Chapter Thirty-Two
Colin looked good in the light blue linen shirt.
Diwa had bought it from a place on Chiltern Street that didn’t put prices on anything. The colour caught the blue of his eyes and made his shoulders look broader, and the linen sat well against the weight he’d put on since Diwa had started him on his feeding programme.
Right now, though, the shirt was wasted. Colin’s face had gone the grey-green Diwa associated with turbulence at thirty-eight thousand feet, and his knuckles were white where his fingers had laced through Diwa’s on the leather seat between them.
Diwa leaned forward. “You haven’t drunk water from the tap, have you?”
Colin’s head turned to face him. “What?”
“At the house. The tap water. You didn’t drink any, did you? Because Manila tap water will go through you like lightning.”
“No, Diwa. I haven’t drunk the tap water.”
“Okay, good. Because Stephen specifically texted me about it, and if you get the runs before we sit down to dinner with my parents, that’s going to be a difficult situation for both of us.”
Colin didn’t laugh. His eyes had gone back to the window, where the traffic had thickened to a standstill around them.
Jeepneys in chrome and elaborate paint jobs boxed the Mercedes in on both sides while motorcycles threaded the gaps at speeds that would have earned a prison sentence on the North Circular.
A vendor knocked on the window with a string of sampaguita garlands, and Deng waved him off without slowing his argument with whoever was on the other end of his mobile.
Colin’s grip on Diwa’s hand hadn’t loosened since they’d left Greenhills twenty minutes ago.
The house had been the first shock. Diwa had watched Colin’s face as they’d pulled through the gate, jet-lagged and heat-wrecked, and seen the exact moment the scale of it registered.
Colin had been expecting something like Ledbury Road.
A beautiful house on a nice street. What he’d got was an open-air compound behind high walls with stone pathways through a garden dense with frangipani and bougainvillea, a lap pool glinting under floodlights, and a main house with so many windows that Colin had stood in the entrance hall and turned a slow three-sixty to take it all in.
Colin had set his bag down on the marble floor, looked up at the double-height ceiling with its wooden beams and slow-turning fans, and said, “So this is where you live.”
“Sometimes.” Diwa had put his arms around him from behind, his chin finding Colin’s shoulder. “Do you like it?”
Colin’s hand came up and covered Diwa’s where it rested against his chest. “It’s beautiful, Diwa.”
He’d been swaying on his feet by then, the jet lag and the heat catching up with him all at once, and Diwa had steered him through to the bedroom and got him horizontal before Colin could insist on finding the kettle first.
Now, in spite of all of that care from earlier on in the day, he looked like he was about to be sick.
“Diwa.” Colin’s hand tightened in his. His eyes stayed on the gridlocked traffic, on a jeepney whose side panel bore a painted Jesus surrounded by chrome detailing and a bumper sticker that read God Bless Our Trip. “Your parents.”
“What about them?”
“I shouldn’t care.” Colin’s jaw worked around the words. “I try not to, and it’s worked out fine.” His thumb pressed hard against the ridge of Diwa’s knuckle. “But they’re your parents, Diwa. They’re everything to you. And if they don’t like me, that’s basically game over, isn’t it?”
Colin’s voice was carefully schooled and perfectly level, which was how Diwa knew his hands would be shaking if he let go. Colin’s gaze stayed on the jeepney. “I don’t think I’m the sort your parents envisioned you ending up with.”
The traffic hadn’t moved. Deng had switched from his mobile to the radio, and a song with a heavy brass section was competing with the horns outside. Diwa watched the sweat collect along Colin’s collar, and chose his words with more care than he’d ever given a pitch deck.
“No,” he admitted. “You’re not.”
Colin’s thumb stilled on his knuckle.
“My parents envisioned a nice Filipina girl from a good family. Preferably one whose father played golf with my father, or whose grandmother went to the same church as my grandmother. Someone who’d give them grandchildren on a schedule and show up at Christmas in a terno and know which fork to use at the Polo Club.
” Diwa turned Colin’s hand over in his and pressed his thumb into the centre of his palm.
“That ship sailed a long time ago, Colin.”
“Because you’re gay.”
“Because I’m gay.” Diwa kept his thumb moving on his palm.
“They’re religious. Catholic. My mother cried for three days when I told her, and my father didn’t speak to me for a week, which for him was basically the nuclear reaction.
” He watched a motorcycle squeeze between two jeepneys.
“We worked through it. It took time, and it wasn’t pretty, but they got there.
My mother lit a candle at Baclaran for my soul every Sunday for about a year, and then one Christmas she asked if I was seeing anyone and told me to bring them along for Noche Buena, and that was that. ”
Colin’s jaw loosened, though his eyes stayed on the window.
“When we’re with the wider family, there might be some cousins, distant relatives, who’ll be a bit stiff.
They’ll be ones who go to charismatic prayer groups and share Bible verses on the family group chat.
Tito Bong’s wife, Tita Mylene, will probably pray over you at some point, but she does that to everyone.
” Diwa leaned his shoulder into Colin’s.
“My parents aren’t snobs, Colin. My mother’s spent her whole career writing about labour exploitation.
My father’s family has had money longer than most people can trace their own family tree, and he’s the least impressed by it of anyone I know.
They’re not going to care about you being an odd-jobs man.
Unfortunately, they’ll probably ask you to take a look at something at their place. ”
“What are they going to care about, then?”
Diwa squeezed his omega tight against him.
“They’ll care about the fact that you’re the man that makes their son happy,” Diwa said.
“That you’re a man who raised two boys on his own from the age of fourteen and turned them into the best people you possibly could.
That you managed to teach me how to change a light bulb and bleed a radiator and not be a complete waste of space.
” His thumb rubbed at the callus at the base of Colin’s ring finger.
“Don’t sell yourself short. Not here. Not with them. ”
Colin was quiet for a long time. The traffic crept forward half a car length, and Deng seized a gap with a jerk of the wheel that pressed Colin’s shoulder harder into Diwa’s.
“Right,” Colin said. He didn’t look at Diwa, but his grip shifted, his fingers threading properly through Diwa’s and holding on. “We’ll see.”
The traffic broke without warning. One moment they were gridlocked between jeepneys, Deng’s elbow out the window, the radio brass section competing with a motorcycle horn that had been going for thirty seconds straight.
The next, the Mercedes turned through a stone gateway flanked by a guardhouse, and everything quieted.
The guard waved them through with a nod at Deng, and the city fell away behind them as though someone had drawn a curtain across it.
The road narrowed to a single lane lined with rain trees whose canopy met overhead, filtering the late light into green-gold coins on the tarmac.
The houses behind the walls were set far back, glimpsed through wrought-iron gates and hedges of bougainvillea: low-slung Spanish colonial, modernist glass, the occasional brutalist cube softened by creeping jasmine.
Here there were no jeepneys, no street vendors or blaring horns.
Diwa had grown up on these streets. He’d learned to ride a bike on this tarmac, and had sat on the kerb outside Tito Bong’s house eating halo-halo from a plastic cup while his cousins argued about who was cheating at Super Mario.
This manicured stillness had never registered as anything other than home.
He watched Colin’s face as they turned onto his parents’ road.
The compound sat behind a whitewashed wall topped with iron spikes softened by trailing bougainvillea.
The gates were already open. The driveway curved through a garden teeming with bougainvillea and traveller’s palms, past a fountain that Diwa’s father had commissioned from a sculptor in Pampanga.
The main house was terracotta-roofed, with deep verandas and tall shuttered windows, built to breathe in the heat long before air conditioning became commonplace.
Diwa slid his arm around Colin’s shoulders as Deng pulled up to the portico and cut the engine.
Colin’s body was rigid against his side, the linen shirt dark with sweat across his back, but he didn’t pull away.
Diwa pressed his mouth to Colin’s temple and kept it there for a beat longer than he needed to.
The front door opened before they’d made it up the steps, and his older sister, Mutya, came through it at speed.
She hit Diwa chest-first, her arms locking around his neck, her heels lifting off the tiles as she squeezed hard enough to compress his lungs.
“Diwa!” Her hands came to rest against his face and turned it side to side, inspecting him the way she’d done since he was six.
“You’re so thin! Are you eating properly? ”
“Ate —”
“Don’t ‘ate‘ me, I can see your collarbones.”
She released him, and her gaze rested on Colin.
Diwa watched his sister read the situation: taking in the omega’s rigid shoulders, the face Colin wore around people he found daunting. Mutya’s arms, which had been half-raised for a hug, came down. She stepped forward, laid her hand on Colin’s shoulder, and squeezed once.
“Welcome to the Philippines, Colin,” she said. “We’re so glad you’re here.”
Colin’s shoulder dropped under her hand. “Thank you.”
Behind Mutya, Diwa’s father filled the doorway.
Rudolpho de la Vega was built like a retired rugby player, broad through the chest, his hair silver and combed back from his craggy face.
He came down the steps with his arms already open and caught Diwa in a hug that lifted him half an inch off the ground, one hand clapping the back of his head hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“Anak.” The Tagalog word for my child, delivered into the top of Diwa’s skull. “You took your time.”
“Hi, Papa.”
His father released him, turned to Colin, and did what he always did when he was uncertain of the protocol: he took Colin’s hand between both of his own and held it there, his grip firm and warm, his eyes steady on Colin’s face.
“Welcome,” he said. “Welcome. Come inside, it’s too hot out here. We’ve got the air conditioning going full blast. Mutya’s been cooking all afternoon. Well, the cook’s been cooking and Mutya’s been supervising, which is the same thing, according to her.”
Colin smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
“Rudy, please.” He released Colin’s hand with a final pat and turned back towards the door, already talking about the traffic and whether Deng had taken the shortcut through Ayala Avenue.
Diwa’s mother was in the entrance hall.
Maria Lucia de la Vega stood beside the console table with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, a slim woman in a white blouse and dark trousers whose stillness held a two-hundred-seat lecture hall at full attention. Her eyes tracked Diwa across the threshold.
“Diwa.” She stepped forward, took his face in both hands, and pressed her lips to his cheek. Then her eyes moved to Colin, and she smiled and inclined her head. “You must be Colin. Come in.”