“I’ve got a sandwich.”
“Yeah?”
“Ham cheese and tomato.”
Diwa shook his head slowly. “Colin. You don’t want that. You want a buddha bowl. Or, hear me out, a salmon miso poke bowl.”
“What the fuck?”
“Listen, listen.” Diwa leaned in, both hands open. “You’ve been expanding my world view. You’ve shown me how to deal with light bulbs and radiators. Demoed the proper way to threaten someone with electrocution. Let me return the favour. There’s this Melbourne-style café down the road. They do a deconstructed eggs benedict on a slate. The hollandaise comes in a little pipette, the coffee is genuinely transcendent —”
“On awhat.”
“A slate. Like a roof slate. The point is it’s not a plate. They use anythingbuta plate. I’ve seen them do avo toast on a miniature easel, and then you kind of paint the avo smash on.”
Colin’s lip twitched.
He shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t. He’d been in this man’s house for less than two hours and his body had already produced a panic flash and several stomach-flips. The only sensible thing for him to do was to take his hundred quid and his sandwich and get on the bus home. He’d given himself an easy day and didn’t have any afternoon jobs lined up.
“All right then,” Colin found himself blurting out instead.
He bent to his bag and started packing, fitting the spanner into its slot, and rolling the offcut of dowel into the side pocket. He took his time about it, because his only other option was looking up at Diwa de la Vega’s fucking ridiculous dimples. Then he zipped the bag shut, stood, and followed the lad out.
Chapter Seven
Therewas a particular pleasure, Diwa decided, in walking down a London street with Colin Huxley beside him. He’d dialled his stride down to something Colin could keep up with comfortably, hands in his jacket pockets, and was paying very close attention to the fact that two separate alphas had done that glancing back over their shoulder thing as they passed and clocked the male omega.
The thing was that historically, he had atype, ingrained in him since Stanford. His type was, broadly, other versions of himself: people who’d done a TED talk before they hit thirty, and had strong opinions about ergonomic keyboards and the future of human flourishing. He’d slept with quite a number of those people, and had mostly enjoyed it. But now that he was removed from his usual setting, he could admit that he’d been bored by ‘his type’ for quite a while now, and that he wanted to cast the net wider.
Right onto Colin.
Colin was like no one he’d ever been with before. Colin had told Diwa, to his actual face, that he was judging him for not being able to change a light bulb at thirty. Nobody Diwa had dated since 2019 would have said anything that wasn’t pre-cleared through layers of relentless positivity. The whole ecosystem he’d been swimming in ran on the principle that you reframed everything as a growth opportunity, and that honest feedback came wrapped up as a compliment sandwich the size of a Subway footlong. You did not, under any circumstances, tell an alpha worth two billion dollars that he was being a bit thick.
Being on the receiving end of Colin’s clear-eyed bluntness was refreshing.
“Here we are,” Diwa said, holding the café door open for the omega.
Colin stepped through, and Diwa watched his face pinch inwards. His eyes tracked over the space as one corner of his mouth lifted in something not quite a sneer, but getting there. He clocked the bar, where two baristas were at work, taking in their leather aprons, top-knots, and chunky-framed glasses in ferocious teal and ferocious orange respectively.
“Brunswick three-oh-five-eight,” Colin read, off the chalkboard. “What’s that, then?”
“It’s a suburb in Melbourne. You ever been? Genuinely, the best coffee I’ve ever had is from a place there called El Mirage. They roast their beans on-site.”
“Nah. Never been out of the UK. Been busy with my two boys.”
“Oh yeah?” Diwa said, holding the door so it didn’t swing back into Colin. “How old are they?”
Kids weren’t a deal-breaker for Diwa. He’d been out with women who had kids before, and it had mostly been fun. He had a big family himself, and so enjoyed the chaos of children banging around a kitchen while he sat at the island and lethimself be cross-examined by a seven-year-old about whether sharks could yawn.
Colin was around forty. Of course he had history. There would be an ex somewhere, or maybe just an arrangement that hadn’t worked out, and there would be a couple of kids Diwa would eventually meet over a careful lunch where everyone pretended not to be assessing each other.
He was ready for “twelve and fourteen.” He was even prepared for “seventeen, my eldest’s just about to finish sixth form.”
Colin was watching his face as he answered. “They just turned twenty-six. They’re identical twins.”
Diwa kept his face very, very neutral. He was good at that, having had to maintain perfect neutrality across negotiating tables while his lawyer kicked him under the desk anytime he got close to making an inopportune comment. He deployed this skill of his now and felt the muscles around his mouth go to their carefully trained resting position.
“Oh, lovely,” he heard himself say, and was relieved when it came out at the right pitch. “Twins must’ve been a handful.”
