Sorry for the slow reply. Been laid up. I can come Wednesday morning if that suits you, around ten.
He sent it before he could talk himself out of it, and turned the mobile face down on the sheet.
Chapter Six
Theyellow door opened before Colin had got his hand off the knocker, which suggested Diwa had been hovering in the hallway waiting for him.
“You came back.”
“I said I would.”
“I know, but I gave you an out in the texts and you didn’t take it, so I just wanted to…” Diwa stepped back to let him in, scanning his face for damage. He started to reach out towards Colin, but stopped himself when Colin visibly tensed. “Are you all right? You said you’d been sick.”
“I’m fine now.”
“You still look a bit peaky.”
“I’m forty, mate. I always look a bit peaky.”
That got a startled laugh out of Diwa, and Colin let himself past the alpha and into the hall. The brass pendant was still glowing. He set his bag down on the floorboards and unzipped it, taking stock of his immediate surroundings. The skirting had been fitted since his last visit, mitred neatly at the corners, andwhoever had done the plastering knew what they were about; there was no rippling, no patches of filler where they’d bodged the finish. Diwa was paying through the nose, no doubt, but at least he wasn’t being fleeced.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll get to the garden gate first, while it’s still not raining. Then the radiator. Then the tap. Lead the way.”
The garden gate was at the end of a narrow side passage between Diwa’s house and the next, and the latch was, as he’d noted, hanging off. Colin crouched in front of it and ran his thumb along the wood where the screws had pulled out. Diwa crouched beside him, close enough that Colin caught the warm, clean smell of him through the cooler air of the passage.
He kept his eyes on the gate.
“Wood’s gone soft round the holes,” Colin said. “If I just put the same screws back in, they’ll work loose again in a fortnight. So I’ll drill out the old holes, plug them with dowel and glue, and let it set. Then I’ll drill fresh holes into the new wood, and the screws bite proper.”
Colin reached for his bag, expecting Diwa’s retreat back into his house. People generally drifted off at this point. They had emails to answer and lives to be getting back to that didn’t involve watching a man drill holes into a gatepost.
Diwa stayed where he was, crouched a foot away, watching Colin’s hands with the focus of a Labrador who had been told to sit and was now waiting to be told what came next.
“Hold the latch flush against the post for me a sec.”
Diwa held the latch flush against the post. Colin marked the pencil through the screw holes onto the wood, took his cordless drill out of the bag, and walked Diwa through the size of the bit and why he’d chosen it.
“Too small a bit and the dowel won’t sit. Too big and you’ve made the problem worse. You’re matching the dowel, not the screw.”
“How do you know which dowel to pick?”
“Eyeball it. After a while you just know. For now, I know.”
He drilled. Diwa held the latch where it was supposed to go and watched his hands as Colin talked. He talked about the difference between hardwood and softwood, and about why outside fittings rotted at the screw points first. He went on about the brand of wood glue he used and why the cheap stuff was a false economy. Colin kept the patter going because the alternative was thinking about how his lower back was still grumbling at him from the heat, or about how Diwa de la Vega had got down on his haunches in the dirt of his own side passage in jeans that probably cost hundreds of quid, holding the broken latch where Colin had told him to hold it.
And if he stopped talking, he might end up hyper-focusing on how close the alpha was to him.
The radiator was upstairs in the back bedroom, cold at the bottom, hot at the top. Colin showed him the bleed key, and showed him where the valve was. He had Diwa hold an old pillowcase under the valve while Colin turned the key a quarter turn and let the trapped air out in a thin steady hiss. A dribble of brown water followed it, and the pillowcase soaked it up.
“Why’s it brown?”
“Sludge. It’s iron oxide off the inside of the pipes. The system wants flushing eventually, but not today. Today we just want the air out.”
“How d’you know when it’s done?”
“When it stops hissing and starts running clean.”
They waited a moment until the hiss shifted, and the water ran clearer. Colin closed the valve, and the radiator started warming at the bottom inside a minute. Diwa put his palm flat against it and made a small, pleased sound. Diwa’s shoulder pressed against his as they both leaned in to watch the panel.Colin stood up too quickly and had to wait a beat for the room to stop tilting.
