Colin tipped his face up. Diwa’s chin was resting on the top of his head, and from this angle Colin could see the underside of his jaw, and the shadow of stubble coming through.
“I want to meet them, Colin.” Diwa’s hand came up to the back of Colin’s head, fingers threading through his hair in a slow scratch that made Colin’s scalp tingle. “Whenever you’re ready. No rush.”
“I know.”
The narrator had moved on to grafting techniques, a close-up of someone’s weathered hands binding a cutting to rootstock with wraps of tape. Diwa’s fingers kept working through his hair, slow and rhythmic, and Colin closed his eyes and let the tension of the week run out of him.
Diwa’s heartbeat was steady under his ear, and Colin was, against every reasonable expectation of his life, happy.
“Diwa.”
“Mm?”
“Come to Sunday lunch with me?”
Colin could feel the exact moment the words landed, because Diwa’s breathing changed. There was a single caught beat, then a silence that preceded either a very sweet comment or a very stupid one. Given that this was Diwa, it would probably be both.
“Yeah?” Diwa’s voice came out carefully casual. “Sunday lunch. With your kid?”
“And Ryland. There’s an Italian place on the Broadway in Barking that we’ve been going to for years. The garlic bread’s good. The wine’s not.”
“I’m going to Google the restaurant. I want to look at the menu so I can have intelligent opinions about the specials. What time are we going? I should get a haircut. Can I get a haircut before Sunday? There’s a place in Marylebone that does walk-ins, but their Sunday hours are —”
“Diwa. This place has paper tablecloths, so match your expectations with that bit of info. All you need to do is make sure you wear some sort of shirt. You don’t need to bring a Barolo.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll make sure to wear a shirt.”
He lay back down, and Colin’s head rested against his chest again. They stayed like that while the avocado documentary ran its credits over footage of an orchard at sunset. Diwa’s fingers returned to Colin’s hair, but his thumb was tapping a rhythm against Colin’s scalp which he recognised as a self-soothing gesture of the alpha’s.
He’d bring the Barolo. Colin knew this with the same certainty with which he knew the bus timetable.
Chapter Eighteen
Diwaspotted them through the window before he got past the awning.
Colin was sitting at a corner table with his back to the wall, and opposite him were two men. The younger one — Stephen, it had to be Stephen — was leaning forward on his elbows, talking, and Colin was nodding along, turning a breadstick between his fingers. The alpha beside Stephen sat very straight and very still, hands folded on the table in front of him.
Diwa looked down at the bottle of Barolo in his hand. He’d been told, in specific terms, not to bring it, and knew Colin would have words for him. But there was nothing like very good wine to lubricate a difficult conversation. Given that he was about to sit down across from a corporate solicitor who’d already decided he didn’t like him, he was going to take every advantage he could get. He adjusted his grip on the neck of the bottle, pushed the door open, and went in.
The restaurant was warm and small and smelled of garlic butter. A good sign. Red-and-white checked paper covered the tables. A candle guttered in a Chianti bottle so thick with old wax it had developed geological strata, and the menus were laminated and slightly sticky when Diwa brushed against them. This wasn’t a problem for him. He’d grown up eating at Binondo carinderias and Dampa seafood places where you bought your prawns from the wet market next door and carried them dripping in a plastic bag for the kitchen to cook.
Colin’s eyes found him across the room, tracked down to the bottle, and came back up to his face with a flatness that could have stripped paint.
Diwa bent and kissed him on the cheek anyway, quick and warm, his free hand squeezing Colin’s shoulder. “I brought wine,” he said, setting the Barolo on the paper tablecloth.
“I can see that.”
“It’s a thank-you for the invitation. It felt rude to come empty-handed.”
“It’s a forty-quid bottle, Diwa.”
“Sixty, actually.”
Colin’s mouth flattened into a line so thin it nearly disappeared, and Diwa straightened up and turned to face the rest of the table. The prickle hit the back of his neck before his eyes even landed on the son. Stephen Huxley was looking at him the way a barrister looked at an exhibit.
He was Colin in younger form, with the same slight frame and fine-boned face. His jaw was set in a way that didn’t quite qualify as a scowl, but was doing all the preparatory work for one.
“Stephen,” Diwa said, extending his hand. “Really good to meet you.”
