A Beautiful Mess

PART 63: Love-filled, Fun-filled

Part LXIII: Love-filled, Fun-filled

She woke up with three knocks on her door. She decided to ignore it and covered her head with a pillow. The knocking didn’t stop so she checked the phone on her bedside. It was 10 in the morning and she missed three calls from Ethan. There was also a message from Chad. She stood up and headed to the door. She saw Ethan through the peephole.

“Good morning,” he greeted her.

“Morning,” she told him.

“Sleepyhead, you’d better start preparing. We will have lunch,” he said when he noticed that she went back to bed and closed her eyes.

“I’m sleepy,” she told him.

“You’d better stand up. I have something to show you,” he said.

They were inside a restaurant after an hour. There were still a lot of people even if it was almost Christmas. Paul went with Ava and Seff in finding  a good place to have dinner in welcoming the holiday. They apparently woke up early even if they went back to their hotels late. Akira was having her hair braided.

“Are we not going to wait for them for lunch?” she asked him as they went in.

“Today, no. We need to have some time alone,” he answered.

They headed straight to a corner and occupied a table. They ordered their food and had lunch. After thirty minutes, they left and went to an area at Station 1 where a Christmas tree stood. She already saw it when she was walking alone before Akira had seen her. She remembered making a mental note of putting her own Christmas wish on the tree.

“Have you seen this?” he asked. He was moving around the tree.

“I did yesterday,” she answered. “What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer right away. “Here, I found it.”

“What?” she asked and went near him. He was holding a card.

She opened it and read it. “I lost what’s most important to me. I am trying to get it back like a little kid who lost his lollipop to his brother. I crossed islands and seas just so I can run after my dreams. If Santa will give me a gift, I’ll make my sock as big as a human being. When I wake up, she’d be…” she said and stopped reading loudly when she saw the rest. She smiled at him. “You got it, right?”

He nodded. “Well… Not inside a sock. But I don’t really mind.”

She playfully nudged him. “Why did we have to go thru all of that?”

“I’d like to think that if we didn’t go thru that, we wouldn’t understand how much we mean to each other. I mean, it’s a given that we love each other. We just didn’t know that we love each other in such a way that we can make sacrifices for the other, that being away from you would hurt more than what we have imagined, and that despite what happened, we’ll still choose each other in the end.”

“I don’t know how to tell Chad,” Raffy told him.

“We’ll tell him. Together,” he said. “I owe him a lot of explanation.”

“I need to talk to him alone too,” she said. “He did a lot of things for me. I owe him an explanation.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

“No, Ethan. I need to talk to him. I am technically still with him. I need to talk to him. We have some things that we need to talk about just between us. We can talk to him together some other time, maybe,” she made him understand.