He wasn’t fine. He needed to leave. Every single person in the café was looking at him, and he was going to throw up if he had to sit in this booth for another thirty seconds. He fumbled his wallet out of his back pocket with sauce-slick fingers and pulled out everything in it. Then he dropped the lot on the table.
“Diwa, mate—”
“I need to go.”
He was already standing. Colin straightened with him, hand half-raised, and Diwa moved past him towards the door without waiting to see if he followed. He could hear Colin behind him, picking up his bag. Then the door was opening, the cold London air hitting Diwa’s face.
Chapter Eight
Anote before this one: there are discussions of the kind of videos that content moderators are paid to look at. Nothing is described in detail, but upsetting material is alluded to.
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Colincaught up to Diwa on the pavement and put a hand at the small of the alpha’s back.
Diwa didn’t shake him off. He kept walking, his breathing audible through his nose, a piece of pasta still stuck to the side of his neck. Colin steered him round a buggy and across the zebra crossing. The sauce was already drying tacky into the collar of Diwa’s shirt, and there was a smear of it down his back.
The yellow door came up on their left. Diwa fumbled for his keys in his pocket and got them on the second try, then stoodwith the bunch in his fist. His hand was shaking too hard to fit the key to the lock. He tried again, and the key skittered off the brass and made a thin scratching sound across the plate.
Colin slid his hand from the small of Diwa’s back to his wrist, and held it there a moment until Diwa’s fingers loosened and let him take the keys. He found the right key by the wear on the head, fitted it into the lock, and pushed the door open.
“In you go.”
Diwa went. Colin followed and shut the door behind them. Diwa was already pulling his jacket off in the hallway, then his shirt, peeling the wet cotton off his shoulders without bothering with the buttons. The shirt landed on the floorboards with a wet slap. He kept walking, kicking off his shoes towards the kitchen.
Colin set the keys down on the side table and went up the stairs.
The guest bathroom was the second door on the left. He took a folded towel off the rail, the largest one he could see, and brought it back down with him. By the time he came into the kitchen, Diwa had got his head under the cold tap at the sink and was rinsing the sauce out of his hair with both hands. Water was running down his back in streaks.
Colin stood beside him at the counter and waited.
When Diwa straightened, he kept his eyes shut and groped for the worktop, water sluicing off his nose and chin. Colin shook the towel out and put it over his head.
He rubbed Diwa’s hair through the towel, brisk and unfussy, the way he’d dried the twins off after the bath when they were small. Diwa stood very still under his hands, and let himself be tended to. Colin worked round the back of his head and down to the nape, then brought the corner of the towel forward to wipe the water off his face. He caught the drips at his jaw, and the bit running down the side of his neck where the pasta had been.
Then he stepped back and let the towel settle round Diwa’s shoulders.
“There you are,” Colin said. “All sorted.”
Diwa didn’t move out from under the towel. He sank down onto one of the bar stools at the kitchen island instead, elbows on the marble, the ends of the towel falling forward round his bare shoulders. His hair was sticking up in damp peaks.
Colin had never seen him sit still like that.
Whatever had been holding the man up all morning had gone out of him on the walk back. His shoulders had rounded in as if he were bracing against the world. There was still a fleck of tomato sauce caught at his hairline. Colin reached out and wiped it away.
Colin pulled out the stool beside Diwa and sat. Close, but not so close he was crowding the alpha in. He kept his hands flat on the marble where Diwa could see them.
“Whatever that woman was on about,” he said, “you didn’t deserve any of that.”
Diwa shook his head. The towel slipped off one shoulder and he didn’t catch it. His shoulders were trembling in the way Colin had learnt to spot in his own boys when they were holding something heavy in.
“You don’t even know, Colin.” His voice came out raw around the edges.
“So tell me.” Colin let his shoulder touch against Diwa’s. “Go on. I won’t even charge you a hundred quid for it.”
Diwa pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, and Colin watched the towel slip another inch down his back. There was a pink scrape on his shoulder where the rim of the bowl had caught him on the way down. Colin made a note of it without saying anything. He’d clean it out for him later.
“I started Orthos Analytics when I was twenty-two,” Diwa said, finally, to the marble. “Out of my dorm room in Stanford.The pitch was that AI needs training data and training data needs people, and people in the Philippines and Kenya and Pakistan would do it for way less than people in San Francisco. That was the whole idea. Stupid simple.”
