He’d never been further from home. The noise pressed in from every direction. Tagalog he couldn’t follow layered over the sound of the band, the laughter, and Tito Bong’s detailed rundown of his karaoke set list. Somewhere behind him a child shrieked, and a tray of something crashed to the ground. Hisalpha was fifty feet away on the other side of a room full of strangers whose names he was still learning.
Colin took a sip of his drink and let Tito Bong talk. He had never felt more safely ensconced in noise.
Three Tom Collinses in, and Colin became fairly confident that he’d cracked Tagalog.
Not fluently, but the words had stopped being a wall of sound and started arranging themselves into shapes he could nearly follow, the way a radio station comes in clearer the longer you drive towards the source of the signal. Pinky was telling him something about her daughter’s school, or possibly her daughter’s boyfriend, or possibly her daughter’s boyfriend’s school, and Colin was nodding at what he was certain were the right moments, because Pinky kept patting his arm and refilling his glass from a pitcher that seemed to replenish itself endlessly.
He’d eaten his way through two plates of lumpia, a bowl of pancit that Goldy had pressed on him with the words “you’re too thin”, which, given that Diwa had spent six months fattening him up, was either a difference in cultural baselines or a challenge to his alpha’s authority, and something purple and coconutty that he hadn’t caught the name of but intended to have again. His shirt was damp at the collar. The band had moved on from Whitney Houston to something with a faster tempo that was making the dance floor dangerous.
A hand closed around his elbow. One of the cousins was talking at him in rapid Taglish, pulling him sideways through the crowd with the determination of a border collie herding a stray sheep, and Colin went with it because his legs were doing what they were told and the Tom Collins had madeeverythingseem like a reasonable idea.
The stage was closer than he’d realised. Tito Bong stood at its centre with a microphone in one hand and his laminated rota in the other, his moustache gleaming under the lights. He wasconducting the karaoke changeover with the authority of a man born to the task.
Maria Lucia appeared at Colin’s other elbow. Her hand settled lightly on his arm, steering him back the way he’d come. “Colin, you don’t have to. You’ve had a long evening, and the flight, your throat must be —”
“I’m fine.”
Diwa materialised from somewhere in the crowd, his hand finding Colin’s shoulder, his body angling between Colin and the stage as though shielding him from incoming fire. “You don’t have to do this. Nobody’s going to make you do karaoke, Colin. I’ll handle it.”
Colin looked at his alpha, who was clearly already composing a diplomatic extraction speech in his head, and then at the stage, where Tito Bong was beckoning with the microphone, game-show-host style.
“I’ll have a go,” Colin said. “Why not.”
Colin took the steps up to the stage before he could think himself out of it, his legs still cooperating, the moment still feeling right. Tito Bong pressed the song book into his hands; a battered binder, thick as a phone book. Its pages were sticky with fingerprints and spilled San Miguel beer. Diwa was beside him, one hand on the small of his back, flipping pages and pointing out the number pad on the MagicSing microphone where Colin needed to punch in the four-digit code for the song he wanted.
Colin found his song. He keyed in the numbers with his thumb and handed the book back to Tito Bong.
The opening bars came through the speakers. Colin’s mouth pulled sideways into a grin he couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried, and he caught Diwa’s eye across the stage. Diwa was beaming at him as Colin wrapped both hands around the microphone and waited for his cue.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Thefirst bars of “Like a Prayer” hit the ballroom speakers, and a hundred and fifty de la Vegas collectively lost their minds.
The roar that went up could have registered on seismographic equipment. Tito Bong’s fist punched the air so hard his drink left his glass in an amber arc. Three of the aunties by the dessert table clutched each other. Kuya Maki, who had been mid-conversation with the cardinal, turned his entire body towards the stage and began clapping on the offbeat.
Colin stood at the centre of all of it with the microphone in both hands, his shoulders square, his chin level, and when the lyrics scrolled across the monitor in front of him, he opened his mouth and sang.
He wasn’t good. Diwa had to admit this to himself, even in this moment. Colin’s voice was thin and sat about a third of a tone flat on every sustained note, his timing drifted ahead of the beat in the verses before snapping back for the chorus, and his stage presence was that of someone waiting for a bus. Not a hintof a sway. He held the microphone like a torch he was using to check under a sink, and he sang “Like a Prayer” to a roomful of strangers.
Diwa understood then, after the months of sleeping beside this man, and of having those calloused hands caressing his face in the dark, that he was in love with Colin Huxley from Barking, who was currently murdering Madonna in front of his entire family. The realisation had been sitting in him for weeks, months probably. He just hadn’t let himself acknowledge it until now, as he watched his omega come out of hiding on a ballroom stage.
Colin’s eyes tracked him across the room. His grin was still there, lopsided and embarrassed. Diwa grinned back so hard his face ached.
A memory surfaced from months ago, back at Ledbury Road, early enough in things that Colin still stood with his elbows pulled in and set his bag by the door instead of hanging it on its hook. Diwa had sat on the floor behind the sofa, setting up the Bluetooth connection on Colin’s mobile to hook up with his Sonos system while Colin stood over him with a mug of tea and offered no help whatsoever. When the connection finally held, Diwa had handed Colin his mobile and told him to pick any song he liked; the inaugural track for the household sound system, a moment of real significance.
Colin had scrolled, pressed play, and the opening synth line of “Like a Prayer” had filled the living room.
Diwa had looked up from the floor, delighted. “The Deadpool versus Wolverine song! I love this one.”
Colin had stared down at him, utterly blank. “The what?”
“Deadpool versus Wolverine. The film. This song’s in the big needle-drop scene. In the slow-motion corridor fight where Deadpool’s covered in —” Diwa had registered Colin’s blank expression. “You haven’t seen it.”
“No.”
“Colin, it came out last year. It was the biggest film of the summer. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in spandex for two hours. How have you not —”
“I don’t watch films with men in spandex, Diwa.”
