“Anyway,” Colin said. “Carry on.”
Diwa’s hands had gone very careful on the bulb. Even as they shook, he fitted it into the socket, turning it half a revolution and then waiting before turning it the rest of the way.
“Done?” he said, in a small voice.
“Down you come.”
Diwa came down. He held onto the ladder for a moment after both feet were on the floorboards.
“Now you go and turn the breaker back on,” Colin said.
Diwa went. From the cupboard came the click of the switch, and from the kitchen the fridge came back to life. Diwa returned, eyes trained on the light fixture.
“Flip the switch and we’ll see how you went,” Colin said.
Diwa walked over to the switch and flipped it.
The bulb came on. The hallway filled with the warm low light of a twelve-quid filament doing its twelve-quid thing, and Diwa de la Vega looked up at it and his entire face brightened.
His mouth came open in pure undefended delight, and he let out a bright burst of laughter. His hand came up. “High five,” Diwa demanded. “High five for teamwork, come on!”
Colin watched the delight happen, and he raised his hand and met Diwa’s palm with his own.
“I changed a light bulb,” Diwa said, to nobody in particular, to the bulb, to the universe.
“You did,” Colin said. “Congratulations on taking your first step towards becoming a fully functional adult.”
Chapter Two
Thelight bulb was still on, and Diwa was still looking at it with an entirely unreasonable amount of pride, when his brain was hijacked by the smell of the male omega next to him.
Warm. Green. Like milky sap from a cut stem, or the sweet-sharp tang of green mangoes. Diwa’s hindbrain went very quiet and locked right in on Colin.
Colin was fixing the latch on his bag, unhurried, apparently unbothered. He was sharp-faced, dark-eyed, his brown hair going silver at the temples. And he’d been direct with Diwa in a way almost nobody was. His two-billion-dollar net worth, and the fact that he controlled one of the most impactful companies in AI, had a way of making people very interested in whatever Diwa happened to think.
“Right,” Colin said, without looking up. “I’ll be off, then.”
“Wait!” Diwa was already crossing the hallway and reaching into his back pocket. He had two fifties and a hundred in his wallet, lifted from the cashpoint the week before when he’ddiscovered that Britain operated on a different relationship to cash than Silicon Valley. He held the notes out. “Here. For your trouble.”
“You’ve paid the call-out fee already,” Colin said. “And you did all the work.”
“I climbed up the ladder and twisted a light bulb around a couple of times.”
“Yeah. That’s it. That’s all it takes to change a light bulb.”
“I know that now, thanks to you. Please.” The notes fluttered in Diwa’s outstretched hand. “Honestly, it would make me feel much better about making you come all the way across the city for such a stupid thing.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Colin said, and still didn’t reach out to take the money. He picked up his bag.
Diwa cast about for anything that would keep this man in his house for another ten minutes. It totally wasn’t about the scent of him, Diwa reassured himself. It was just that he had been in London for a week now, and hadn’t spoken to very many people at all. “Can I at least make you that green juice? I made too much spirulina base this morning and it’ll go off. You’d genuinely be doing me a favour.”
Colin’s eyes narrowed. “Would it taste good?”
“No,” Diwa said, with the reflexive honesty that had got him into four separate professional crises over his years as a founder. “But it’ll get you up and running for the rest of the day. It’s incredibly bioavailable.”
“I don’t need a virility potion.”
“It’s not a — no, it’sspirulina, it’s a blue-green algae. It’s got B vitamins, iron, complete protein per gram,” Diwa said. He was already steering them gently down the hallway towards the kitchen, his hand hovering two inches from Colin’s elbow without making contact. “The iron bioavailability specifically is very well-documented, there was a meta-analysis out of Uppsalathat — you know what, the point is, it’ll give you a genuinely good afternoon. You need to try it!”
