Chapter Twelve
Ezra Holberg had flown eleven hours from San Francisco just to tell Diwa he was being an asshole, and to his credit, he’d waited until his second glass of wine to say it.
“You’re being, like, a total asshole,” Ezra said.
He was sitting in the armchair opposite the sofa with his ankle crossed over his knee, holding a glass of the Barolo he’d brought with him from duty free.
He had the pallid complexion of a man who spent his days bathing in the blue light of a computer screen, and his curly hair sat on his head in a state of barely contained revolt.
Ezra had been Diwa’s COO for five years, his college roommate for two before that, and was the person most likely to tell him the truth at any given time. He was exercising that privilege now. Brutally.
“The board meets in nine days. You’ve not returned a single call from Adhya in three weeks.
She’s left you voicemails, Diwa. Plural.
Adhya Dhawan does not leave voicemails. She sends one email, and if you don’t reply, she makes your life very difficult at the next compensation review.
The fact that she has lowered herself to sending you fucking voicemails should be giving you chest pains right now. ”
“I’ve been busy,” Diwa said. Ezra didn’t need to know that he’d deleted those voicemails without listening to them.
“You’ve been doing yoga.”
“Mysore-style. It’s a different discipline from my usual.”
“You’ve been doing Mysore-style yoga—” Ezra set his glass down on the side table, letting the base connect with a deliberate clink.
“—while Adhya circles your name on a whiteboard in Menlo Park like you’re next on her kill list. Kenji has started CC’ing legal on his follow-ups.
Legal, Diwa. That’s not a nudge. That’s him stacking up evidence for a subpoena in the making. ”
Diwa was absolutely listening. Ezra was his best friend in the world, the person who’d been beside him since the pitch deck was a Google Doc with clip art in it.
He was the only human being who’d ever seen Diwa throw up on a VC’s shoes at Demo Day, and he’d still chosen to hitch his career to him the following Monday.
Diwa needed to smooth this the fuck out.
“I hear you,” he said. “I do. And I’m going to call Adhya. I’ll call her tomorrow, first thing.”
“You’ll call her tonight.”
“I can’t call her tonight.”
Ezra’s eyebrows went up. “Why not?”
Because Colin was due at six. They’d had one date since the kiss, at a Thai place on Westbourne Grove.
It wasn’t anything flash, but it had gone well enough that Colin had texted him the next morning to say the green curry was decent.
Diwa had been vibrating at a frequency just below audible ever since then, and tonight was supposed to be the follow-up.
Dinner at the house, something Diwa would order as soon as he got Colin’s opinion on what cuisine he wanted.
He hadn’t accounted for Ezra dropping in unexpectedly.
“I’ve got a thing on tonight,” Diwa said.
Ezra looked at him for a long moment. Then he picked up his wine and settled in further on his chair.
“A thing?” he repeated.
“A thing.”
5:49.
“Look, Ez.” Diwa set his glass down and got to his feet.
He moved towards the hallway with the casual purpose of a man who absolutely did not have a date arriving in eleven minutes.
“You’ve had a long flight. You must be exhausted.
You need to go have a shower, decompress, get some sleep.
Go check into your hotel. I’ll call Adhya first thing tomorrow, I promise. ”
“Hotel?” Ezra didn’t move from the armchair. “Diwa. You’ve got five bedrooms in this house. I’ve seen the realtor photos of this place. I helped you pick the paint colour for the guest suite, which you then ignored because you went with something called Cromarty.”
“Yeah, but the house is new. It’s…you know. It’s still settling.”
“It’s a couple hundred years old!”
“The plaster. The plaster needs to off-gas. There’s VOCs. Volatile organic compounds. You don’t want to be breathing those in after a transatlantic flight. Your immune system’s already compromised from the cabin air.”
“What the fuck, Diwa?”
Ezra’s eyes had gone narrow the way they went when a Series B founder tried to renegotiate terms after the handshake. He set his wine down and fixed his full attention on him, and Diwa felt the back of his neck go hot. There was now absolutely no chance of Ezra leaving.
“You’re kicking me out.”
“I’m not kicking you out. I’m trying to make sure you’re well rested.”
“You are literally standing at the door of your own house trying to get me to leave because of VOCs. VOCs, Diwa. You once ate a breakfast burrito you found under the seat of my car. You don’t care about VOCs.”
5:52.
“Look,” Diwa said, “I just think you’d be more comfortable at a hotel. I’ll book you the Connaught. My treat. They do a breakfast that’ll change your life, Ez, the pastry chef trained at —”
“Who’s coming over?” Ezra picked up his wine glass again.
He took a slow, deliberate sip, watching Diwa over the rim.
“You’ve checked that clock five times in the last six minutes, and you’re sweating through your T-shirt.
” He settled deeper into the armchair, crossing his ankle back over his knee.
“So I’m going to finish this very nice Barolo, and you’re going to tell me about your thing.
Is it that Spanish model again? Because Diwa… you should know better than that.”
5:54.
Diwa looked at the clock and calculated exactly how many minutes he had left before Colin Huxley knocked on the door and his two worlds collided in the worst possible way.
The knock came just as he was about to resort to begging Ezra to leave.
Diwa’s whole body went rigid. Ezra clocked it instantly, and a grin spread across his face.
Their eyes met for a single held moment, and then Ezra was out of the armchair and moving for the hallway with the speed of someone who was not, in fact, all that tired from his eleven-hour first class flight.
“Ez! Don’t!”
Ezra got to the yellow door three strides ahead of him and pulled it open.
Colin stood on the step in his work jacket, bag over one shoulder, his blue eyes flicking from Ezra’s face to Diwa’s over Ezra’s shoulder.
Ezra looked at Colin. He took in the jacket, and the work bag, then he glanced past Colin down the street, as though expecting the rest of a crew. He turned back to Diwa with his eyebrows raised.
“Oh, hey, man. Come on in.” Ezra stepped aside and threw a look at Diwa over his shoulder. “Bit of a weird time for you to have the cleaner in, D.”
The sentence landed in the hallway like a bag of cement dropped from a great height.
Diwa wanted to die, and he wanted to punch Ezra in the mouth hard enough to rearrange the smile he’d been wearing since he’d opened that door.
He wanted to wrap Colin up, to press his face into the top of his head, and make it very, very clear to everyone in the postcode that this man was not the cleaner, was not the odd-jobs man who came round on Thursdays, but the person Diwa had spent the past month falling for so hard that he’d thought of little else.
He went for Colin.
Colin’s shoulder came up as Diwa reached him. The flinch was barely there, a reflex so old it preceded thought, but Diwa caught it. He slowed himself. He brought one arm around Colin’s shoulder and drew him closer.
Colin didn’t pull away. His blue eyes held Diwa’s steadily, and that was enough.
Diwa kissed him. Soft, closed-mouthed, one hand finding the side of Colin’s neck where his pulse sat warm under soft skin.
Colin’s mouth gave against his, and the fingers that had been gripping the strap of his work bag loosened.
Diwa pulled back just far enough to get his hand on Colin’s shoulder, turned him towards the hallway, and said, “Colin, this is someone I vaguely know from work. He’s American, so please excuse him.”
Colin’s spine straightened as he drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much, but he used every inch of it, and he extended his hand towards Ezra. “Nice to meet you.”
The colour had left Ezra’s face so fast that Diwa briefly wondered if he was suffering from a stroke.
His gaze flicked to Diwa’s hand lying possessively on Colin’s shoulder, and the full horror of what he’d just said swept across his features in real time.
To his credit, he recovered in under three seconds, his smile arriving warm and genuine as he took Colin’s hand in both of his and pumped it twice, with great enthusiasm.
“Ezra Holberg. Huge pleasure!”
Diwa got his palm onto the small of Colin’s back and steered him over the threshold before Ezra could make things worse. The yellow door closed behind them, and Diwa kept his hand where it was as they moved down the hallway, fingers spread against the worn cotton of Colin’s jacket.
“How was your day? You look tired. Sit down, sit down.” He was guiding Colin towards the kitchen, talking over his own sentences before they’d finished landing.
“We should order in. Have you eaten? Don’t tell me you’ve eaten, because I haven’t sorted anything yet and I want to feed you.
What do you want? Burgers? Thai? We could do both! ”
“What about fish and chips?”
“Fish and chips,” Diwa repeated. “Yes. Fish and chips! Brilliant. I’ll get us fish and chips.” He had his mobile out before Colin could change his mind, thumbing through Deliveroo. “Cod? Haddock? They’ve got a battered halloumi option if you want to go healthy.”
Colin’s lip curled at the mention of halloumi. “Cod.”
“Cod. Two cod, two chips, mushy peas. Done.” He tapped the order through, and was about to finalise it when Ezra appeared in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame with his hands in his pockets.
“Could I, uh.” Ezra cleared his throat. “Could I get in on that order? I haven’t had fish and chips since that conference in Edinburgh, and I’m hungry.”
“No,” Diwa said. “You’re going to a hotel. You can eat by yourself off a tray.”
“Diwa,” Colin said.
Diwa turned back to the app again. “What fish do you want?”
“Flake.”
Colin shook his head. “You don’t want flake.”
Ezra blinked. “I don’t?”
“It’s shark. They batter it because it’s cheap and falls apart on the fork, and it tastes of nothing.
You haven’t come all the way from the US to eat a fish that tastes of nothing.
” Colin picked up the glass of water Diwa had set down in front of him and took a sip. “Have the haddock. It’s a better fish.”
“Haddock,” Ezra said. “I’ll have the haddock, then, please.”