Chapter Eleven
Colin shut off the tap and reached for the tea towel folded over the handle of the oven. He’d had to lie on his side under the sink to get at the p-trap, and his shoulder was yelling at him about it now. He worked the towel between his fingers, getting the wetness out from under his nails.
Diwa was at the kitchen island opposite, watching him with the full attention Colin had got used to over the past month.
The kitchen was finished now. The skirting boards had been painted, and the marble of the island had been sealed and buffed and was catching the late afternoon light.
Through the doorway he could see the hall where the wiring had once hung in a tangle, all closed up now behind smooth plaster.
The tools and offcuts and bits of dowel that had lived in small drifts along the walls for a month were all gone, packed away neatly by Diwa’s newly departed contractors.
It was a truly beautiful house.
Colin folded the tea towel back over the handle of the oven. He kept his face turned to the rail a beat longer than he needed to, as the realisation sank in that Diwa wasn’t going to need him anymore.
He’d been making good money out of Diwa’s home improvements.
Better than good. At forty quid an hour, cash-in-hand, no invoice required, and the lad never once quibbled about the tariff or asked for a discount the way half of Colin’s clients did, sliding their eyes sideways and mentioning that the Polish fellow down the road charged thirty-five.
Diwa paid what Colin quoted, and sometimes added a twenty on top.
That was a decent wedge to lose. Especially with the new prescriptions eating into his monthly income, and the boiler in the flat making that strange gurgling sound again. The one that meant he’d probably need a new ignition board soon.
Colin wiped down the counter that didn’t need wiping. He straightened the washing-up liquid so it sat square with the edge of the sink.
It was the money he was going to miss. Obviously it was the money. The fact that this particular client happened to smell like warm wood and clean cotton was irrelevant to the financial calculation.
Across the island, Diwa shifted his weight onto one elbow and smiled at him, dimples and all, oblivious about where Colin’s mind had gone.
“So,” Diwa said, straightening up on his stool and pulling his mobile out of his back pocket.
“Next week. I’ve been making a list.” He thumbed at the screen, already scrolling, and Colin would have put money on there being a spreadsheet involved.
“The towel rail in the guest en-suite is slightly loose on the left bracket. The garden tap is dripping, which I think is the same job as the washer thing we did upstairs, but I want to make sure it’s not going to end up flooding the patio.
There’s a draught coming from somewhere around the bay window in the front room, and I can’t work out if it’s the frame or the seal.
Oh, and the extractor fan in the downstairs bathroom is making a noise.
Not a bad noise, but a noise. A sort of ticking, like there might be a bird trapped inside the wall. ”
There was another flurry of tapping against his mobile’s screen.
“And I want to put up a picture rail in the study,” Diwa went on.
“I found this reclaimed oak one on a salvage website, and I think it’d look really nice against the paint colour, but it needs to go up level, obviously, and the walls are original plaster, so I’m not sure about the fixings. Whether it’s a masonry bit or a —”
“Diwa.”
Diwa’s thumb stopped moving on the screen.
“Your house is done.” Colin folded the tea towel once more and set it on the counter between them. “It’s bloody beautiful, and you don’t need me to do all that simple shit for you anymore.”
Diwa shook his head. “The picture rail, though. That still needs —”
“You know how to put up a picture rail. We did that last week, and I’ve watched you drill into masonry, hang shelving, and bleed every radiator in this house.
You’ve got a spirit level, a decent drill, and a bag of wall plugs.
” He nodded at the garden through the bay window.
“All sitting in that shed of yours, lined up like they’re in a shop display. ”
“The point is,” Diwa said, and his voice had gone a fraction higher, “that I’ll hang it crooked.
You know I will. It’ll be three millimetres off and I’ll notice it every single time I walk into the room.
It’ll drive me mad, and then I’ll have to call you back anyway, so really this is just me being efficient. ”
“You might hang it crooked, but at least you’d have hung it yourself, mate.”
The kitchen went quiet. Diwa bit down on his bottom lip. His thumb was still resting on the screen of his mobile, on the list he’d made. “I need you here, Colin.”
“No, you don’t,” Colin said.
The silence that followed was long enough for Colin to hear the fridge ticking over in the corner. Diwa’s teeth bit down on his bottom lip, working at the skin there while his thumb pressed a groove into the edge of the countertop. “I want you here,” Diwa said.
The word came out with a force that didn’t match his usual displays of easy charm.
Diwa set his mobile face-down on the marble countertop.
“We should celebrate, Colin. Properly. Look at this place.” He gestured at the kitchen, the painted skirting, and the hallway beyond where the plaster was smooth and the pendant lighting was still glowing away perfectly.
“We put so much work into this house. Let me take you to dinner. Wherever you want. Not sushi, obviously. We’ll dress up, we’ll have a great night, we’ll go somewhere with actual plates and actual cutlery and nobody will serve anything on a roofing tile. ”
Colin stayed very still on his side of the island.
What Diwa was describing was a date. There was no angle from which a man taking another man to dinner, dressed up, to celebrate a shared achievement, was not a date.
Colin had been on precisely one date in his life, in 2006, with a beta called Gary who had asked him out for a coffee and then spent forty minutes talking about his ex-wife’s solicitor.
He’d walked home afterwards and not tried again.
The whole exercise had felt like a con; sitting across from a decent man with a coffee going cold between them, pretending he was someone who could be touched without his nervous system treating it as a threat.
At one point, Gary had reached across the table to brush a crumb off Colin’s sleeve, and Colin’s hand had come up so fast he’d knocked the sugar bowl off the table.
Diwa was still babbling. “I just want to say thank you. For everything. You came in here and you taught me how to do things I should’ve known how to do at fifteen, and you never once made me feel stupid about it.
Well, you did, actually, quite a lot. But in a way that was somehow fine?
And I want to do something for you that isn’t just handing you cash in my hallway, because that’s always felt wrong, and I think you know it’s felt wrong, and —”
“Diwa.”
“I just think we deserve a really good meal together, is all I’m saying. Somewhere with a wine list. I’ll learn about wine. I’m more of an IPA guy, but I’ll learn about wine for you.”
“Fuck that,” Colin said. “The last bottle I had was a sangria from Aldi, mate.”
Diwa’s mouth opened to launch into what would likely be a passionate defence of natural wines, so Colin cut across him before he got there.
“Are you asking me out on a date, Diwa?”
Diwa’s eyes went shifty. Then he squared his shoulders, and forced direct eye contact with Colin across the marble. “Well…yeah,” he said. “Of course I am.”
Colin waited for the rest of his brain to catch up with the flare of hope rising in his chest and shut it down, because surely he’d just misunderstood Diwa, or Diwa was just talking shit, as usual. Jumping in with a response before he’d fully thought about what Colin had just asked him.
It didn’t.
“I kind of thought our nights in were already ‘dates’…I mean, not officially, but it felt like we were getting there?” Diwa’s hand made a small circular gesture, as though he could wind the right words out of the air.
“We cooked together. We fell asleep together on the sofa. You’ve been drooling on me, Colin. That’s verging on couple-y territory.”
“You thought that was dating?”
“I thought that was something.” Diwa’s composure held, just about. “So this is just the version where I take you somewhere nice and we make it all official. That’s all. That’s the only difference. I don’t care where we go. I just want to go there with you.”
Colin shook his head.
“Oh, you don’t want me, Diwa.”
He said it the same way he’d tell someone the bus was cancelled, just laying down the facts of it and letting it sit between them on the marble.
Diwa’s expression fell, going gradually, the way a house settles after you take the scaffolding down. The dimples vanished, then the brightness round his eyes.
“I’m forty,” Colin said. “I’ve got two grown sons who are only a couple of years younger than you.
You could have absolutely anyone you want in this city, mate.
” Colin shook his head, hoping this would dislodge the crazy voice in his head that was telling him that he wanted to take up this alpha’s offer. “Nah. You don’t want me.”
He was just being practical, the way he’d always been. The kindest thing he could do was to offer the lad an out, a gentle rejection. Young men like Diwa often didn’t know what they needed until they were forty themselves and looking back at the mess they’d made at twenty-eight.
Diwa came round the island. He moved without rushing, and stopped in front of Colin close enough that the smell of him came through warm and clean. His hand came up and settled at the back of Colin’s neck, large and steady, fingers curving round the nape.
Colin didn’t look up, but his forehead found Diwa’s chest anyway, resting against the soft grey cotton of his shirt.
“I want you so fucking much, Colin,” Diwa said quietly. His other hand came up to join the first, both of them closing warm around the base of Colin’s neck, and Colin shut his eyes and let himself be held.
Diwa’s lips pressed against the top of his head, soft and close-mouthed, barely there. “I want you,” he said, into Colin’s hair.
Colin’s hands stayed at his sides.
Diwa turned his head and kissed the side of Colin’s temple, where the silver was coming in. “I want you.” Then the other side, his mouth warm and dry against the skin above Colin’s ear.
Colin’s forehead stayed pressed against Diwa’s chest, his breath coming in through his nose in slow, measured pulls that he was using to keep himself from doing something stupid.
Every inhale brought in more of the alpha scent, and every carefully timed exhale kept him from losing control of his own hands, which wanted to take a fistful of Diwa’s shirt and pull him closer.
He tipped his face up.
Diwa was looking down at him with those ridiculous dimples nowhere in sight. His expression was open and serious. He let Colin take his time, and held his gaze.
“I want you, too,” Colin admitted. His words felt clumsy as they escaped him. Then he rose up on his toes and pressed his mouth to Diwa’s in a closed-lipped kiss that was barely long enough to count as anything beyond a peck. He kept his hands at his sides, his fingers curled against his palms.
Diwa didn’t try for any more than that. His fingers tightened at Colin’s nape, drawing him in closer, and he let Colin pull back when he felt the need to.
Diwa’s thumb came to rest against the knob of bone at the top of Colin’s spine and traced a slow circle there, unhurried, as though they had all the time in the world to work on their kissing. “I’m taking that as a yes,” he said.
Colin looked away from him. Through the bay window, the garden was going dark at the edges, the last of the afternoon light catching the top of the fence where he’d replaced the post cap a fortnight ago.
He was still afraid. He had no idea where this was going, or whether his body would let him have Diwa when the time came. He had two grown sons who would need to be told, and a calendar on the back of his kitchen cupboard that no longer meant what it used to.
But it was a yes to Diwa.