Chapter Seven
There was a particular pleasure, Diwa decided, in walking down a London street with Colin Huxley beside him.
He’d dialled his stride down to something Colin could keep up with comfortably, hands in his jacket pockets, and was paying very close attention to the fact that two separate alphas had done that glancing back over their shoulder thing as they passed and clocked the male omega.
The thing was that historically, he had a type, ingrained in him since Stanford.
His type was, broadly, other versions of himself: people who’d done a TED talk before they hit thirty, and had strong opinions about ergonomic keyboards and the future of human flourishing.
He’d slept with quite a number of those people, and had mostly enjoyed it.
But now that he was removed from his usual setting, he could admit that he’d been bored by ‘his type’ for quite a while now, and that he wanted to cast the net wider.
Right onto Colin.
Being on the receiving end of Colin’s clear-eyed bluntness was refreshing.
“Here we are,” Diwa said, holding the café door open for the omega.
Colin stepped through, and Diwa watched his face pinch inwards.
His eyes tracked over the space as one corner of his mouth lifted in something not quite a sneer, but getting there.
He clocked the bar, where two baristas were at work, taking in their leather aprons, top-knots, and chunky-framed glasses in ferocious teal and ferocious orange respectively.
“Brunswick three-oh-five-eight,” Colin read, off the chalkboard. “What’s that, then?”
“It’s a suburb in Melbourne. You ever been? Genuinely, the best coffee I’ve ever had is from a place there called El Mirage. They roast their beans on-site.”
“Nah. Never been out of the UK. Been busy with my two boys.”
“Oh yeah?” Diwa said, holding the door so it didn’t swing back into Colin. “How old are they?”
Kids weren’t a deal-breaker for Diwa. He’d been out with women who had kids before, and it had mostly been fun.
He had a big family himself, and so enjoyed the chaos of children banging around a kitchen while he sat at the island and let himself be cross-examined by a seven-year-old about whether sharks could yawn.
Colin was around forty. Of course he had history. There would be an ex somewhere, or maybe just an arrangement that hadn’t worked out, and there would be a couple of kids Diwa would eventually meet over a careful lunch where everyone pretended not to be assessing each other.
He was ready for “twelve and fourteen.” He was even prepared for “seventeen, my eldest’s just about to finish sixth form.”
Colin was watching his face as he answered. “They just turned twenty-six. They’re identical twins.”
Diwa kept his face very, very neutral. He was good at that, having had to maintain perfect neutrality across negotiating tables while his lawyer kicked him under the desk anytime he got close to making an inopportune comment.
He deployed this skill of his now and felt the muscles around his mouth go to their carefully trained resting position.
“Oh, lovely,” he heard himself say, and was relieved when it came out at the right pitch. “Twins must’ve been a handful.”
“They were.”
“Bet they’re a handful now, too.”
“Different sort of handful.”
Diwa nodded and gestured Colin further in through the café ahead of him. He was doing the maths in his head.
Colin had been about fourteen when he’d had the twins.
Diwa, at fourteen, had been recovering from surgery on his ankle after racing his bike down a road inside the Forbes Park subdivision and finding out, in real time, that fourteen-year-olds didn’t have the body control they thought they did.
He’d had pins put in, and he remembered being mostly cross about missing a paintballing weekend in Santa Rosa with his cousins.
The hostess was already coming towards them with menus, top-knot bobbing, and Diwa fitted his most charming smile onto his face and said, “Two, please, somewhere quiet if you’ve got a spot.” They were settled into a corner table tucked in between the impressive foliage of two giant palms.
“This one’s good,” Diwa said, pointing to a menu balanced between them. “The corn fritter. It comes with — actually, I’m not going to tell you what it comes with. You’ll have to be surprised.”
“I don’t like surprises,” Colin said.
Diwa grinned. “All right. It’s a corn fritter with a smear of crème fra?che on top, and then they dust dried avocado powder over the whole thing. It’s incredible. The avocado goes sort of bitter and earthy when they dehydrate it, and it cuts through the —”
“Well, I’m not having that, then.”
The waitress arrived, her pen poised over a notepad, and Colin ordered the full English without consulting the menu a second time, or even pretending to politely listen to Diwa’s recommendation.
“And for you, sir?”
“Salmon miso poke bowl, please. With extra edamame, swap the jasmine rice for brown if you can do that. And a flat white.”
“Tea for me, please, love. Builders’.”
The waitress went off, and Diwa folded his menu and set it aside.
“All right,” he said. “So. Where do you live, Colin?”
“Barking.”
“Right. Right, that’s east, isn’t it?”
“Mm.”
Diwa waited for the rest. Some sort of elaboration about what it’s like to live in Barking.
Diwa had never been, but Colin volunteered nothing else.
He was used to dealing with Bay Area founders who’d talk for forty-five minutes given a single word of encouragement, and Colin Huxley had just managed to make that single word feel like a closing statement, and a story in and of itself.
“And what do you do for fun?”
“Stay in, mostly.”
“Yeah?”
“My flat’s quiet, now that my boys’ve moved out. I like it quiet.”
Diwa nodded as though this were a perfectly normal amount of information for an adult human being to volunteer about themselves over a meal.
This was the first time in years he’d sat across a table from somebody who wasn’t actively merchandising himself.
Everybody he’d dated since 2019 had answered the what do you do for fun question with a full on CV.
They climbed mountains. They ran ultras.
They had a sourdough starter named after a dead philosopher they admired.
They were doing the John Muir Trail in August, they were learning Mandarin, they had just got back from a ten-day silent retreat in Big Sur and they were, you know, processing.
The unstated rule was that the answer to ‘what do you do for fun?’ was meant to demonstrate that you were a person with a project centred around self-improvement.
Colin just liked to keep it quiet.
“What about you?” Colin asked. “What’ve you been up to since you got here?”
Diwa shrugged. He had been up to, in approximate order: sleeping in until nine, sitting in front of his light therapy box, going to Mysore yoga, drinking smoothies, sitting on the floor of his half-finished living room reading the same paragraph of a book about Stoicism for forty minutes, ordering Deliveroo, and doing his journaling.
By any candid accounting, he’d been wallowing. His company board had pushed him sideways, and he had relocated to a country where it rained six days out of seven specifically so he could do his wallowing in an environment more conducive to it than California’s aggressive sunniness.
He was not going to tell Colin Huxley any of that.
“Working on a few side projects, mainly,” he said.
“I’m building out the home automation for the Ledbury Road place.
It’s actually a pretty interesting problem.
The existing wiring’s all over the place because the house is a hundred and twenty years old, so I’ve had the contractors run a parallel low-voltage system through the loft for sensors.
Everything talks to a local hub instead of going through the cloud, because, you know, latency.
Plus I don’t really love the idea of knowing what time I get out of bed.
I sat next to Jeff at a dinner once, Colin, and I’d sooner hand my house keys to someone I’d just met at Paddington Station.
Anyway…my home set up’ll control the lighting, heating, blinds, the lot.
I want to be able to walk in the front door at six o’clock in winter and have the place already warm. ”
“Mate. You can do all that on your computer, but you couldn’t manage a light bulb?”
Diwa felt the heat rise up the back of his neck. “My skills are highly specialised.”
“So you’re a computer guy, then?”
“Yes,” Diwa said, which was a massive oversimplification.
The food came. Colin’s plate landed with the heft of a small paving slab.
Piled onto his sensible plate were two sausages, two rashers, a fried slice, mushrooms, beans, a tomato halved and grilled, a black pudding, and an egg.
The corner of Colin’s mouth lifted in an unambiguous smile.
He picked up his cutlery without ceremony and started in.
Diwa’s bowl arrived two seconds later. The brown rice sat under a fan of pink salmon sashimi, glossy with miso glaze, alongside edamame, pickled ginger, slivers of cucumber, and a small constellation of black sesame seeds. The lip-curl did its thing on the other side of the table.
“That’s your lunch, is it?”
“This is my lunch.”
“Cold and uncooked.”
“The salmon’s sashimi-grade, it’s beautiful.”
“Mm. Could do with some hotting up in the microwave.”
Diwa picked up a piece of salmon between his chopsticks and held it out across the table, charm-armoured, as he said, “Try it. Just one.”
Colin’s knife and fork stopped moving. He didn’t look up at the chopsticks, or at Diwa, but set a hand over his plate, fingers slightly spread, in a gesture that was so definitive that Diwa stopped immediately.
“No raw fish on my plate, mate.”
Diwa retracted the chopsticks. “Right. Yeah. No raw fish.”