JiaTiu
In court, inadmissible means true, but not allowed to count.
Rai Villanueva, 30, lawyer, had a plan: Year Five, engagement. Six years with Pao, one Google Sheet, and a rooftop dinner on Roxas Boulevard where she practised her yes face in the mirror.
Instead, she got dumped over dessert. Then he asked, "Hati tayo?"
So she ended up in an ER in Malate at midnight, in a cocktail dress, sure she was having a heart attack. It wasn't. It was a panic attack. And the triage nurse who crouched in front of her and said breathe with me was a total stranger.
Migs Lacson. Twenty-two. Calm, matalino, suplado sa lahat, except, apparently, to a crying woman holding a melting Magnum.
She thought she'd never see him again.
Four days later, she walked into her first-ever class as a law professor, and he was sitting in the back row by the window.
"Lacson, Miguel A."
"Present... Ma'am."
It starts with questions about Article 36 at midnight. Then "kumain na po kayo?" at 2 a.m. Then pasalubong left at a tapsilog counter, and Spotify links with no message that Rai reads like evidence. Nobody makes rules, because nobody thinks there's anything to make rules about.
Until a motorcycle ride down Taft Avenue at night, when she holds on to him and hears music that isn't there.
He's her student. She's eight years older. And everyone, from her best friend to her mother to an anonymous confessions page, has an opinion.
But the hardest thing about loving someone at the wrong time isn't the rules.
It's what happens when the rules are gone.
A slow-burn forbidden romance about loving someone at the wrong time, the double standard nobody talks about, and learning to breathe on your own.