Chapter Text
The arena smelled like floor wax and ten thousand people’s worth of adrenaline, and Stacey Sevilleja was thirty minutes early.
She was always thirty minutes early. It was a point of pride—the kind of small, controllable thing she could hold onto when everything else about game days felt like barely managed chaos. The broadcast team had their own rhythm: Michael hauling the camera equipment, their producer barking into a headset about segment timing, the graphics intern stress-eating from a plastic bag in the corner. Stacey’s job was to be the calm center. Composed. Prepared. The face of the university’s courtside coverage, three semesters running, and she intended to keep it that way.
She stood near the team bench now, reviewing her cue cards under the harsh arena lights while the venue slowly filled around her. The UAAP finals had a gravitational pull—the kind of game that emptied lecture halls and turned the schools into a ghost town by 3 PM. Students were already flooding through the gates in waves, university colors splashed across shirts and painted on cheeks, the hum of anticipation echoing off high ceilings like static before a storm. The arena was massive—ten times the size of their university’s gym—and the LED screens above center court were already cycling through team graphics and sponsor reels.
Stacey liked this part. The before. When everything was still clean lines and preparation, when the questions on her cards were just questions and not minefields, when she could pretend that the team captain and star spiker of the Lady Blooms volleyball team was just another athlete she’d be interviewing today.
She could not, in fact, pretend this.
She hadn’t been able to pretend this for approximately five months, two weeks, and—she was not counting the days. She was not that person. (Fourteen days.)
Across the court, the Lady Blooms were warming up. Stacey kept her eyes on her cue cards. Disciplined. Professional.
Her eyes drifted anyway.
Jhoanna Robles was mid-stretch near the back line, one arm pulled across her chest, laughing at something Mikha had said. She was wearing the blue-and-white warm-up jersey, the one thing that hung just slightly loose on her frame, sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail—practical, effortless—with a few strands already escaping because Jhoanna had never met a hairstyle she couldn’t destroy within twenty minutes.
She looked focused. Relaxed. Like a person who belonged exactly where she was.
Stacey’s chest did a thing. She ignored it. She’d been ignoring it for a few months now.
(It had not gone away.)
She looked at her cards.
The cards were boring.
She looked back at Jhoanna.
And Jhoanna—because she had some kind of sixth sense, some infuriating internal radar that could locate Stacey across any room at any distance—turned her head and found her immediately.
Their eyes met across fifty feet of polished hardwood, and Jhoanna smiled.
Not the press smile. Stacey had catalogued all of Jhoanna’s smiles at this point, which was embarrassing but factually accurate. There was the press smile—polite, a little practiced, media-friendly. There was the competitive smile, the one that came out mid-game when she’d just run a play that made the opposing team look silly. There was the teammate smile, bright and easy, the one she gave Mikha and Colet and Gwen.
And then there was this one.
Slow. Warm. A little crooked. The one that reached her eyes and stayed there, like she had a secret she wasn’t telling and the secret was that she adored you.
That smile was Stacey’s. Only Stacey’s.
Tigilan mo ‘ko, Robles. There are cameras everywhere.
Stacey looked away first. She always looked away first. It was a matter of survival.
The thing about Jhoanna Robles was that Stacey had disliked her first.
This was an important detail—one Stacey maintained with the tenacity of someone who needed the narrative to make sense, because the actual timeline of her feelings did not make sense, not even a little bit.
It had started in their second year. Stacey had just gotten the courtside position—her first real assignment with the university broadcast team—and one of her earliest interviews had been a post-game segment with the Lady Blooms’ breakout spiker. She’d prepared her questions carefully, done her research, shown up with the right energy.
Jhoanna had been… a lot.
Not rude, exactly. But she’d answered Stacey’s carefully crafted questions with a kind of easy confidence that bordered on dismissive. Short answers. A smirk that suggested she found the whole process mildly amusing. And then, at the end, she’d leaned slightly toward the mic and said, “Next time, ask me something harder,” and winked.
Winked.
On camera.
Stacey had smiled through the rest of the segment and then spent the entire walk back to the broadcast room composing a mental essay about the audacity of athletes who thought they were God’s gift to their sport. Ang kapal ng mukha. Sino ba siya? One good game and akala mo naman superstar na.
Her friends heard about it. Everyone heard about it.
“She’s so mayabang,” Stacey had ranted over iced coffee in their usual hangout spot, while Aiah, Maloi and Sheena nodded along with the weary patience of people who had heard variations of this speech before. “Lahat ng athletes ganyan. Kaya ayoko sa kanila talaga. ‘Di ako magpapakatanga sa athlete. Never.”
“Oo na, Staku,” Sheena had said, stirring her drink. “Alam na namin.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’ve been saying that for an hour.”
The problem—the real, fundamental, catastrophic problem—was that Stacey kept getting assigned to cover the Lady Blooms. And the Lady Blooms’ star spiker kept giving interviews. And somewhere between the third game and the seventh, between the snarky answers and the slow grins, between the press tables and the accidental hallway encounters and the one time they’d argued for forty-five minutes about serve-receive strategy in the cafeteria line because Jhoanna said something wrong and Stacey couldn’t let it go—somewhere in all that mess, the irritation started to feel different.
Less like annoyance. More like awareness.
She noticed things. Stupid things. The way Jhoanna’s voice dropped when she was being serious versus when she was performing. The way she high-fived her teammates after every point, not just the big ones. The way she’d stay after practice to work with the freshmen on their hitting form, patient in a way that didn’t match the cocky persona she wore in front of cameras.
Hindi naman pala siya ganoon kayabang, Stacey had thought one evening, watching Jhoanna walk a freshman through her arm swing from across the practice court. O baka mayabang pa rin. But maybe there’s something underneath all that.
That was the beginning of the end.
They’d found themselves at the same group hangout—inevitable, given that their friend circles had collapsed into each other like a social Venn diagram made entirely of couples. Aiah was with Mikha. Maloi was with Colet. Sheena was with Gwen. Stacey and Jhoanna were the last two singles in a friend group that had turned into a dating ecosystem, and everyone kept putting them next to each other at dinner tables with the subtlety of a freight train.
Stacey had insisted it won’t happen every time.
But things kept happening. Small things. Stupid things. Things Stacey couldn’t stop cataloguing no matter how hard she tried.
The first one was at a ramen place—the whole group crammed into a booth at that spot near campus, the one with the good tonkotsu and the perpetually fogged-up windows. Everyone was loud, everyone was slurping, and somehow Stacey had ended up across from Jhoanna because Sheena had "accidentally" taken the seat next to Gwen and left nowhere else to sit.
Stacey had been ready to ignore her for the entire meal. She was good at that.
Then Maloi asked, casually, between bites of chashu, “Staku, kumusta ‘yung application mo sa internship?”
And Stacey had made the mistake of being honest. She’d shrugged, said it didn’t go well, said the station had told her she “lacked on-camera warmth”—a polite way of saying she was too stiff, too rehearsed, too much control and not enough personality. She’d said it lightly, like it didn’t bother her, but the table had gone quiet the way tables do when someone accidentally says something real in the middle of a joke.
Sheena had said, “That’s their loss naman.”
Maloi had said, “Ang bobo nila actually.”
Aiah had reached over and squeezed her hand.
And Jhoanna—Jhoanna, who Stacey expected to either stay quiet or make some deflecting joke—had put down her chopsticks and said, “That’s bullshit.”
Everyone looked at her.
“I’ve watched your segments,” Jhoanna said. Not performing. Not smirking. Just—direct, the way she was when she meant something. “You’re one of the best courtside reporters in the league. Kung ‘warmth’ and hanap nila, hindi nila alam ‘yung tinitingnan nila. You have something else—precision. Kung sino ka on-camera, ‘yun yung maganda. You don’t need to change anything about yourself para sa kanila.”
The table was quiet.
Stacey stared at her.
Jhoanna picked up her chopsticks and resumed eating like she hadn’t just dismantled Stacey’s entire emotional defense system.
“Anyway,” Jhoanna said, stirring her broth. “May iba pa namang station. Marami. Mas magaling ka pa sa karaminhan ng reporters na nag interview sa ‘kin.”
Mikha had broken the silence with a dramatic “Hala, si Jho oh. Pinapagtanggol si Stacey,” and the table had erupted into teasing, and the moment passed.
But Stacey had not stopped thinking about it.
Precision. Hmm.
She’d replayed it in her head the entire walk home. And the next morning. And the morning after that.
You don’t need to change anything about yourself para sa kanila.
Nobody had ever told her that. Not like that. Not like it was obvious.
The second thing happened two weeks later, at a party Stacey hadn’t wanted to go to.
Some org event—loud music, too many people, the kind of thing Stacey attended out of social obligation and then spent the whole night wishing she were home. She’d been standing near the drinks table, scrolling through her phone, when a guy from the communications department—slightly drunk, very confident—had started talking to her.
At first it was fine. Small talk. Then it wasn’t.
“Ang seryoso mo naman lagi,” he’d said, leaning too close. “I think that’s why you don’t have a boyfriend. Smile ka naman minsan.”
Stacey had frozen. Not because she couldn’t handle it—she could, she’d handled worse—but because the comment had landed on the bruise the internship rejection had left, and for a second, her rehearsed response didn’t come.
She didn’t need to find them.
“Uy, pre.”
Jhoanna had appeared from somewhere—nowhere—like she’d materialized out of the bass-heavy music. She stepped between them, casual as anything, beer in hand, and looked at they guy with an expression that was technically a smile but contained absolutely zero warmth.
“Parang busy si Stacey, ah,” Jhoanna said. “Go ahead and bother someone else.”
“Nag-uusap lang naman kami—”
“Yep, you’re done here.” Still smiling. Still terrifying. “Diba, Stacey?”
Stacey found her voice. “Uh, yeah.”
The guy left. Smart.
Jhoanna turned to her, and the scary smile melted into something softer—almost concerned, almost gentle, but restrained enough that it could still pass as casual if Stacey needed it to.
“Okay ka lang?”
“Okay lang.”
“Sure?”
“Jho. Okay lang.”
A beat. Jhoanna studied her face like she was checking—really checking—and then nodded. “Sige. Pero kung bumalik ‘yun, sabihan mo lang ako.”
She’d walked away after that, back to wherever she came from, and Stacey had stood by the drinks table with a heart rate that had nothing to do with the guy and everything to do with Jhoanna Robles just protected me and then asked if I was okay and I think I might be losing my mind.
The third thing was the smallest, and it ruined her completely.
A Tuesday. Nothing special. Stacey was in the library, third floor, her usual corner table, surrounded by notes for a broadcast journalism exam. She’d been there for four hours. She was tired, stressed, and running on coffee that tasted like regret.
Her phone buzzed.
Unknown number: Iced americano yung usual drink mo ‘di ba?
Stacey: Uh, who’s this? How did you get my number?
Unknown number: Yung athlete na ayaw mo. :)
Five minutes later, Jhoanna had walked into the library—still in her practice clothes, hair damp from a shower, gym bag over one shoulder—and placed an iced americano on Stacey's table without a word.
Stacey stared at it. Then at her.
"Paano mo alam na iced americano 'yung go-to drink ko?"
"Napansin ko lang." Jhoanna shrugged, already backing away. "Last week sa cafe, after mo mag-cover ng game namin. You looked tired then too."
“So… you’ve been watching me?”
Jhoanna paused. For the first time since Stacey had known her, she looked almost—caught. Like she'd revealed more than she meant to.
"Luh, ‘di naman. Observant lang talaga ako,” she said, recovering. That grin again—but this time, Stacey could see the edges of it, the way it covered something more careful underneath.
"Thanks," Stacey said. Quiet.
"You’re welcome. Good luck sa exam."
And she left.
Stacey stared at the iced americano for a full minute before picking it up. It was exactly how she liked it—less ice, extra shot. She didn’t know how Jhoanna had noticed that. She didn’t know when Jhoanna had started paying that kind of attention.
She took a sip and thought: I've already lost.
Every wall she'd built didn't stand a chance.
The confession—if you could even call it that—happened on a Thursday night, seven months ago.
It wasn’t planned. Nothing between them ever was.
Jhoanna had played a brutal game that afternoon—a loss, a rare one, the kind that sat heavy in the locker room long after the buzzer. Stacey had done the post-game segment, asked the standard questions, gotten the standard answers from the other players. But Jhoanna had been quiet. Not performing. Not smirking. Just… tired, in a way that went past physical.
Stacey had stayed late to pack up equipment, which was Michael’s job, but she’d offered anyway because she needed a reason to still be there that wasn’t I’m worried about her.
The venue was emptying. The lights were being shut off section by section.
And Jhoanna had walked over to the press table, still in her jersey, hair wrecked from the game, and sat down across from Stacey like she had nowhere else to be.
They’d sat in silence for a while. Not uncomfortable—just heavy. The kind of silence that happens when two people are past pretending but haven’t figured out what comes next.
"Ang hirap," Jhoanna had said, finally. Not about the game. Or maybe about the game. Or maybe about everything. "Minsan, ang hirap kapag feeling mo hindi ka enough."
And Stacey—who had built walls out of professionalism and sarcasm and a strict no-athletes policy—felt every single one of them crack.
Because she knew that feeling. She lived in that feeling. And hearing it from Jhoanna, who always seemed so untouchable, so sure of herself—it made Stacey want to say something real. Something that wasn’t a deflection or a joke or a carefully worded broadcast answer.
So she did.
"Ikaw pa," Stacey said. Soft. "Ikaw pa 'yung magsasabi niyan."
Jhoanna looked up.
“Jho, you’re…” Stacey hesitated. Her hands were shaking under the table. "Hindi mo nakikita 'yung nakikita namin. Ng lahat. It’s not just the game—it’s you. You’re so much more than what you think you are.”
She trailed off. Jhoanna was staring at her, and the gym was empty and the lights were half-off and Stacey's heart was hammering so loud she was sure it echoed.
"Why are you so concerned?" Jhoanna asked. Quiet. Careful. Like she was holding something fragile and didn't want to break it.
Stacey could have deflected. She could have said "concerned lang naman as a friend" or "wala lang" or any of the hundred escape routes she'd memorized for exactly this kind of moment.
She didn’t.
“Alam mo naman kung bakit,” she whispered.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Stacey had ever heard.
Then Jhoanna smiled—not the press smile, not the competitive smile, not even the private one Stacey had catalogued. This one was new. This one was shaky at the edges, disbelieving, like someone who'd been hoping for something and couldn't quite believe it was happening.
"Matagal na," Jhoanna said. Almost a whisper. "Matagal na akong umaasa na sasabihin mo 'yan."
"Wala naman akong sinabi ah…"
“Stacey.”
“Okay. Fine. Oo.” Her eyes were burning. “Oo, may gusto ako sa’yo. Okay? Matagal na. Happy?”
The silence stretched. Stacey’s pulse was screaming. She was already drafting the retreat in her head—forget I said anything, joke lang, kabag lang ‘to—when Jhoanna leaned back in her chair and let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for months.
Then, with the ghost of a grin pulling at her mouth—half-joke, half-something terrifyingly sincere—Jhoanna said:
“Eh kung ligawan kita ngayon, papayag ka ba?”
Stacey blinked. “Ano?”
"Ligawan. Officially. 'Yung maayos." Jhoanna's voice was light, but her eyes weren't. Her eyes were dead serious. "Hatid-sundo. Breakfast before your 7 AM class. Dala-dala ko 'yung iced americano mo na less ice, extra shot. 'Yung buong package."
“Jho—”
“Unless ayaw mo. Kasi kung joke lang ‘yung sinabi mo kanina, I can pretend I didn’t hear it. We go back to normal. Walang weird.” She paused. “But I’d rather not pretend. Pagod na ‘ko mag-panggap na ‘di kita gusto. I like you, Stacey.”
And there it was. Underneath all the bravado, underneath the cocky smirks and the winks on camera and the easy confidence that Stacey had spent almost a year being annoyed by—there was just a girl, sitting across a press table in an empty gym, asking if she had a chance.
Stacey’s hands were shaking. Her chest was tight. Every rational thought she had was telling her to say no—to protect the reputation she’d built, the lines she’d drawn, the entire identity she’d constructed around not being this person.
She looked at Jhoanna. Jhoanna, who remembered her coffee order. Who told her she didn’t need to change. Who stepped between her and a drunk guy at a party without being asked. Who was looking at her now like the answer mattered more than any game she’d ever played.
"Yes," Stacey said. Barely a whisper. "Papayag ako."
Jhoanna’s face broke open—surprise first, then something so soft and unguarded that Stacey almost looked away out of instinct. But she didn’t. Not this time.
Jhoanna reached across the press table and took her hand. Slowly, carefully, like she was giving Stacey every chance to pull away.
Stacey didn’t pull away.
“Yes?” Jhoanna repeated, like she needed to hear it again.
“Oo, Jho. Oo.”
They’d sat there for a long time—hands intertwined on a press table in an empty gym, the overhead lights clicking off one by one around them—and it felt less like a beginning and more like an exhale. Like something that had been building for a very long time had finally, finally been allowed to land.
That night was the start.
And Jhoanna Robles? She went all in.
Two months. Two months of Jhoanna showing up. Not in the big, showy ways Stacey had expected from someone with her personality—though there was some of that too—but in the quiet, steady, consistent ways that undid Stacey completely.
The iced americanos became a regular thing. Every Tuesday and Thursday, without fail, waiting on Stacey’s library table before she even sat down. Jhoanna never made a big deal of it. Just a coffee, a sticky note with something written on it— “good luck sa quiz, mahal (practice lang ‘yung mahal hehe)” or “you’re the best reporter sa buong campus :) (objective opinion ‘to ha)” —and then she’d disappear before Stacey could even protest.
She walked Stacey to her classes when their schedules overlapped. Not in an obvious way—she’d just… appear, falling into step beside her like it was coincidence, like she happened to be going the same direction. Every single time.
“Diba may class ka sa kabilang building?” Stacey had asked once.
“Maaga pa naman,” Jhoanna had said, even though her next class was in eight minutes and on the opposite side of campus. She’d made it on time. Barely. Stacey had heard from Mikha that she’d sprinted.
She never pushed. That was the thing that got Stacey the most. Jhoanna was patient in a way that didn’t match the image—no pressure, no timeline, no “so, ano na?” Just presence. Consistent, warm, impossible-to-ignore presence.
And Stacey tried to resist. She really did. She maintained the act for weeks—“hindi pa tayo, Jho” and “nanliligaw ka pa lang” and “huwag kang assuming diyan”—but every time Jhoanna smiled at her across the cafeteria, or fixed her collar before a broadcast segment or texted her “kumain ka na ba?” at exactly the right moment, another brick came loose.
Two months in, they were sitting on the bleachers of the university gymnasium after everyone else had left. Practice was over. The gym was quiet. Jhoanna was lying on the bench one row below, looking up at the ceiling, and Stacey was sitting above her, pretending to scroll through her phone.
“Jho.”
“Hmm?”
“Oo na.”
Jhoanna sat up so fast she almost fell off the bench. “Anong oo na?”
“I’m saying yes. Tayo na. Sinasagot na kita.” Stacey didn’t look up from her phone, but her ears were red. “Kung gusto mo pa rin.”
“Kung gusto ko pa rin?” Jhoanna’s voice cracked. “Stacey. I waited two months for this tapos sasabihin mo yan. Kung gusto ko pa rin?”
“Eh di oo na nga! Bakit kailangang paulit-ulit pa?!”
“Kasi gusto ko marinig ulit!”
“Ang ingay mo!”
Jhoanna was grinning—the biggest, dumbest, most radiant grin Stacey had ever seen on a human face—and before Stacey could say anything else, Jhoanna had climbed up to her row, sat beside her, and taken her hand.
“So… it’s official? Tayo na?” Jhoanna asked, even though she already knew.
“Tayo na nga, ‘di ba? Ano pang gusto mong sabihin ko?”
“Like as in girlfriends?”
“...Oo.”
“Say it.”
“Jho.”
“Say it, Staku.”
“...Girlfriend mo na ‘ko. Okay? Happy?”
“Very happy.”
A pause.
“Pero secret muna,” Stacey said. Quieter now. “Please. Di ko pa kayang marinig yung mga pang-iinis ng mga friends natin.”
And Jhoanna had laughed—real, bright, the kind of laugh that came from the chest—and said, “Deal.”
That was five months ago.
Five months of being together, and nobody knew. Not their friends, not the broadcast team, not the teammates. And the irony—the rich, delicious, absolutely maddeningly irony—was that every single one of their friends was openly, loudly, embarrassingly dating each other across the player/audience line, while Stacey and Jhoanna, the reporter and the athlete, the most visible pair in their entire circle, kept their thing hidden behind professional smiles and plausible deniability.
It had started as self-preservation. Pano nalang ‘yung mga sinabi ko dati? Parang kinain ko lang yung mga sinabo ko. Stacey had spent years saying she’d never date an athlete. Coming out with “jk, I’m dating the team captain” was not an option. Not yet. Not when she could already hear Sheena’s screaming and Maloi’s smug “sabi ko na, eh” and Aiah’s disappointed head-shake that would somehow be worse than all of it.
But five months in, the secrecy had become something else entirely. Something that belonged to them. The shared looks, the hidden smiles, the way Jhoanna could say something completely innocent in an interview and only Stacey would catch the second layer underneath. It was their game within the game.
And honestly? They were happy. They were having fun.
“Stacey, two minutes,” Michael called from behind the camera, pulling her back to the present. “Robles is wrapping up warm-ups.”
Stacey straightened her collar. Checked her mic. Put on her broadcast face.
Game time.