He sat there, breathing hard, his hand still wrapped loosely around both of them. Diwa’s thumb was drawing slow circles against his hip bone, idle and warm.
After a moment Colin looked down at the mess between them, at his own rough hand, and their cocks softening together in his grip. The back of his neck went hot. He was sitting in another man’s lap at half seven in the morning, covered in come, wearing a Stanford T-shirt rucked up round his ribs, and he had no idea how to move on from what had just happened.
Then Diwa’s smile broke across his face with the same delight he’d shown when the light bulb came on the day that they met, and Colin’s mouth instinctively responded in kind.
“Morning,” Colin blurted out, wanting to be the one to break the silence.
Diwa’s laugh came out breathless and half-wrecked. He reached for Colin’s jaw, drew him down, and kissed him. “Right. You deserve a proper breakfast after that. Tender Juicy hotdogs and garlic rice.”
Colin pulled back far enough to look at him. “Tender Juicy hotdogs,” he said flatly. “After what we’ve just done?”
“They’re a Filipino brand! Hotdogs are a really common breakfast food. They’re bright red, they’re a bit sweet, and you fry them till they split. Colin, why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason.”
“They’re calledTender Juicy! That’s the name on the packet, and I’ll show you that! This is awholesomechildhood memory you’re ruining right now!”
“I haven’t said a word, mate.”
“But your face is saying plenty.”
Colin swung his leg off Diwa’s lap and sat on the edge of the mattress, reaching for the tissues on the nightstand. “Go on, then,” he said, wiping his hand clean without ceremony. “Show me your Tender Juicy hotdog.”
“Cherished,childhoodmemory, Colin!”
Colin was still laughing when he took himself off to the bathroom to clean up before breakfast.
Chapter Fifteen
Thehotdogs were, against all reasonable expectation, fantastic.
They’d come out of a packet that Diwa had pulled out from the back of the freezer with the reverence of a man producing a first edition Tolkien. Colin had three on his plate alongside another big mound of garlic rice and a fried egg.
Diwa was at the hob plating up a fourth hotdog for Ezra, who was hunched over his mobile at the far end of the island with his reading glasses on, scrolling through emails.
“She’s in Singapore,” Ezra said, not looking up. “Family holiday. Her kids are seven and four. Don’t lead with the FT. Don’t mention the board letter. And for the love of God, D, do not open with a joke.”
“I’m not going to open with a joke.”
“You opened with a joke last time and she hung up on you.”
“It was a good joke.”
“It was a joke about convertible notes at seven in the morning her time, and she’d been on a red-eye from Bangalore.” Ezraset his mobile down and accepted the plate Diwa slid across the marble. He picked up a hotdog with his fingers, bit the end off, and kept talking while he chewed. “Start with the Q2 projections. She respects numbers. Let her bring up the article. If she doesn’t bring it up,youdon’t bring it up. If she does bring it up, you listen before you talk, and then you fucking grovel. Can you do that?”
“I founded a fourteen-billion-dollar company, Ez.”
Colin’s tea went down the wrong way. He set the mug down and pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth, eyes streaming, while fourteen billion rattled around inside his skull like a marble in a tin. He’d known Diwa had money. He’d clocked the house. But fourteenbillionwas a different postcode from rich. Fourteen billion was a different planet.
Ezra leaned across and thumped him twice between the shoulder blades without looking away from Diwa. “Yeah. Nice. Now d’you think you can get through a twenty-minute call without causing a board revolt that’ll sink the valuation fifteen percent in one day?”
“‘Course.”
Ezra didn’t look like he believed Diwa.
Diwa set his own plate down and pulled his mobile out, while Ezra leaned across and tapped a contact. The dial tone pulsed twice through the speaker before a woman’s clipped voice came through the line.
“Diwa,” her voice was frosty.
