A weird encounter, that was.

Last night, Kelvin and I went to watch The Wolverine.

As we were standing in line, I asked Honey to go to the ticket counter and check the next screening time.

A few seconds after Hon left, a group of young men came up to me and this guy in the middle started asking questions.

"Hi, manonood ka ba ng sine?" was his warm greeting. Hi, are you going to watch a movie?

I wanted to say "Nah, I'm just here to stand and think about elephants!" but since he asked very nicely, I simply said, "Yes." I was starting to get confused at that point.

His next question was, "What are you planning to watch?"

"The Wolverine" was my puzzled answer. I didn't know where this was going.

The young man was holding something in his hand, he held it up and said, "We have extra tickets e. Hindi dumating yung mga ibang kasama namin, so bigay ko na lang..." We have extra tickets, some of our friends didn't show up so I'm just gonna give...

As the guy was talking, I breathed a sigh of relief because I saw Hon causally strutting back to me, looking at the young men with a small cryptic smile. As he came closer, all I could say was, "Oh, Hon..."

When Hon was finally standing beside me, I looked back at the young man and asked again, "What was that again? You have extra tickets?"

One of the young men saw Kelvin and his eyes widened. The young man, who was talking to me started backing up and hurriedly said, "Oh, uh, yeah, some our friends didn't show up and we have extra tickets. Sayang naman e, so you can have these."

He then gave us the two tickets. Dumbfounded, I stood there; confused as to what was going on. I looked at Kelvin for an answer. He simply shrugged and said, "Okay."

After a second, my brain kicked in and I started to take out my purse to pay them. I realized they were selling the tickets to us. Upon seeing me taking my purse out, the young men started hurriedly walking away and said, "No, you don't have to pay us. Those are yours now. Bye!"

And we were left standing there, with two tickets to The Wolverine.

As we walked towards the cinema, I was raving to Honey as to how nice the young men were to give us their tickets for free. They were so sweet and nice!

Kelvin, the entire time, was just walking beside me, smiling and shaking his head. He had still had that small, mysterious smile on his face.

I stopped and asked, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

And he said, “Hon, that was a set-up. That guy was hitting on you, and the rest of the guys with him were his wingmen.”

Surprised, I answered him back. “No, they were just being nice! Sayang nga naman ang ticket. Stop thinking like that about other people!”

He laughed again and said, “Trust me, I’ve participated in the same strategy before. They thought you were alone and that was his way of asking you out.”

Now I don’t really know their reason behind giving us the tickets but I couldn't bear to use the tickets without giving the young men something in return. To appease my conscience, I went and bought the young men bags of chips.

So there we were, Hon, me, and the young men in the cinema, enjoying the adventures of The Wolverine.