He left before Diwa could answer, pulling the yellow door shut behind him. The morning air off Ledbury Road was cold against his face, and he walked towards the bus stop with his hands in his pockets.
Chapter Sixteen
A note before this one: Colin discloses to Diwa what happened to him as a child. The conversation isn’t graphic, but it is a hard one.
? ? ?
Foolingaround with Diwa made Colin feel twenty years younger and eight hundred per cent more reckless than any middle-aged, andropausal male omega had a right to feel.
Not that Colin had a strong frame of reference. His sexual history prior to Diwa could be written on the back of a till receipt with room to spare for the shopping list. But the evidence that he was losing control over this alpha was mounting; in the looseness of his limbs when Diwa’s hands were on him, and inthe way his own hands had started reaching for him without Colin’s conscious permission.
It was good. It was so good that Colin hadn’t thought very far past it; the way Diwa’s mouth opened against his like he was starving for a taste of Colin, or the way his hand had learnt the exact grip and rhythm on his cock that made Colin’s breath come apart.
He was in Diwa’s bed again, wearing one of Diwa’s T-shirts. He had a perfectly good shirt of his own folded in his holdall. He’d reached for it, caught a whiff of Diwa’s on the back of the chair, and that had been that. Now the cotton sat too wide across his shoulders, and the scent of it was making his thoughts slow and useless.
Diwa’s mouth was on his neck, just below his ear, and Diwa’s hand was sliding down Colin’s stomach. Colin’s hips lifted into the touch instinctively. His cock was hard and straining against the cotton of his boxers, and every nerve in his body was tuned to the trajectory of Diwa’s fingers as they dragged lower, past his waistband and the jut of his hip bone.
Then Diwa’s hand kept going. Past his cock, past the crease of his thigh, and down between his legs to cup the curve of his arse, one fingertip tracing a slow, deliberate line along the cleft.
Colin’s body went still. Diwa’s touch didn’t immediately trigger the old panic. His fingers were light and warm through the cotton, and his mouth was still skimming, soft and aimless, against Colin’s jaw. There was no threat in Diwa’s touch. Colin knew that. His nervous system knew it too, which was its own small miracle. But the heat that had been building behind his navel stuttered and cooled.
Diwa’s finger pressed teasingly against his hole through the fabric, and Colin shifted his hips sideways on the mattress, putting three inches of Egyptian cotton between Diwa’s hand and anything it might have been planning.
Diwa blinked at him. His eyes were soft and half-focused. His hand stayed where Colin had left it, resting on the sheet between them. He let Colin have his distance.
The ceiling fan turned overhead. Colin lay on his side with his pulse ticking in his throat and waited for the questions to come, or for Diwa to make another play for it. He could see the alpha’s erection tenting the front of his boxers, obvious and unaddressed.
Diwa smiled at him. His hand shifted across the sheet between them and stopped halfway in a clear invitation.
Colin let his pinkie find Diwa’s and curl around it.
The words had been sitting in his chest for days now. Every time they’d been in this bed together, every time Diwa’s hands had found him and Colin’s body had responded with a hunger that still caught him off guard, the words had been right there, nudging at the back of his teeth.
He fixed his gaze on Diwa’s collarbone. It fixed on his favourite spot; the hollow at the base of his throat, where the skin was smooth and golden brown. “I’ve never had sex, Diwa.”
Diwa huffed out a laugh. “You’ve had twin boys, Colin. Unless you’ve somehow managed immaculate conception—” The rest of the alpha’s sentence trailed off, as though someone had pressed a thumb against his windpipe to choke him off. The colour left Diwa’s face.
If this was going to work, and Colin wanted it to work more than he’d wanted anything in a long time, then Diwa needed to know all of it.
“Before you, the only experience I’ve had of someone else’s hands on me is one I didn’t choose. In a council flat stairwell.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing he’d ever sat inside. Diwa’s hand came across and lifted Colin’s to his mouth. His lips pressed against Colin’s knuckles, warm and dry, and held there.
“Okay,” Diwa said, against his skin.
Colin’s jaw ached. He hadn’t realised how tightly he’d been clenching it.
“What do you need from me, Colin? And when I ask you this, I need you to know that I’m not asking with the end goal of us having sex.” Diwa looked at him earnestly. “I just want to know how to make you feel safe. That’s it.”
“I don’t know,” Colin said. The ceiling fan turned above them, casting its slow shadow across the bed. “It’s a lot to ask of you, Diwa. I’m forty. I’m starting andropause, and you’re twenty-eight. My heats are going to get worse before they stop. I’ve got a cabinet full of suppressants that aren’t doing what they used to.” He let the list of his faults sit there, plain and unadorned. “So there’s that.”
Diwa moved slowly and curled himself against Colin’s side. His forehead rested against the point of Colin’s shoulder. His arm came across Colin’s waist and rested there, light enough that Colin could have shrugged it off without effort, if he’d wanted to.
Colin didn’t shrug it off.
“I might panic,” Colin went on. “I might be fine, and then I might not be, and I won’t always be able to tell you which one’s coming.” His throat moved around the next part. “So I need you to know that before you put your hands on me again. Because I won’t have you blindsided by it. I mean, if you even want to. After hearing all that.”
Colin waited for the let down. He breathed in deeply, taking in one last lungful of Diwa before the alpha started to untangle himself from him. He was doing the maths on a forty-year-old omega with dodgy knees, and years of damage from manual work he couldn’t always keep the lid on.
