“You know what, while you’re here, I’ve been meaning to ask someone local. Is there a particular butcher you’d recommend? I’ve tried the one on Westbourne Grove and the lamb was fine, but the chicken had this weird taste…”
“I get my chicken from Lidl.”
“Right. Right, yeah, no, of course.” Diwa nodded. “Lidl. I’ll add it to the list.”
Colin finished the water and stood. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Thanks for the lesson.” Diwa stuck his hand out. “Genuinely. I appreciate it.”
Colin shook his hand. His grip was firm, and the calluses across his palm caught against Diwa’s softer skin. Then he gathered his bag, and Diwa walked him to the door, still talking. As he passed the letterbox, Colin paused, picked at the protective film on it, and peeled it off in one quick movement. The yellow door clicked shut behind him.
Diwa stood in the hallway for a moment, then he walked back to the kitchen.
He stopped beside the island and breathed in deep, drawing the air through his nose the way the breathwork app told him to, four counts in.
There was nothing left of the omega in the air. Only the scent of spirulina, ginger, and the faint citrus of whatever the cleaner had used on the worktops yesterday.
He breathed in again, deeper.
“Fuck,” Diwa said, to the empty kitchen.
He looked at the half-drunk pond-coloured smoothie sitting on the table where Colin had left it, and the glass tumbler beside it with the faint smudge of a thumbprint on the rim. Then hestarted running through the house in his head, room by room, looking for things that could plausibly need fixing.
Chapter Three
Theflat was a furnace. Colin lay on top of the duvet in his pants, the sash window cracked as far as the warped frame would allow, which was about three inches before it stuck. The night air coming through smelled of wet brick and the bins outside, neither of which was doing anything to help his current state. He’d already kicked the duvet to the foot of the bed because the radiator under the window was clanking out heat the council had decided everyone in the building needed whether they wanted it or not.
It was the flat. Ithadto be the flat.
He turned onto his side and the sheet underneath him was damp where he’d been lying. He turned onto the other side. That side of the pillow was hot too. He flipped it. The cool side lasted about ninety seconds before it started radiating the heat of his skin back at him.
No…
His heat wasn’t due for another month. He kept the dates in a little calendar on the back of the kitchen cupboard, and he wasmeticulous about it because the consequences were dire if he slipped up. It was definitely still four weeks away, give or take a day.
It was the flat that was the problem.
He picked up his mobile from the floor by the bed. The screen lit the ceiling a sickly blue, and he squinted against it until his eyes adjusted. There were three messages from Lysander, all with photos. Colin’s chest loosened at the sight of his beautiful boy.
The first was Lysander on a beach somewhere, hair wet, grinning at the camera. The second was a plate of something orange and glistening, with a wedge of lime on the side and what looked like an entire chilli sliced into it. Finally, there was Lysander again, surrounded by a large group of newfound friends holding fluorescent drinks the size of fishbowls.
He thumbed out a reply with the slow care of a man who’d come to texting late in his life.
Gorgeous, love! I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. Don’t get too adventurous with the spicy food, you know how your tummy is.
He sent it and lay back, mobile resting on his chest, and let himself smile at the ceiling.
Lysander’s tummy. God. He was fourteen years old and pregnant in a care home, and nobody had thought to sit Colin down and talk him through what was on the other side of it.
He’d had the boys on a Wednesday morning, and by Friday he’d been handed two damp wriggling things in matching cot blankets and left to work it out. The shit had been the worst of it. Nobody warned you about the shit. Stephen’s had been fine, more or less, the colour of mustard in a sandwich shop. Lysander’s had been green. So runny and so volcanic that Colin often had to change his own clothes as well as the nappy.
His baby’s shite had been the same green as the smoothie from that morning.
Colin huffed a laugh into the dark, and then immediately wished he hadn’t. The laugh dragged the smoothie back into his head, and then Diwa de la Vega was sitting on the bench opposite him in a soft grey T-shirt explaining what spirulina was.
It was the smell of him that drew Colin back to his memory of that day.
He pressed the back of his head harder into the pillow. Most alphas he’d ever stood close to had smelled of one of three things: fags, supermarket aftershave, or whatever sweat had soaked into the lining of their high-vis jacket over a long shift. Diwa had smelled like none of that. Colin didn’t have a word for it other thanalpha.
