Chapter Eighteen
Diwa spotted them through the window before he got past the awning.
Colin was sitting at a corner table with his back to the wall, and opposite him were two men.
The younger one — Stephen, it had to be Stephen — was leaning forward on his elbows, talking, and Colin was nodding along, turning a breadstick between his fingers.
The alpha beside Stephen sat very straight and very still, hands folded on the table in front of him.
Diwa looked down at the bottle of Barolo in his hand.
He’d been told, in specific terms, not to bring it, and knew Colin would have words for him.
But there was nothing like very good wine to lubricate a difficult conversation.
Given that he was about to sit down across from a corporate solicitor who’d already decided he didn’t like him, he was going to take every advantage he could get.
He adjusted his grip on the neck of the bottle, pushed the door open, and went in.
The restaurant was warm and small and smelled of garlic butter.
A good sign. Red-and-white checked paper covered the tables.
A candle guttered in a Chianti bottle so thick with old wax it had developed geological strata, and the menus were laminated and slightly sticky when Diwa brushed against them.
This wasn’t a problem for him. He’d grown up eating at Binondo carinderias and Dampa seafood places where you bought your prawns from the wet market next door and carried them dripping in a plastic bag for the kitchen to cook.
Colin’s eyes found him across the room, tracked down to the bottle, and came back up to his face with a flatness that could have stripped paint.
Diwa bent and kissed him on the cheek anyway, quick and warm, his free hand squeezing Colin’s shoulder. “I brought wine,” he said, setting the Barolo on the paper tablecloth.
“I can see that.”
“It’s a thank-you for the invitation. It felt rude to come empty-handed.”
“It’s a forty-quid bottle, Diwa.”
“Sixty, actually.”
Colin’s mouth flattened into a line so thin it nearly disappeared, and Diwa straightened up and turned to face the rest of the table. The prickle hit the back of his neck before his eyes even landed on the son. Stephen Huxley was looking at him the way a barrister looked at an exhibit.
He was Colin in younger form, with the same slight frame and fine-boned face. His jaw was set in a way that didn’t quite qualify as a scowl, but was doing all the preparatory work for one.
“Stephen,” Diwa said, extending his hand. “Really good to meet you.”
Stephen took his hand. His grip was firm, and clearly trying for painful, but his omega grip could only do so much. Diwa flinched obligingly. Easier all round to let the omega know that his dad had landed on a soft alpha.
Beside him, Ryland was studying the bread basket.
Diwa leaned across the table and offered his hand.
Ryland glanced at it, took it for exactly long enough to constitute contact, and released it without looking up.
His fingers went back to the basket, turning a piece of focaccia over and over in his hands.
Diwa sat down, unfolded his napkin, and smiled at the table, bright and ready. The table did not smile back. His brain began cycling through conversational openers.
So, Stephen, what kind of law do you practise? Too stiff. Job-interview energy. He’d sound like an uninvolved uncle at a wedding.
How’s your week been, mate? He’d never said mate in his life. He’d sound like an American doing an impression of a British accent based on a few EastEnders episodes. Or worse, Australian. HR still had the complaints from the Sydney launch video he’d filmed on file.
Colin tells me you’re in law. That’s so cool. He was two years older than Stephen. If he said that’s so cool across this paper tablecloth, every person at the table would hear the gap close to nothing.
Diwa reached for the bread basket. The first piece went down without incident.
The second was harder to justify, but he committed to it anyway, tearing it into quarters and working through them slowly.
Olive oil dripped onto the paper tablecloth.
He mopped it with a third piece. Colin was watching him through narrowed eyes.
The glare convinced him to put his hand down even as he reached for a fourth.
The waiter appeared, pad in hand, and Stephen ordered without consulting the menu. “Carbonara for my dad, please. Penne arrabiata for me, and he’ll have the —” He glanced at Ryland, who said, “Margherita, thank you,” without looking up from the laminated page he’d been studying.
“And for you, sir?”
Diwa scanned the menu. “Could I get the cacio e pepe, please?” He turned to Colin, already mid-pivot, because his mouth was a vehicle that had long since disconnected from whatever part of his brain handled self-preservation.
“Colin, have you tried the cacio e pepe here? It’s basically the same idea as the carbonara but without the egg and guanciale, just pecorino and black pepper.
The technique’s incredible, they emulsify the cheese into the pasta water to get that creamy texture, and I just think it’s worth trying once because the…
” He clocked Stephen’s face, which had gone from neutral to something a lawyer might deploy across a courtroom while waiting for a witness to finish incriminating themselves.
“…the pepper’s really good with it…” Diwa finished, at a lower volume.
“My dad always has the carbonara,” Stephen said.
“Right, no, totally, the carbonara sounds great. I just thought he might want to branch out? Try something new?”
“Why?” Stephen’s chin lifted. “He’s done things the same way for years and years. He knows what he likes. Doesn’t strike me as someone who needs a stranger turning up and improving his choices.”
Stephen took a sip of his Coke and held Diwa’s gaze over the rim.
The hit landed clean. Diwa registered the word stranger as the main attack vector.
He could have pointed out that he wasn’t a stranger to Colin at this stage.
He could have mentioned the shirt thing, for instance.
How Colin had started pulling Diwa’s worn T-shirts off him in the morning on the days he was heading back to Barking.
He took them home to wear for the nights they weren’t together, because the ones in Diwa’s wardrobe weren’t properly scented.
Or, alternatively, the frequency with which they were getting each other off.
He went for trying to sound reasonable instead.
“Sure, but that’s kind of the argument for trying something different, right? If you already know one thing is good, the only direction left to explore is the thing you haven’t tried yet. Growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone.”
The sentence left Diwa’s mouth and he heard it, too late, coming off like a daggy motivational poster quote. Stephen’s expression confirmed as much.
“Growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone,” Stephen repeated. “That’s lovely. How long have you been in this country, Diwa? Five minutes?”
“A few months.”
“A few months. And in those months you’ve formed a strong enough opinion about my dad’s dinner order to suggest he change the one he’s had since before you were born.”
Diwa’s teeth clicked together as he clenched his jaw tight against a snappy reply.
He’d been outflanked by a twenty-six-year-old in a high street shirt, and the worst part was that he couldn’t even be annoyed about it, because the twenty-six-year-old was right.
He’d walked into Colin’s restaurant, sat down at Colin’s family table, and immediately started trying to optimise Colin’s pasta consumption.
“I’ll try some of yours,” Colin said to Diwa. He laid a fleeting touch on Diwa’s arm.
Stephen’s nostrils flared. His foot moved under the table. Ryland’s knee jerked sideways, his water glass wobbling, and he straightened in his chair with sudden attentiveness.
“Diwa,” Ryland said. His voice was measured, unhurried, and directed at the salt cellar.
“I’ve been reading about reinforcement learning from human feedback.
The Financial Times published a piece in January around the working conditions at outsourced data-labelling facilities.
Your company was cited. Could you talk me through that? ”
“No, Ryland,” Colin said. “He can’t.”
Ryland’s blink rate increased. His fingers paused on the focaccia. “Is that because he’s currently subject to litigation or a subpoena relating to his involvement with the company’s operations?”
“No.” Colin’s eyes had closed. When they opened again, they bypassed Ryland entirely and landed on Stephen. “It’s because we’re having a family dinner. A nice family dinner. And it isn’t the time to talk about Diwa’s work.”
Ryland set the focaccia down and aligned it with the edge of his side plate.
“Asking someone about their work is widely considered the cornerstone of socialisation in Western culture. It’s the most commonly deployed conversational topic across first meetings, second meetings, and all subsequent meetings until both parties have exhausted the subject and moved on to property prices.
” He picked the focaccia back up. “I was being polite.”
“You were, love,” Colin said, in a voice that closed the subject as neatly as a latch clicking shut. “Stephen wasn’t. He sent you in to do his dirty work.”
Diwa’s shirt was sticking to the small of his back.
He’d sweated clean through the cotton sometime between the mention of reinforcement learning and subpoena, and he was fairly sure that if he moved too quickly the damp patch would become visible and Stephen would take note of his nervous sweating.
He would take it as a sign of sexual perversion and moral bankruptcy, no doubt.
He kept very still and studied the paper tablecloth, where a ring of condensation from his water glass was bleeding into the red-and-white check.
Thankfully, the food arrived.
The waiter set Colin’s carbonara down first, then the arrabiata, then the margherita, and finally Diwa’s cacio e pepe, which came in a wide shallow bowl with a crack of black pepper across the top and a sheen of pecorino that caught the candlelight.
Diwa had never been so grateful to see pasta in his life.
He picked up his fork, twirled a generous portion, and deposited it onto the side of Colin’s plate. The cacio e pepe sat in a small golden heap next to the carbonara.
Colin speared the offering, brought it to his mouth, and chewed. His eyebrows lifted. He didn’t say anything, which was, by Colin’s standards, a rave review.
Diwa dug into his own bowl, even though he’d filled up on bread twenty minutes ago and was now facing the consequences.
The cacio e pepe was good, properly peppery, the cheese emulsified into a sauce that clung to each strand, and he ate it with commitment, because the alternative was sitting idle while Stephen’s gaze took another pass at him across the table.
“This is as good as anything you’d get in Rome, man.” Diwa pointed at the bowl with his fork, grateful for a conversational lane that didn’t involve his company’s litigation exposure. “Seriously. You ever been? Stephen?”
Stephen wound his fork through the arrabiata.
“Contiki, when I was twenty. It was a coach tour, and there were forty of us on a bus. We had two hours at the Colosseum, then three hours at a bar near Termini where a lad from Coventry was sick into a fountain.” He chewed.
“Ryland took me to Venice last year, though. That was different.”
“Yeah, Venice is incredible. The whole Dorsoduro area —”
“It was nice,” Stephen said, in a tone that did not invite further discussion.
Diwa nodded and ate another forkful, recalibrated, and pressed on.
“You’ve got to live like the locals do, that’s the thing.
The tourist restaurants near the main squares are all traps.
They charge you eighteen euro for a plate of carbonara that tastes like it came out of a microwave.
That’s actually why I keep a flat in Rome, over in Trastevere.
Nothing flashy, just a pied-à-terre, but the neighbourhood’s proper residential.
There’s a great little trattoria on the corner, wine shops where the guy knows me by name and remembers my past buys.
” He twirled his fork through the cacio e pepe.
“We should sort something out, actually. When Lysander’s back in the UK.
The place has three bedrooms, so it’d be one for me and Colin, one for you and Ryland, and Lysander would have his own space.
We could do a long weekend, eat our way through the whole city —”
His words petered out as he realised what he’d just done. He’d just told Colin’s eldest son, whom he’d met forty-five minutes ago, that he planned to share a bedroom with his father. In Rome. On a family holiday he’d unilaterally organised.
Stephen glared at him. “So you’d stay in a room with my dad, then?”
Diwa loaded his fork with the largest possible quantity of cacio e pepe and put it in his mouth, chewing with great and deliberate attention to the texture, because his mouth was now performing the only useful function left available to it.
“Well, yes,” Ryland said. He was cutting his margherita into precise eighths with a knife and fork.
“That would be the logical arrangement. Couples share a room for proximity, convenience, and access for sexual relations. It’s the standard configuration.
” He aligned a slice with the edge of his plate.
“There’s data suggesting couples engage in intercourse thirty-five per cent more frequently on holiday than at home.
Stephen and I exceeded that figure quite significantly ourselves in Venice. ”
Stephen’s breadstick snapped in half, and for the rest of the dinner, he wouldn’t meet Diwa’s eyes.