CHAPTER 2

Tasyo honestly thought he would never see Isidro Leonardo De la Cruz again after the meeting. He'd only attended as a stand-in for his adviser, who'd been stuck at a conference in Singapore and had shoved the redevelopment proposal onto Tasyo as it would help his research studies and possibly a break too, maybe a little bit of real world experience as well. Tasyo had gone in expecting to sit quietly in the corner and maybe argue a little.

Then Isidro walked in.

Tasyo kept replaying their last meeting in his head, which was annoying for several reasons, the main one being that he still couldn't decide whether Isidro Leonardo De la Cruz had actually been flirting with him or if Tasyo had imagined the entire thing because the man was unfairly attractive in that charcoal suit. The pull between them had been there, that much Tasyo knew. But Tasyo had still pushed back during the meeting harder than necessary, talking over him once or twice just to prove…? To what exactly? Maybe Isidro was nothing more than a pretty face. Still, it didn't matter. Men like Isidro belonged to worlds Tasyo only briefly passed through—glass offices, expensive watches, polished certainty. Their paths had crossed for exactly one afternoon. That was all.

Then three days later his professor called him during lunch and casually said "The development board liked your input. They specifically requested you continue as environmental consultant for the project." And now, somehow, he was in a van on the Expressway with Isidro sitting two seats away, looking infuriatingly composed while scrolling through project plans like he hadn't accidentally destabilized Tasyo's nervous system the week before.

Honestly, he'd expected Isidro to leave holding a grudge, maybe avoid him entirely after Tasyo behaved like an asshole. Instead, the man had shown up this morning with that calm, amused look in his eyes and asked if Tasyo wanted to ride together like nothing had happened. And now Tasyo was trapped beside him in a van, trying very hard not to think about how good Isidro smelled.

Outside, Manila dissolved gradually behind them, replaced by the industrial sprawl of the expressway and then, finally, open sky. The rain fell in sheets that made visibility nearly impossible. Inside the vehicle, the other consultants spoke in exhausted half-sentences about drainage systems and zoning permits. Someone's terrible acoustic playlist crackled softly through speakers that had seen better days.

Across from Tasyo, Isidro sat perfectly straight despite the van's tendency to lurch around corners without warning. His sleeves were rolled neatly to his elbows now, revealing a silver watch and the kind of forearms that made concentration difficult. He wore reading glasses low on his nose—actual reading glasses, which Tasyo found absurdly infuriating—while he reviewed site assessments with the kind of focused attention that suggested nothing else in the world existed.

Tasyo hated how intelligence looked on certain men.

Isidro seemed completely unaware of what his face did to people when he focused on something. The way his entire being contracted to a single point. The way his fingers moved precisely across the pages. The small furrow that appeared between his eyebrows. It made Tasyo want to provoke him purely for the distraction. Which was immature and transparent and, as a strategy, entirely ineffective but you know what fuck it.

"They're from six months ago", Isidro replied calmly.

"Climate damage accelerated after the last typhoon hit", Tasyo pressed. "The entire flooding pattern has changed. Your models don't account for that." Isidro set the document down slowly and looked at him directly. His eyes were dark and steady and capable of pinning a person exactly where they stood, to say "You assume I'm not updating the calculations."

"You assume I trust developers to care about accuracy when cost cutting is profitable."

The corner of Isidro's mouth twitched upward slightly. Not quite a smile. Something that suggested he found Tasyo's behaviour amusing rather than annoying.

"You enjoy antagonizing me," Isidro observed, and there was something almost warm in his tone, which somehow made it worse.

Tasyo leaned back against the rattling seat and let himself grin—Yes, Isidro. I love fucking with you.

Isidro raised his eyes and Tasyo stuttered—no, I mean fucking you, and he realized how bad that sounds but Isidro just smiled.

The consultant sitting beside them sighed with theatrical exhaustion and put headphones on. A wise decision.

The drive continued in that pattern for another hour. Tasyo would raise concerns about floodplain rehabilitation. Isidro would counter with data. Tasyo would question the data's relevance to actual human survival. Isidro would ask if emotion could solve structural engineering problems. Tasyo would ask if spreadsheets understood what it meant to watch your home flood repeatedly. And underneath all of it ran something else entirely. Something electric and persistent and increasingly difficult to ignore.

Tasyo had met attractive men before. This was Manila—attractive men existed in abundance. Pretty men with expensive watches and curated indifference and gym-built shoulders who knew exactly how to flirt and expected reciprocation in exchange. They were easy to categorize, easy to dismiss, easy to move past.

Isidro wasn't like that.

Isidro was restrained in a way that made his attractiveness dangerous. Every emotion looked tightly leashed beneath his careful composure, held under such rigid control that Tasyo found himself wanting to test the boundaries just to see what would happen if something slipped free. It was a dangerous impulse. Entirely unwise. The kind of thing that got people hurt.

Tasyo had never been particularly good at avoiding danger.

By the time they reached the destination, the rain had softened into a persistent, heavy mist that clung to everything. The former plantation site stretched wide and wet beneath gray skies—broken fields flooded with shallow water, abandoned structures being slowly reclaimed by vines, coconut trees bending in the wind like they were exhausted from standing.

Tasyo stepped out first, letting the humid air wrap around him. His boots sank slightly into the wet earth, and the smell hit him immediately—rainwater, rich soil, the green scent of growing things. It was a smell he'd known his entire life. It meant home.

Behind him, Isidro exited the van with considerably more caution, his polished shoes splattered with mud, immediately prompting him to make a noise in the back of his throat. Tasyo's jaw locked tight, his shoulders trembling with the effort of holding it together.

"I'm glad to see my suffering makes you happy", Isidro said, perfectly dry. Tasyo's composure shattered. A laugh burst out of him—sharp and helpless and slightly unhinged. His hands found Isidro's shoulders without thinking, grounding himself, and he hung his head down, shaking with it, shoulders heaving. Then he looked up. Their eyes met, and the world went still for a moment. Tasyo's laugh faltered. His hands were still on Isidro—warm against his skin, fingers pressed in just a little too firmly. He pulled back sharply, his hands dropping away too fast. "Sorry, I—" His voice came out rough and strangled. He ran a hand through his hair, suddenly very aware of how close they'd been, how hard he'd been gripping. "Sorry, that was—I didn't mean to just—"

He looked away, then back, then away again, his jaw working uselessly. When Tasyo finally risked a glance back at Isidro, he found him smiling—really smiling, not the dry half smirk from before, but something genuine and warm that made his chest do something complicated.

"What?" Tasyo asked defensively, already feeling heat creep up his neck. "Don't—"

"You're smiling," Isidro said, his amusement evident in every syllable. "Now you're smiling."

Tasyo opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. Because he was. Despite the embarrassment, despite the way his hands were still tingling from touching Isidro's shoulders, despite everything—he was smiling so hard his face hurt.

"Oh, shut up," he said, but there was no bite to it.

Isidro's smile widened, and then Tasyo started laughing again and Isidro joined him, and suddenly they were both laughing and Tasyo enjoyed that entirely too much.

The local coordinators greeted them near the edge of the property, and within minutes Tasyo found himself crouching beside an irrigation trench, explaining erosion patterns to a consultant taking notes while the nearby farmer nodded in agreement. He tried very hard not to notice how Isidro looked outside the city, all severe lines softened by wind and rain, his careful posture relaxed into something more natural.

He failed completely at not noticing.

There was something unfair about how Isidro could stand in the middle of muddy floodplains, still somehow composed enough to belong in a magazine spread. Wind tugged loose strands of dark hair over his forehead, softening the sharp geometry of his face. He held the elevation maps with the kind of care someone might use with something fragile.

Tasyo wondered what he looked like tired. Or laughing. Or wrecked in a way that had nothing to do with composure.

That train of thought needed to stop immediately and never restart.

"Mr. Cruz?"

Tasyo blinked back to attention. One of the local farmers—Mang Roberto, who'd farmed this land for forty years—was speaking to him in rapid Tagalog about how the floodwater had worsened after the nearby highway development redirected runoff patterns. Tasyo listened carefully, translating occasionally for the consultants documenting conditions, his hands moving as he spoke to illustrate the water flow, the changes, the damage.

While he was speaking, he felt Isidro watching him.

Not casually. Not with the disinterested observation of someone monitoring a meeting. Attentively. Like he was trying to understand something fundamental about how Tasyo moved through these conversations so easily. How he listened. How he translated not just words but meaning.

Mang Roberto gestured toward the damaged fields and spoke quietly in Tagalog about losing three crops after repeated flooding, about watching the land deteriorate, about feeling like he'd failed as a steward of something his grandfather had stewarded before him.

One of the consultants translated : "He says the land remembers where the water used to go. It wants to return to its old patterns, even though the city has changed. The city forgot to ask the land what it needed."

One of the consultants frowned, about to launch into a dismissive comment about the poetic nature of peasant thinking versus actual hydrological science.

Isidro interrupted smoothly. "That's actually scientifically accurate."

Everyone turned toward him.

He crouched near the flooded trench, studying the soil saturation and the way water pooled in specific patterns. When he spoke, his voice was steady and educational in that way that made complex things sound simple.

"Urban development alters natural drainage routes and water flow patterns," he explained. "The land, essentially, retains historical hydrological memory. Even after we've constructed barriers and redirected water, the earth itself still 'remembers' where water wants to go. The water seeks those original channels. It's not mystical—it's physics. Geology. The land asserting its own patterns despite human intervention."

Tasyo stared at him. Well, that was infuriatingly attractive and Tasyo had to clear his throat and look away for a moment, composing himself before explaining it to the farmer. The old farmer nodded approvingly at Isidro in a way that suggested understanding, and continued his explanation. For the next hour they walked the property together in a kind of reluctant partnership: measuring elevations, documenting water damage, arguing constantly about solutions and responsibility and the best way forward.

At one point, after reviewing the informal settlements clustered near the most flood-prone areas, Isidro suggested relocating the residents to safer housing on higher ground.

Tasyo stopped walking entirely.

"Relocating where?" he asked, his voice deliberately calm in that way that suggested it wasn't calm at all.

"To safer housing. Elevated areas. Less flood risk."

"With what jobs? What transportation access? What schools? What community?" Tasyo turned to face him directly. "You're suggesting we remove people from homes they've had for decades because it's more convenient than actually solving the flooding problem."

"It's dangerous here," Isidro said, and there was genuine concern in his voice, which somehow made it worse. "People are at serious risk."

"And displacement kills communities," Tasyo replied. "You shatter networks. You separate people from their livelihoods. You create poverty out of the simple act of 'safety.' That's not solving the problem—that's choosing one kind of death over another."

"You think emotion solves structural failure?" Isidro asked, his voice sharpening.

"You think spreadsheets understand what it means to survive?" Tasyo shot back. It just boil down into the same conversation they had in the van.

Their voices echoed across the flooded fields louder than either of them had intended. A flock of birds scattered from nearby trees, startled upward into the gray sky. The silence that followed was heavy with something neither of them wanted to name. Then Isidro exhaled slowly and pinched the bridge of his nose, and Tasyo noticed things he hadn't wanted to notice, the exhaustion beneath the careful composure, the faint shadows under his eyes that suggested late nights and worry, the tension held so tightly in his shoulders that it looked painful to maintain.

The realization softened something inside Tasyo against his will. Against his better judgment. Unfortunately, that was precisely when Isidro looked up and held his gaze. Too long. Tasyo's heartbeat did something complicated—stuttered once, then picked up pace. His mouth went dry. He felt heat creep up the back of his neck and found himself aware of that, he's making this very hard for Isidro than it already is.

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