Colin’s voice was carefully schooled and perfectly level, which was how Diwa knew his hands would be shaking if he let go. Colin’s gaze stayed on the jeepney. “I don’t think I’m the sort your parents envisioned you ending up with.”
The traffic hadn’t moved. Deng had switched from his mobile to the radio, and a song with a heavy brass section was competing with the horns outside. Diwa watched the sweat collect along Colin’s collar, and chose his words with more care than he’d ever given a pitch deck.
“No,” he admitted. “You’re not.”
Colin’s thumb stilled on his knuckle.
“My parents envisioned a nice Filipina girl from a good family. Preferably one whose father played golf with my father, or whose grandmother went to the same church as my grandmother. Someone who’d give them grandchildren on a schedule and show up at Christmas in a terno and know which fork to use at the Polo Club.” Diwa turned Colin’s hand over in his and pressed his thumb into the centre of his palm. “That ship sailed a long time ago, Colin.”
“Because you’re gay.”
“Because I’m gay.” Diwa kept his thumb moving on his palm. “They’re religious. Catholic. My mother cried for three days when I told her, and my father didn’t speak to me for a week, which for him was basically the nuclear reaction.” He watched a motorcycle squeeze between two jeepneys. “We worked through it. It took time, and it wasn’t pretty, but they got there. My mother lit a candle at Baclaran for my soul every Sunday for about a year, and then one Christmas she asked if I was seeing anyone and told me to bring them along for Noche Buena, and that was that.”
Colin’s jaw loosened, though his eyes stayed on the window.
“When we’re with the wider family, there might be some cousins, distant relatives, who’ll be a bit stiff. They’ll be ones who go to charismatic prayer groups and share Bible verses on the family group chat. Tito Bong’s wife, Tita Mylene, will probably pray over you at some point, but she does that to everyone.” Diwa leaned his shoulder into Colin’s. “My parents aren’t snobs, Colin. My mother’s spent her whole career writing about labour exploitation. My father’s family has had money longer than most people can trace their own family tree, and he’s the least impressed by it of anyone I know. They’re not going to care about you being an odd-jobs man. Unfortunately, they’ll probably ask you to take a look at something at their place.”
“What are they going to care about, then?”
Diwa squeezed his omega tight against him. “They’ll care about the fact that you’re the man that makes their son happy,” Diwa said. “That you’re a man who raised two boys on his own from the age of fourteen and turned them into the best people you possibly could. That you managed to teach me how to change a light bulb and bleed a radiator and not be a complete waste of space.” His thumb rubbed at the callus at the base ofColin’s ring finger. “Don’t sell yourself short. Not here. Not with them.”
Colin was quiet for a long time. The traffic crept forward half a car length, and Deng seized a gap with a jerk of the wheel that pressed Colin’s shoulder harder into Diwa’s.
“Right,” Colin said. He didn’t look at Diwa, but his grip shifted, his fingers threading properly through Diwa’s and holding on. “We’ll see.”
The traffic broke without warning. One moment they were gridlocked between jeepneys, Deng’s elbow out the window, the radio brass section competing with a motorcycle horn that had been going for thirty seconds straight. The next, the Mercedes turned through a stone gateway flanked by a guardhouse, and everything quieted.
The guard waved them through with a nod at Deng, and the city fell away behind them as though someone had drawn a curtain across it. The road narrowed to a single lane lined with rain trees whose canopy met overhead, filtering the late light into green-gold coins on the tarmac. The houses behind the walls were set far back, glimpsed through wrought-iron gates and hedges of bougainvillea: low-slung Spanish colonial, modernist glass, the occasional brutalist cube softened by creeping jasmine. Here there were no jeepneys, no street vendors or blaring horns.
Diwa had grown up on these streets. He’d learned to ride a bike on this tarmac, and had sat on the kerb outside Tito Bong’s house eating halo-halo from a plastic cup while his cousins argued about who was cheating at Super Mario. This manicured stillness had never registered as anything other than home.
He watched Colin’s face as they turned onto his parents’ road. The compound sat behind a whitewashed wall topped with iron spikes softened by trailing bougainvillea. The gates were already open. The driveway curved through a garden teemingwith bougainvillea and traveller’s palms, past a fountain that Diwa’s father had commissioned from a sculptor in Pampanga. The main house was terracotta-roofed, with deep verandas and tall shuttered windows, built to breathe in the heat long before air conditioning became commonplace.
Diwa slid his arm around Colin’s shoulders as Deng pulled up to the portico and cut the engine. Colin’s body was rigid against his side, the linen shirt dark with sweat across his back, but he didn’t pull away. Diwa pressed his mouth to Colin’s temple and kept it there for a beat longer than he needed to.
The front door opened before they’d made it up the steps, and his older sister, Mutya, came through it at speed.
She hit Diwa chest-first, her arms locking around his neck, her heels lifting off the tiles as she squeezed hard enough to compress his lungs. “Diwa!” Her hands came to rest against his face and turned it side to side, inspecting him the way she’d done since he was six. “You’re so thin! Are you eating properly?”
“Ate—”
“Don’t ‘ate‘ me, I can see your collarbones.”
She released him, and her gaze rested on Colin.
Diwa watched his sister read the situation: taking in the omega’s rigid shoulders, the face Colin wore around people he found daunting. Mutya’s arms, which had been half-raised for a hug, came down. She stepped forward, laid her hand on Colin’s shoulder, and squeezed once.
“Welcome to the Philippines, Colin,” she said. “We’re so glad you’re here.”
Colin’s shoulder dropped under her hand. “Thank you.”
Behind Mutya, Diwa’s father filled the doorway.
Rudolpho de la Vega was built like a retired rugby player, broad through the chest, his hair silver and combed back from his craggy face. He came down the steps with his arms already open and caught Diwa in a hug that lifted him half an inch off theground, one hand clapping the back of his head hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“Anak.” The Tagalog word for my child, delivered into the top of Diwa’s skull. “You took your time.”
“Hi, Papa.”
