The sting was rising behind Colin’s eyes again. He held Diwa’s gaze because he wanted to stay in this moment. He wanted to be looked at with such naked fondness, and called ‘my omega’, in that soft a voice from now on.
He cleared his throat.
“You need to get the chicken out of the freezer,” Colin said. His voice came out steadier than it had any right to. “It won’t defrost in time if you leave it much longer.”
“The afritada can wait.”
“It can’t. You left it too late last Saturday and the middle was still frozen. Then you sulked about it for an hour because we had to get Deliveroo instead.”
“I didn’tsulk. I expressed legitimate disappointment about the textural compromise.”
Diwa’s fingers kept working through his hair. Colin lay there with his cheek on the alpha’s collarbone, nagging him about chicken thirty seconds after the best sex of his life, and thought:we have a Saturday routine.The walk, the afritada. He’d never had that with anyone before. The thrill of it sat right next to the orgasm and held its own.
“I’ll get to it in a minute,” Diwa said, voice rising in a whine that always made Colin roll his eyes. “Give me a minute.”
Colin gave him a minute. And then another one, because his legs weren’t ready to cooperate with any plan that involved standing, and because Diwa’s heartbeat under his ear was steady and warm.
Chapter Twenty-One
Colin’sflat was on the fourth floor of a brutalist estate in Barking that looked, from the outside, like something designed to withstand artillery fire rather than house families. The communal bins were overflowing.
Diwa climbed the stairs behind Colin, who took them two at a time, and tried not to think about the fact that the lift had an out-of-order sign on it that had been laminated. That implied that it had been in place for a while, or that outages were frequent enough that the sign had to be used pretty regularly.
The flat itself was small, made up of a narrow hallway that opened onto a kitchen barely wide enough for two people to pass each other, a living room that contained a sofa, an ancient television, and not much else. The linoleum in the kitchen was worn through to the backing in front of the sink.
It was also spotless. Every surface wiped clean, every edge squared. While Colin filled the kettle, Diwa stood in the doorway of the living room and looked at the photographs of the Huxley family. They covered most of one wall, encased in a mishmash offrames. Diwa stepped closer and tracked the growth of the twins through them.
Two babies in a hospital cot, both screaming, wrapped in NHS blankets. The same babies a few months later, propped against cushions on a sofa, their round faces identical down to their furious expressions. The twins at around four, in matching school uniforms, one grinning, the other scowling at the camera with an intensity that meant this could only be Stephen. Both of them were little Colin minis, down to the same stubborn cowlick.
In a frame smaller than the rest was a photograph Diwa almost missed. A boy, narrow-shouldered and hollow-cheeked, his collarbones sharp above the neck of a T-shirt that hung off him. Colin sat on a single bed in a room with pale institutional coloured walls, a sleeping baby in each arm. Colin was looking at the camera, exhausted, holding the two small bodies against his chest like they were the only thing keeping him upright.
Colin had been so small. Just a child holding his own children, in a room that held no supportive family members.
“Tea’s ready,” Colin said from the kitchen doorway.
Diwa turned to meet his gaze. “They were gorgeous,” Diwa said.
“Yeah. They were also a fucking handful.” Colin settled onto the sofa and tucked one foot under himself. “Lysander used to eat sand. I’d take them to the playground and turn my back for thirty seconds and he’d have a fistful of it in his mouth, happy as anything. The health visitor thought he had pica. Turned out he just liked the texture.”
Diwa sat down beside him, careful with the mug. The sofa cushions were shaped by years of the same body sitting in the same spot. Colin’s end had a permanent dip.
“Stephen was the opposite. He was a proper English baby. Wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t beige. Only interested in toast, chips, plain pasta, chicken nuggets. I used to hidevegetables in the nugget batter and he’d find them, Diwa. He’d pull apart a chicken nugget like a pathologist and fish out a single piece of carrot smaller than his fingernail and hold it up and look at me like I was trying to poison him. Then he’d argue with me about why he didn’t need veggies to get big.”
Diwa laughed. Colin’s eyes crinkled at the corners in response, though his mouth barely moved.
They ate schnitzel and chips at the kitchen table. Colin had pounded the pork thin with a rolling pin and fried it in a shallow pan with enough oil to crisp the breadcrumbs golden, and the chips were hand-cut and cooked twice. Diwa cleared his plate and accepted seconds because the schnitzel was genuinely excellent. Colin leaned back in his chair and watched him eat.
Later, in the bedroom, which was barely large enough for the double bed and a chest of drawers, Colin pulled Diwa’s shirt over his head and ran his rough palm down the centre of Diwa’s chest.
Diwa let himself be pushed onto his back. The mattress dipped under both their weights, and Colin swung a leg over him, settling across his hips with his hands braced on Diwa’s ribs. The car park light threw the rest of his face into shadow.
“You’re staring,” Colin said.
“You’re worth staring at.” Diwa ran his thumbs along the creases of Colin’s hips, where the skin was thinner and softer than anywhere else on him, and Colin’s breath caught. Over the weeks since their first time, Diwa had been making note of these spots; the places where Colin’s body hadn’t been roughened by work. The insides of his wrists. The pale strip of skin below his navel where the hair narrowed to a fine line and his scent pooled, warm and green and so thick Diwa sometimes got lost in it.
Colin’s hands moved him. That was how this worked. Colin’s calloused fingers on him, guiding Diwa where he wanted him with small, certain adjustments that Diwa followed withoutthinking. Lower. There. Slower. Colin didn’t say any of it out loud, but his hands were fluent in their guidance.
Afterwards, Colin slept, curled onto his side with one arm tucked under the pillow and his knees drawn up, compact as a closed fist. Diwa lay on his back beside him, wide awake, and stared at the ceiling while the mattress tried to kill him.
