Much later: I'm sitting with Raya in a 24-hour café along V. Luna, sipping tepid coffee and soaking up the air-conditioning and the artsy ambience. Rattan creations hang from the ceiling; they look like the frameworks of impossible boats, or the skeletons of prehistoric sea creatures. Photographs and murky watercolors adorn the walls. It's three A.M., and our fellow café-goers consist of a handful of students cramming for an exam, two talkative UP mountaineer-types, and a green-haired musician and his entourage.

"You have a problem with endings," I say.

Raya nods, and then waves at a passing waiter. "The waiter's ignoring me," she says.

"That's what they do here," I reply. "I think it's because deep down, they know their food is horrible, and so they're actually ashamed to serve it. That's why they avoid us - we might try to order something."

I look at the set of twelve semi-crumpled sheets of short bond paper in my hand. It's an inkjet printout of Raya's short story - I jotted down notes in its margins, desecrated it with coffee-cup stains and doodles, and brought it to the café rolled up in my back pocket. The only neat thing on the printout is the staple that still holds it together. I hand it back to her with some embarrassment.

"So," she says, taking it gingerly, "Does it suck?"

"No, no - " I assure her. "I liked it a lot, really. I mean, I love the way you wrote it, that droll tone you use. I love the brief and vivid descriptions, the way the dialogue flows, and the jokes and the sarcasm..."

"Why do I feel like I'm standing on a stage accepting a consolation prize?"

"...And your characters are well delineated: the artist boyfriend, and the co-worker guy, and especially Glenda, the main character. I felt like I knew these people."

"You probably do," she says, flipping through the pages, glancing at my written comments. "But the ending sucks, right?"

"I wouldn't say sucks," I say. I pause, and try to remember exactly what it was I wanted to say. "I also wouldn't actually call it an ending."

"Oh boy, here we go," she says, leaning forward as if to insert her head into a guillotine.

"It's just that I felt a bit frustrated." I toy with my now-empty coffee cup, rotating it clockwise, counterclockwise. "I mean, there I was, enthralled, turning the pages, eager to find out what was going to happen next - and then, just as Glenda meets her boyfriend's 'other woman,' it ends."

"O-kaay..." she says, a bit doubtfully.

"So I wanted to know: what happens next? And whatever happens to her and this Makie, this co-worker? I guess in a way it's a soap-opera kind of yearning, this wanting to know who ends up with who or whether in the end anyone ends up with anyone at all, but I couldn't help feeling a bit..."

"Frustrated?" she repeats.

"Yeah."
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