Diwa’s laughter ripped out of him. “Good to hear. But what else?”
“I reckon I’d be a good teacher.” Colin turned the thought over as he spoke, testing it for weight. “I was never much for maths or literature or any of that. But the trades, Diwa. I could teach people the trades. How to fix things. How to look after their own homes instead of paying through the nose for someone else to do it.”
Diwa wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You could,” he said. “I mean, I know the difference between the screwdriver heads now because of you and that I need to turn a radiator bleed valve clockwise.”
“Anti-clockwise.” Colin shook his head. “Right off the bat, you’d have failed the course.”
“I’d have failed spectacularly,” Diwa agreed.
Colin was quiet for a moment as he looked out into their expansive view of the sea. “I reckon I’ll look into it,” he said. “When I get back. There’s a college in Barking that does assessor qualifications. City and Guilds. I’d need my teaching cert first, but that’s only a few months, part-time. I could keep working while I do it.”
Diwa’s mouth opened. The words were right there;I’ll fund the whole thing, I know people who run trade foundations, let me make one call. Instead he closed his mouth and let Colin talk through his plans for his future.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Theoutside world came back to them in increments. First it was Diwa’s mobile, buzzing against the nightstand at half five in the morning with a frequency that suggested someone in a distant time zone had run out of patience with him. Then the alpha’s laptop, which appeared on the breakfast table between the papaya and the scrambled eggs. By noon of their second to last day on the island, Diwa had taken four calls in three languages, pacing the length of the deck in his linen shirt with one hand in his hair.
Colin watched him from the lounger. He’d got good at reading Diwa’s calls from the outside, judging how bad things were going by the pitch of his voice, or the speed of his Tagalog. The easy calls made him louder; the hard ones caused his voice to drop down to a murmur.
By the afternoon, Diwa had gone very quiet indeed.
Colin found him on the deck with his laptop open to a spreadsheet dense enough with numbers to give a person amigraine. His shoulders sat high and tight, the way they’d been when Colin first met him.
Colin draped himself over Diwa’s back. His chin rested against the dip of Diwa’s shoulder, his arms looping loosely around his alpha’s chest. Diwa’s hand came up and covered both of Colin’s where they rested against his sternum, fingers threading through without looking away from the screen.
“I’m sorry I’m leaving you on your own,” Diwa said, taking Colin’s hand and bringing it up to his lips.
Colin shook his head against his shoulder. “No. You’re doing what you have to.” He rested his hand over Diwa’s chest, where he could feel the alpha’s heart hammering away too fast for a man sitting still. “Proud of you, Diwa. So proud.”
He pressed his mouth to the hinge of Diwa’s jaw and stayed there. The laptop displayed columns of figures that represented the dismantling of something Diwa had spent his twenties building. Colin didn’t need to understand the specifics, only the toll that it was taking on the man that he loved.
Diwa was twenty-eight years old, and he was being forced to let go of the company that had been his crowning achievement so far. Colin turned Diwa’s face towards him with two fingers under his chin and kissed him, soft and unhurried, his mouth warm against Diwa’s. Diwa’s hand tightened on his.
“It’s not even losing the money that’s hitting me hard, Colin,” Diwa said, after a while. His voice had gone rough at the edges, the polished Californian drawl stripped back. “It’s everything else that I’m going to miss. The way people move towards me when I walk into a room. Being the big man. Everyone treating me like I’m this pioneering genius who’s changing the world.” He squeezed Colin’s hand. “I know that sounds awful.”
“It’s human, Diwa.” Colin settled his chin back against Diwa’s shoulder. “I’m guessing all that is addictive. I mean, I only get that treatment from one person.”
He turned Diwa’s face towards him and kissed the tip of his nose. Diwa’s breath caught.
“And I’m obsessed with it,” Colin said, quietly. “So I can only imagine what it’d be like getting that fromeveryone.”
Diwa’s laugh came out wet. “It’s pretty fucking crazy.”
Colin cuddled close. He could feel the tension in Diwa’s back. “Look at the two of us,” Colin murmured, his lips still close enough to brush against Diwa’s skin when he spoke. “Forty and twenty-eight. Both starting over again.”
Diwa’s hand came up to rest against the back of his neck. His thumb pressed into the tight muscle there, working it loose. “I couldn’t do it with anyone else, Colin. You know that, right?”
“I wouldn’t want you to, Diwa.”
Colin pulled Diwa down onto him until the alpha’s full weight was on him, and they lay chest to chest, Diwa’s hips settling between his thighs. The lounger creaked beneath them both.
He’d always slept light, waking at every creak in the flat, every footstep on the landing, every shift in the dark that might have been a door handle turning. His nervous system had been wired for decades to read weight above him as threat, as something to brace against or get out from under. Diwa’s body on his registered as none of those things. This was the man he’d chosen, covering him.
Diwa braced on his forearms. “Your shoulders—”
“Don’t care.”
“Colin, the sunburn—”
