Ryland started the engine, checked his mirrors in sequence: rear-view, left wing, right wing, and pulled out. They made it as far as the roundabout on Longbridge Road before Stephen broke. “I don’t like him.”
Colin watched the streetlights slide past the window. A takeaway on the corner was lit up, its orange glow spilling across the pavement where a bloke in a puffer jacket was eating chips out of a tray.
“Well,Ilike him, love.”
“He’s smug.” Stephen was facing forward, his reflection ghosted in the windscreen. “He’s smug like…” The sentence hung there for a moment, searching for its own ending. “He’ssmug like someone who’s never had to worry about whether the money for heating’s going to last the winter. He walked into that restaurant like he owned the building. He brought a sixty-quid bottle of wine to a place with paper tablecloths, Daddy. Who does that?”
“A man who was nervous,” Colin said.
Stephen scowled. “He wasn’t nervous. He ate half the bread basket and then tried to change your dinner order.”
“He was nervous, Stephen. He ate half the bread basketbecausehe was nervous. He does that. Eats when he doesn’t know what to do with his hands or what to say next. It’s a stalling tactic.”
The car moved through the Barking Road traffic at Ryland’s careful pace, and Colin let the quiet sit, because Stephen needed it. His son’s hands were in his lap now, fingers knotted, picking at the skin around his thumbnail.
“He’s twenty-eight, Daddy.”
“I know how old he is.”
“He’s only two years older than me. I could’ve been at school with him. I could’ve sat next to him in a lecture theatre and asked to borrow his notes, and now he’s what? Just kissing you on the cheek in front of everyone whenever he feels like it?”
Stephen’s reflection in the windscreen had that set to his jaw that meant the verdict on Diwa was in and no amount of new evidence was going to shift it.
“I know it’s strange, Stephen.” Colin kept his voice level. “I do. And the age thing, it normally would have put me off.Everythingabout him would normally put me off. How casual he is with money. How much of it he’s got. How American he is. But he makes me feel safe, love.” The words came out quieter than Colin had meant them to. “He takes care of me…in a non-overwhelming way. I’m with him, and I relax.”
Stephen didn’t turn round. His reflection stared back at Colin from the windscreen, mouth pressed thin, and the silence in the car was heavy enough that Colin could hear the indicator ticking as Ryland signalled left onto Ripple Road.
There was more he could have said. He could have told Stephen about how the smell of warm alpha next to him had helped him sleep properly for the first time in years.
He could have said all of it. He wanted to. He wanted to lay his whole case out, piece by piece, the way Stephen himself would have done in a courtroom, and make his son see that this wasn’t recklessness. That a man who’d spent most of his life not being touched had found someone whose touch didn’t make him flinch, and that was worth protecting even if it looked, from the outside, like a forty-year-old omega making a fool of himself over a rich boy with dimples.
But Stephen’s jaw hadn’t loosened. His thumbnail was bleeding where he’d picked it raw, and the line of his shoulders said that nothing Colin offered tonight was going to land anywhere except against his wall of judgement, so Colin let it go.
In the rear-view mirror, Ryland’s eyes met his.
It was a brief, but deliberate thing. Ryland’s gaze didn’t slide across Colin’s the way it usually did, deflecting off eye contact. He looked straight at Colin, held it for two full seconds, and then returned his attention to the road.
He hadn’t said a word since Ripple Road. He knew better than to insert himself into this, to take sides between a father and his son, and Colin was fairly sure that was exactly why he’d done it this way, giving him the only show of support he could offer without crossing the line.
Colin breathed out through his nose and watched Barking come up around them in the dark.
“When this goes wrong, because it will go wrong, Daddy, it absolutely will with flighty types like him. He’ll go back to SanFrancisco or Manila or wherever billionaires go when they get bored, and you’ll still be in Barking with a broken heart.”
Colin’s throat tightened. He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth and waited for it to pass, because Stephen’s voice had cracked onbroken heart, and he didn’t want Ryland to be driving two sobbing Huxleys through Barking at twenty miles an hour.
“You’ve spent your whole life looking after us, Daddy,” Stephen said. “You’ve given us everything. Every single thing. You worked double shifts so we could have school shoes, and you walked home in the rain so we could have the bus fare, and you never once — not once — asked for anything for yourself. I want you to have everything that you want out of life. Iwantto believe that this’ll work out. But you can’t expect me to just nod and say lovely, how wonderful, my forty-year-old father is dating a tech billionaire he met while changing a light bulb?”
“Yes,” Colin said. “That is what I’m asking you to do, Stephen.” He watched his son take in the shine on his cheeks that Stephen was pretending wasn’t there. “I want you to let me take this risk, and trust that I’m not just a desperate old omega looking for any alpha to help him through a heat. I’m letting this happen. It scares the shit out of me, but I’m seeing it through. Even if it does end badly.”
Stephen didn’t answer. He didn’t nod. But he didn’t argue either, and for Stephen, that was as close to permission as Colin was ever going to get. His son brought both hands up to his face and pressed them over his eyes.
Ryland pulled the car into the space outside Colin’s building, and the handbrake came up with a soft click. He turned off the engine, checked all three mirrors again, and folded his hands on the steering wheel.
Colin leaned forward between the front seats and put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder. His baby’s head dropped sidewaysuntil his cheek rested against Colin’s knuckles, and they stayed like that for a long moment, the three of them sitting in the dark with the engine off and the orange streetlight drawing a line across the dashboard.
“I’m going to be all right, love,” Colin said. “Whatever happens.”
Stephen sniffed. “You’d better be.”
