Page 33 of The Five Stages of Courting Dalisay Ramos

Pinky holds up her hands, still cracking up. Dalisay is laughing too, despite herself. Is she really so obvious?

“I won’t tell, I promise,” Pinky says. “Your secret crush is safe with me.”

“Thank you.” Dalisay turns back to the target. “But I’m not sure I’d call it a crush.”

“What else would you call it? You’re into him, right?”

Dalisay doesn’t know. She mumbles, “I may have had a sex dream about him …”

Pinky nearly spits out her beer. “What!”

“It doesn’t mean anything, though, right? I have weird dreams all the time.”

Pinky’s eyebrows are in the stratosphere. “I guess, but … whatever you gotta tell yourself!”

A shadow of guilt gnaws at Dalisay’s insides. She hasn’t even told Nicole yet that she might have feelings for Evan, but then again Nicole hasn’t exactly been an open book either. Besides, talking with Pinky about Evan is a lot easier than it is with Nicole. Pinky doesn’t break out into song, teasing her to no end, like Nicole does.

But none of this means Evan has any feelings for her. He asked her out, she said no; that’s all there is to it.

With a huff, Dalisay raises the ax and takes aim at the wooden target. “It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s only doing this so he can have the Asia tour.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Have you two actually, you know, talked?”

Dalisay throws the ax and it lands with a solidthunkin the wood. “No.”

“Then you don’t know.”

Pinky might be right. She’s just assuming how he feels. She’s left wondering unless she asks, but does she want to risk the disappointment?

That dream was so real, she actuallycouldsee herself being with him. But Evan from her subconscious is very different from the Evan of real life. What if he doesn’t feel the same way? Does she really want to open her heart like that again?

“This isn’t just because Evan’s my friend,” Pinky says, “but I genuinely think you’d be good together. For real.”

Dalisay turns back around and takes a sip of her beer. “He’s … definitely not what I thought. He’s stubborn, in a good way.”

Itisadmirable he didn’t complain at all during his servitude. He scrubbed all the floors in the house on his hands and knees, got on a ladder and cleared the gutters, got rid of a wasp’s nest in those same gutters, and repainted the shed in the backyard. A man of lesser character might have given up by now.

Pinky nods. “When he says he’ll do something, he does it. I could have told you firsthand what you were in for. He’sthe only friend I know who will say he’ll pick me up from the airport in the middle of the night and actually follow through. In his piece-of-shit car, no less.”

Dalisay’s heart softens a bit. “Say, hypothetically, I felt differently about him. And he felt differently about me. I would still want to take things slow, and take my time, but I realize for Americans maybe that’s too slow.”

“Don’t worry about all that. Play by Manila rules. JM and I dated for four months before we slept together,” Pinky says, waving her hand like she’s shooing away a fly. She says “four months” as if it’s a long time.

“Who said anything about sleeping together?” Dalisay asks, her voice a little shrill.

Pinky’s eyebrows shoot up. “Are you a virgin? Oh, wait—of course you are. Good Filipino girls don’t have sex till they’re married!” Pinky rolls her eyes.

“It’s not that I don’t want to have sex, it’s just … complicated.”

When her dad died, dating had taken a back seat. She was more worried about what her family needed than what she needed. Besides, if her parents found out that she wanted to have sex before marriage, they would have freaked out. All three of them—Daniel, Nicole, and Dalisay—were forbidden from dating anyone until they graduated, and dating Luke in secret was one of the only times she rebelled.

She remembers a time back in Manila when Daniel was caught in the theater kissing a classmate from high school. The rumor mill churned, and news reached the Ramos house before Daniel even crossed the threshold. Their parents ranted for hours about how it was inappropriate and low class andunbecoming for him to gallivant with a girl as if he was some Casanova. And it’s even worse for girls. If they had known Dalisay was dating Luke—her first real boyfriend—she would have been grounded and forbidden from going out for the rest of her life. Daniel merely got a slap on the wrist for his dalliance. Of course, this was before their dad got sick. Priorities changed after that.

Sometimes Dalisay wonders if her parents realized how differently they treated her. How her momstilltreats her. Guilt is the first emotion she feels whenever she does something remotely selfish. But can she really call what she wants “selfish”?

She never wants to hurt her family, and at the same time she can’t deny the twist in her gut sometimes when she sees Evan at work, as he laughs with Riggs, when he types so fast his fingers are a blur, the way a crease forms between his eyebrows when he reads …

Her desire feels like a dangerous thing, like something that she needs to control, to tame. It’s come from a lifetime of growing up to be a polite, respectable woman. One sex dream cannot throw off that delicate balance.

---