.

“Rey.” She said his name like she was handing him something she couldn’t hold anymore. “Please.” A breath. Then “Kantutin mo ko. Please. Gawin mo kung puta. Sige na.” She could feel her face burning but she kept going. “Buntisin mo ko. Putukan mo ko sa loob. Sige na. Please, Rey. Please.”

The words, once said, could not be taken back. They hung in the Cavite air over the ruined mound in front of the hundreds of duwende who had heard every syllable.

Rey stared at her. Something in his face went through several changes in rapid succession. He was wrecked, yes. He was horrified, yes. But there was also something else, something that had been sitting quietly underneath eleven months of opo-ma’am, and right now, with magic and exhaustion and everything else stripping every professional layer off both of them, it had come completely to the surface.

“Cara,” he said. Whatever magic was doing this to his body, he knew with certainty that some part of what he was feeling right now was entirely his own.

“Please,” she said. The word barely had sound left in it.

He exhaled through his teeth.

The duwende screamed.

The Nuno smiled its toothless smile. “Ibibigay ko sa inyo ang gusto ninyo. Nang paulit-ulit. Para hindi kayo makalimot.”

Because she had asked for it, the Nuno is about to give her everything she had begged for.

But before they gave it to her, they wanted a show.

The magic seized them both and pulled them together, face to face, mouths first.

The kiss was not gentle. It was not a question. His mouth found hers and the magic fused them there, tongue against tongue, and she made a sound into his mouth that she had never made in twenty-eight years. It went on and on, while he squezes her breats. It longer than any kiss she had ever experienced, long enough that she lost track of it, long enough that her body stopped understanding where the magic ended and her own want began. All she felt is her tongue against his toungue and his hands on her breasts, while she's carressing his. When he exhaled, the magic made her breathe it in. When his mouth flooded with warmth, the magic made her swallow, and she felt it go down.

Then something hit her from nowhere. Not her thought. Something thrown into her from the outside, landing in her chest like a lit match. She felt the thought form and tried to stop it before it reached her mouth. She pressed her lips together. She clamped her jaw. It came out anyway.

“Ang sarap,” she said.

She heard herself say it. Her eyes went wide. No it's aweful. She tried to close her mouth.

“Ang sarap...” It came again. Not her. Not hers. But her voice, her lips, her breath. “Duraan mo ko.”

Rey pulled back slightly and looked at her. He could not quite believe what he had just heard.

She could not believe it either. “That wasn’t..” she started. “I didn’t...putangina!” The curse finally made it out, loud and scandalized, the first fully voluntary sound she had produced in minutes. “That wasn’t me! I didn’t say that! Something made me...” Her face was burning so completely she could feel it in her ears. “Don’t you dare think that I...”

He did it anyway. The magic saw to that too. And she was made to swallow again, twice, and when it was over she sat with the fact of it for a silent moment before, “Putangina, REY. Ang dami!”

Then it moved her. Slowly. Deliberately. Her knees hit the mud.

“No.” She planted her hands against his hips. “No, no, no..mmpphh...”

The magic used her open mouth.

“Fuck, ma’am...” Rey’s voice broke on the words, strangled and unsteady. “Stop. Please, stop...” But his hands were on the sides of her head, the magic pulling them there, and she could not stop and he could not make her. “Hindi ko kaya, ma’am, tangina, hindi ko...”

She couldn’t stop. The magic moved her head in a rhythm she had no control over, and the sounds he was making above her were nothing like the measured, polite man who had driven her to three job sites in the past eleven months. He sounded like a person being undone at the seams.

“Shit..” he gasped. “Shit, shit...ma’am, I’m going to..hindi ko mapigilan...”

She knew exactly what was coming. She had understood it from the second her knees hit the mud. She objected with everything she had, her hands, her shoulders, the rigid resistance of her whole body. None of it mattered. She could not free her mouth. She could not make it stop.

The magic didn’t stop. It sped up.

His whole body shuddered. What followed was unavoidable and immediate and she felt it hit the back of her throat and she choked on the shock of it. The magic made her swallow. She coughed, eyes watering.

“Tangina, Rey,” she choked. “Ang dami!” She meant it as a curse. It came out sounding like something else.

Another thought entered her uninvited. She tried to reject it. It landed in her mouth before she could stop it. “Sarap...,” she heard herself whisper, and then she wanted to disappear into the mud entirely. The magic pressed her back down to clean what remained, her tongue tracing every surface whether she wanted to or not, until nothing was left, and she could feel her own face burning with an embarrassment so complete it had gone past humiliation into something almost quiet on the other side.

He was still breathing hard above her, his hands in her hair, his chest heaving.

Then the magic stood her up. Then it sat him down in the mud, leaning against the rusting backhoe. Then it put her on top of him.

She felt him enter her again from this angle and the magic fired another unwanted thought directly into her chest.

“No!” She said it out loud before she understood she was responding to something inside her own head. “She..I mean I..that’s not...” She stopped. She tried again. “It’s not me.” She looked at nothing. Her face was completely red. “Something is putting things in my...”

Then the thoughts came faster, louder, impossible to separate from her own.

“Puta,” she breathed. “Ang sakit pero ang sarap. I'm a bitch. Shit. Gusto ko maging puta...ungghhh...” She clamped both hands over her mouth. It didn’t help. Her mouth opened around her hands. “Ohhhh...why am I saying this...sarap...ungghhh...”

She stared at him with wide, horrified eyes. He stared back. Neither of them had an answer.

She could feel everything from here. Every angle, every depth, every point where his body met hers in a way that her body lit up around like a circuit completing. Her new, impossible weight shifted as she moved, her breasts swaying with every rise and fall, and she was aware of them in a way that felt obscene and couldn’t be stopped.

She moved. The magic moved her, she told herself. The magic moved her.

But somewhere around the third or fourth rise she was not entirely sure that was still true. There was a deep, desperate itch building in her, the kind of need that spreads from a single point outward until it takes over everything, and the magic or no magic she found herself chasing it. She found herself rising and falling harder than she had to. She found herself leaning forward to change the angle in a way the magic had not instructed.

Her mouth was still open. Her eyes could still not close. She stared down at him and he stared up at her and neither of them looked away.

“Tangina,” she breathed. “Shit. Please. Tama na. Unghhh...” She kept moving. She was the one moving now, she knew it, she could feel the difference. She needed the release and the magic was keeping it just out of reach again, just one more push, just one more rise, and she kept going and kept going and couldn’t reach it. “Shit, fuck, why can’t I...I need it, please, tangina...”

Rey’s hand came up and closed around her breast. Not gently. With a force that sent the heat of it straight through her and she cried out at the ceiling of the evening sky.

“Ma’am,” he said, his voice low and rough and nothing like his opo-ma’am. “Ang sarap mo.”

“Shut UP,” she gasped. She did not stop moving.

“Ganda mo, Cara.” He said it quietly, directly, looking up at her with those dark eyes that had been looking straight through her for eleven months. “Fuck. Ang sarap ng ungol mo. Shit.”

The shame of it hit her like a wave. The heat of it hit her worse. “Eehhh. Fuck. Shut up, Rey...”

“Ganda mo talaga...”

“SHUT UP...” But the pumping went harder and her voice cracked and what came out was not a command at all. It was a moan, a long and exposed and completely undignified moan that echoed off the scaffolding. She felt her face go red. She kept going anyway because she had no choice and because some part of her, some part she was not going to name tonight, did not want to stop.

“Shit, fuck,” she sobbed, breathless and frantic and nothing like herself. “Why can’t I...I need it, please...gusto mo to, huh? Gusto mo to?! Fuck you, Rey. Fuck you. Tangina ka...”

“Oo,” he said.

Then the magic tilted her back. Laid her down in the mud. Missionary again, him above her, the full weight of him pressing her into the wet earth, face to face, the way the Nuno had started it, her eyes still open and still unable to look away from his.

He moved. Hard. No preamble, no build-up, just the immediate brutal rhythm of it, and she felt the itch finally, finally cresting toward something real.

“Tangina mo, Cara,” he said against her cheek, rough and low and absolutely nothing like his opo-ma’am. “Sarap mo kantutin.”

She wanted to say absolutely not, you are my driver and you will address me correctly or I will...

“I’m your bitch,” she heard herself say. “Please make me...shit..I’m going crazy..putukan mo ko...” It was all coming out now, everything the magic had loaded into her and everything that was hers, mixed together until she could not tell the seams apart. “Please, please...”

“Ma’am!” he groaned.

“Yes, yes, don’t stop, ayan na, ayan na..shit...sirain mo, please, please don’t stop, tangina, wag, unghhhh. Ayan na, ayan na...shit” Her voice broke completely. “Unghhh, fuck, UNGHHHH...”

And then the release finally came, enormous and total, rolling through her in a wave that started at the base of her spine and consumed everything, her legs, her chest, the back of her throat, every nerve that had been wound tight and denied and built and denied again for what felt like her entire life.

“Ohhhhh...”

Then nothing. Just the sensation of it unwinding, spreading outward, her whole body going liquid. The pressure was gone. All of it, suddenly, finally gone. She lay with her cheek in the mud and felt the release in every bone, every single one.

He came down on top of her, heavy and spent, both of them gasping into the evening air, unable to move, unwilling to.

The crowd cheered. Hundreds of small voices rising into the darkening Cavite sky, triumphant and delighted, the sound of an audience that had gotten exactly what it came for.

The duwende had their show.

The rain came down then. Not gradually, not as a drizzle that announced itself. It simply opened, cold and immediate and total, the way things end in Cavite without asking permission. It soaked the lot, the broken mound, the vinyl tarp on the gate still reading ON THIS SITE WILL RISE. It soaked them both.

One by one, the duwende slipped back into the earth. The scaffolding emptied. The backhoe sat quiet and vacant. The spirit on top of it bowed once, a small dignified bow, and then it too was gone. The Nuno sat on its root a moment longer than the rest, looking at the two figures in the mud with the ancient, satisfied patience of something that had done exactly what it set out to do. Then it stepped backward into the broken earth, and the ground closed over it, and the mango tree stood in the corner of the lot exactly as it always had.

Cara and Rey did not move.

He was still on top of her. They were both too spent to speak, too exhausted to be embarrassed anymore, too hollowed out by what had happened to feel anything beyond the cold rain on bare skin and the slow return of breath. The mud was everywhere. She could feel it in her hair, on her cheeks, in the creases of her palms. She stared up at the dark grey sky and let the rain fall on her face and could not think of a single thing to say.

After a long time, he shifted. Pushed himself up. Extended a hand.

She took it.

Their clothes were folded on the passenger seat of the SUV. Neatly, impossibly neatly, as though someone had pressed and arranged them while they were otherwise occupied. Every button back in place. Every seam intact.

She picked up her blouse and pulled it on.

It did not close.

She sat with both sides of the open blouse in her hands and looked down at herself and understood that the Nuno had not undone any of it. The body she had been given was the body she had now. The weight of it. The size of it. Everything that had split and burst and torn its way out of her tailored clothes was still here, permanent, settled into her frame as though it had always been there and the previous twenty-eight years had been the aberration.

She looked at Rey. He was sitting in the driver’s seat. His shirt was on and buttoned but it strained at the shoulders and chest in a way it had not this morning, because he too had not been put back the way he was.

Neither of them said anything about it. She sat with the fact of it quietly. She was his bitch. She had said it. Not because the magic had put the words in her mouth, not that time. That one had been entirely hers. She had said it and meant it and she could feel it still sitting in her chest, that specific feeling, the feeling of being entirely at someone else’s mercy and having asked for it yourself. She did not know what to do with that yet. She suspected it was going to take a while.

She folded the blouse as best she could across herself and held it closed with one arm. Her skirt sat in her lap, unwearable. She didn’t try. She sat in the back seat with wet hair and mud still drying on her skin and bruises she could feel in places she was not going to catalogue right now, and she looked out the fogged window at the Cavite lot and said nothing.

The rain continued.

Her phone buzzed.

She looked at it. An unknown local number. She let it ring once, twice, a third time. Then she picked up.

“Hello?” Her voice came out soft and unfamiliar to her own ears. She still had not gotten it back completely.

“Ms. Santana!” The voice on the other end was bright and fast and entirely too cheerful for the state she was in. A project coordinator from Halloway she had spoken to twice before. “So sorry to call so late. Good news, actually, very good news. We’ve sorted everything. The whole Cavite site situation, the permits, the LGU complications, all of it. The decision came through this afternoon. We’re relocating the project to the Laguna site. Same scope, same timeline, no changes on our end. And we want you to stay on as lead. The partners were very clear about that. You’re still our architect on this.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I see,” she said.

“We know it’s been a frustrating few weeks and we really do apologize for the communication lag on our end. But everything is sorted now. You don’t have to worry about the Cavite lot anymore.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate the call.”

She hung up.

She sat with the phone in her lap and looked at the lot through the windshield. At the vinyl tarp on the gate. At the mango tree in its corner, dark and still and completely ordinary in the rain. At the spot where the mound had been, leveled now, just bare dark earth.

She thought about what it had cost to stand in that lot and swing that shovel. She thought about the six workers who had walked out one by one with their chins up. She thought about the site engineer who had said sorry po and left and never came back, and she thought about what he had known that she had not, and what she had cost him by not listening.

She thought about what she had said, on her knees in the mud, with hundreds of witnesses.

She looked at the back of Rey’s head.

He was sitting very still in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead, hands in his lap, not starting the car. She could see the tension in his shoulders under the strained shirt. He had heard the call. He knew. He was waiting to see what she would do with it.

She remembered what he had said to her, in that low rough voice that had nothing of the opo-ma’am in it. Ganda mo, Cara. Ang sarap ng ungol mo. She remembered saying fuck you, Rey and meaning it and not meaning it at all. She remembered saying yes.

She remembered everything she had begged for.

She looked out the window.

He started the car. He pulled out of the lot. The vinyl tarp caught the headlights as they turned onto the road, and for one second the words ON THIS SITE WILL RISE were illuminated in the beam, and then they were gone, and the Cavite lot disappeared behind them.

Neither of them spoke on the drive home. The rain came down on the windshield and the wipers moved and the lights of the highway slid past in the dark and the city slowly assembled itself around them again.

He pulled up in front of her building and stopped the car and did not turn around.

She sat in the back seat for a moment. She could feel the bruises. She could feel the weight of her own altered body in a way she was going to have to figure out how to live with. She could feel the absence of whatever she had been before she kicked that mound, that particular Cara Santana, that version of herself with the power voice and the immovable certainty, and she understood, sitting in the back of her own car in front of her own building, that it was not coming back. That it had not been taken from her. That it had been given to her, once, a long time ago, and it had never actually been hers.

She opened the door.

“Goodnight...” she said.

He nodded.

She went upstairs.

The next day she called him at seven in the morning. Not because the magic was still on them. Because she knew his schedule and the hour and exactly how long it would take him to reach her building, and when she heard his voice answer she did not have a professional reason ready.

He came.