“Stephen, I’m fine,” Colin said firmly, to head off the next round of catastrophising from his boy.
Colin pressed the back of his head against the headrest behind him and looked up into the pale March sky. This was his own bloody fault. His omega sons had grown up watching him flinch away from alphas in the supermarket queue. He’d hardwired a vigilance against alphas that they shouldn’t have had to grow into, and now his oldest was on edge just because he’d found Colin’s flat empty.
“Daddy.” Stephen’s voice had gone very small. “Wherewereyou?”
“I had dinner with a friend from work, love. We got talking, and I fell asleep on their sofa.”
The bus pulled in at a stop. The doors hissed open below him, and somebody came up the stairs and went past Colin’s seat to the back.
“A friend,” Stephen repeated.
“That’s right.”
The pause down the line was long, and Colin let it sit there. “Daddy, you have no friends from work.”
The bus turned off Holland Park Avenue and Colin watched the world go past without really seeing any of it. “I have,” Colin said. “I’ve got friends from work.”
“Name one.”
He couldn’t, of course. The line went quiet, and Stephen waited him out. He hadn’t a name to give his son, not a single one, because there had been what happened to him on the stairwell at thirteen, and after that there had only been the boys. He’d raised them, and worked, and gone home, and then worked some more. That was the whole shape of his adult life.
“Were you with an alpha?” Stephen’s voice had gone small.
Colin closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “But nothing happened, love. We had dinner. I fell asleep on the sofa watching a film with him. That was it.”
“Please don’t go on the apps. Please.”
The whole shape of what Stephen had been carrying landed on Colin in one go. His son, awake in the dark, picturing his father swiping through a screen full of strangers because his suppressants weren’t holding and the next heat was going to hurt.
“Stephen, love —”
“I know how the heats hurt now. Dr Gu told us. She told us what’s coming, and I know it’s going to get worse, but please, daddy, please don’t go on the apps. They aren’t safe. You don’t know who you’re meeting. You don’t know what they’ll do once they’ve got you in a room while you’re off your mind and in heat.”
Colin brought his free hand up to his mouth and pressed the back of it against his lips.
“I’m not on the apps,” he reassured his son. “I’m not on them, I promise you that, love. The alpha, he’s just a client. I met him through work, doing odd jobs at his place in Notting Hill. He’s from America, you know how friendly they are, that’s all. He’s not interested in me, Stephen, it’s not anything like that. He’s very young. Twenty-eight, only a bit older than you. He’s very rich, and he could have anyone he wanted in this city. He’s not going to be picking a forty-year-old odd-jobs man off BarkingHigh Road. He’s just lonely. He’s just landed here, and he’s lonely, and I happen to be the one who turned up to change his light bulb.”
“Stop it, daddy.” Stephen’s voice had a hard edge underneath it. “You’re perfect. Any alpha in the world would be lucky to have you, and if this one’s spending time with you, it’s because he knows that, and if he doesn’t know it yet he will. So stop selling yourself short on the bus to me at half eight in the morning.”
Colin looked at the back of the seat in front of him. The vinyl had a tear in it that someone had tried to mend with a square of clear tape, and the tape was peeling at one corner. He stared at it until the prickling behind his eyes went away.
“I want you to have what I’ve got with Ryland. I want that for you more than anything else in this world.”
Colin pressed his thumb against the peeling corner of tape.
“I’ve never needed taking care of, Stephen.”
“It’s not about needing taking care of, daddy. I know you don’tneedit. You raised the two of us on your own, and we turned out mostly fine.” There was the sound of Stephen breathing in hard against the receiver. “It’s about having someone there when you’re crook. Or to make you a cuppa when you’ve been on your feet for ten hours and you can’t face the kitchen. That’s all I want for you. It’s what you deserve.”
The tape lifted and settled under Colin’s thumb. “All right, love.”
“All right.”
“I’ll ring you tonight.”
“Ring me at lunch, daddy.”
Colin reassured his son that he would, then hung up. He sat with the mobile in his lap and watched the plane trees go past, and caught himself thinking about Diwa’s dimples, what Stephen had said, and wondering whether any of it was true.
