Chapter Thirty-Five
The first bars of “Like a Prayer” hit the ballroom speakers, and a hundred and fifty de la Vegas collectively lost their minds.
The roar that went up could have registered on seismographic equipment.
Tito Bong’s fist punched the air so hard his drink left his glass in an amber arc.
Three of the aunties by the dessert table clutched each other.
Kuya Maki, who had been mid-conversation with the cardinal, turned his entire body towards the stage and began clapping on the offbeat.
Colin stood at the centre of all of it with the microphone in both hands, his shoulders square, his chin level, and when the lyrics scrolled across the monitor in front of him, he opened his mouth and sang.
He wasn’t good. Diwa had to admit this to himself, even in this moment.
Colin’s voice was thin and sat about a third of a tone flat on every sustained note, his timing drifted ahead of the beat in the verses before snapping back for the chorus, and his stage presence was that of someone waiting for a bus.
Not a hint of a sway. He held the microphone like a torch he was using to check under a sink, and he sang “Like a Prayer” to a roomful of strangers.
Diwa understood then, after the months of sleeping beside this man, and of having those calloused hands caressing his face in the dark, that he was in love with Colin Huxley from Barking, who was currently murdering Madonna in front of his entire family.
The realisation had been sitting in him for weeks, months probably.
He just hadn’t let himself acknowledge it until now, as he watched his omega come out of hiding on a ballroom stage.
Colin’s eyes tracked him across the room. His grin was still there, lopsided and embarrassed. Diwa grinned back so hard his face ached.
A memory surfaced from months ago, back at Ledbury Road, early enough in things that Colin still stood with his elbows pulled in and set his bag by the door instead of hanging it on its hook.
Diwa had sat on the floor behind the sofa, setting up the Bluetooth connection on Colin’s mobile to hook up with his Sonos system while Colin stood over him with a mug of tea and offered no help whatsoever.
When the connection finally held, Diwa had handed Colin his mobile and told him to pick any song he liked; the inaugural track for the household sound system, a moment of real significance.
Colin had scrolled, pressed play, and the opening synth line of “Like a Prayer” had filled the living room.
Diwa had looked up from the floor, delighted. “The Deadpool versus Wolverine song! I love this one.”
Colin had stared down at him, utterly blank. “The what?”
“Deadpool versus Wolverine. The film. This song’s in the big needle-drop scene. In the slow-motion corridor fight where Deadpool’s covered in —” Diwa had registered Colin’s blank expression. “You haven’t seen it.”
“No.”
“Colin, it came out last year. It was the biggest film of the summer. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in spandex for two hours. How have you not —”
“I don’t watch films with men in spandex, Diwa.”
“It’s not about the spandex, it’s about…Okay, we’re watching it. Tonight. I’m ordering it right now.”
Colin had taken a sip of his tea. “This song was on the radio when I was small,” he’d said, as though the only possible context for a Madonna single was a care home rec-room in the Midlands in the early nineties, and Diwa’s blockbuster needle-drop was an irrelevance he was choosing not to dignify.
They’d watched the film that evening. Colin had sat through the entire thing without commentary, his tea going cold on the armrest, and when the credits rolled, Diwa had turned to him, buzzing, ready for the debrief.
“Well?”
Colin had considered this for a moment. “Hugh Jackman’s fit,” he’d said, and had gone to put the kettle on.
On stage, Colin reached the chorus. His voice cracked on the high note, held on through sheer force of will, and the ballroom surged.
Tito Bong was singing along from the front row, his moustache trembling with conviction.
Lola Joy was clapping from her chair, tiny and fierce in her red dress, her jewelled comb catching the light every time her head moved.
Diwa watched his omega murder the bridge, miss the key change entirely, and recover with a stubbornness that Madonna herself would have respected.
Then the second verse started, and Colin’s grip on the microphone shifted.
His shoulders pulled, his eyes dropping from the crowd to the monitor and staying there.
The grin was still on his face, but it had gone careful.
There was too much awareness behind it now, the room suddenly too large and too full of strangers.
Diwa took the steps to the stage two at a time and pressed his cheek against Colin’s so that the microphone sat between both their mouths. Colin’s head turned towards him.
“All right?” Diwa murmured, under the music.
Colin’s free hand reached for Diwa’s hip and pulled him flush against his side. “Shut up and sing.”
So Diwa sang. He was even worse than Colin, truth be told. But Colin’s shoulder was warm against his chest, and the ballroom had decided that volume was an acceptable substitute for actual vocal talent.
He looked out over his family as he sang.
Lakan was on the dance floor with his daughter held tight against his chest, her small hands locked behind his neck, her feet dangling a foot off the ground as he swayed her through the chorus.
Tito Bong had abandoned his post at the karaoke station and was singing from the front row with both fists raised.
The aunties had formed a swaying line near the dessert table, arms linked.
Kuya Maki stood at the back with his arms folded and his chin lifted, and just watching the stage.
Lola Joy clapped from her chair, keeping time with the music, and his mother, she was on her feet beside the long table. Her chin was tipped back, her mouth wide open, and she was giving Madonna everything she had.
Colin’s hand tightened on Diwa’s hip. The last note cracked out of both of them, triumphant and utterly terrible, while around them the ballroom erupted into cheers.
? ? ?
The ballroom crowd thinned out. Children were peeled off the dance floor and carried out in their parents’ arms, their small faces slack with sleep.
Tito Bong surrendered the karaoke station at half eleven, having performed “My Way” twice, and retired to the bar with his moustache still intact and his dignity debatable.
Colin had stopped making sense around his fifth Tom Collins.
He was still upright, technically, propped against the back of a banquette with his tie loosened and his eyes at half-mast, but his contributions to conversations had narrowed to a single syllable — “Mm” — deployed with decreasing precision.
When Diwa crouched in front of him and said they were going upstairs to their room, Colin nodded once, gripped Diwa’s shoulder, and stood as though the floor were pitching beneath him.
The suite was on the twenty-third floor.
Diwa got Colin into the lift, through the corridor, and past the door, which involved Colin leaning against the wall while Diwa found the key card, and then leaning against Diwa while the door swung open into a room that was larger than Colin’s entire flat in Barking.
Colin didn’t notice. His eyes were already closing as Diwa walked him to the bed, sat him on the edge, and knelt to pull off his shoes.
“I’m not drunk,” Colin said, to a point six inches to the left of Diwa’s face.
“You’re very drunk.” Diwa undid Colin’s shirt buttons and eased the damp linen off his shoulders. Colin’s undershirt was soaked through. Diwa pulled that off too, and Colin sat bare-chested on the edge of an emperor bed, swaying, his skin flushed from his collar to his hairline.
“That was a good party,” Colin said.
“It was.” Diwa tipped him backwards onto the pillows. Colin went without resistance, his body trusting Diwa’s hands the way it always did, and was asleep before Diwa had even finished pulling the sheet across his chest.
Diwa stood over him for a moment. Colin’s breathing had already settled into its deep, even rhythm, his mouth open, one hand curled on the pillow beside his head.
He kissed Colin’s forehead, twisted the cap off a bottle of water and left it on his bedside table.
When he was sure Colin wasn’t in danger of rolling clean off the bed, he switched off the lamp and headed back downstairs.
The ballroom had mostly emptied. The band had packed up, the lechon trays had been cleared, and the floral arrangements drooped in the warmth.
A handful of cousins remained at a table near the bar; Lakan, Pedro, Kuya Len were passing a bottle of something amber-coloured between them.
Diwa pulled up a chair, accepted a glass, and let the talk wash over him.
Lakan was telling a story about their grandfather and a fishing boat that Diwa had heard a dozen times over, but he always managed to pick out a new angle any time he heard a retelling.
A hand slipped through his arm without warning. His mother’s fingers settled into the crook of his elbow, her grip firm, and she pressed her shoulder against his. Diwa looked down at her. She was still in her dinner clothes, and she looked tired in a way she never let herself look in public.
He didn’t pull away.
She tugged him to his feet and steered him out of the ballroom and through a set of glass doors into a mezzanine lounge that overlooked the hotel atrium.
It was empty at this hour, the chairs angled towards floor-to-ceiling windows.
The city lights of Makati stretched out below them in a glittering sprawl.
She sat with Diwa beside her, close enough that their arms touched from shoulder to wrist.
“Diwa.” Her voice was quiet. Her hand came to rest against his forearm. “We’ve had a lot of differences, the two of us. We’ve always butted heads.”
He looked at her hand on his arm. Her fingers were slim, her nails neat. These hands had gotten him through a lot over the years.
“Lakan and Mutya were always straightforward to deal with. They’re smart.
Very smart, like you. But they stay within the box.
They were always straightforward. Always did well in school because they knew how to take a test. They follow the line.
” Her thumb pressed once against his wrist. “You never did. The number of times I was called to your school because you corrected a teacher or argued a point.” She shook her head.
“Every single time, I’d sit in that office thinking, he’s right, but I can’t tell them that. ”
Diwa’s throat closed.
“And I am so glad, Diwa.” Her voice cracked on his name, and she didn’t try to control it.
“So glad that you’re a man who sees what he wants, and goes for it.
Because if you weren’t, I don’t think I’d ever have seen you this happy.
” She took in a deep breath, like she was holding back tears.
“Seeing you on that stage with Colin, singing that terrible song — it made me so happy.”
He put his arm around his mother as she tucked herself against his side. Colin’s voice found him then. You’ve got two billion fucking dollars, Diwa. Who says you can’t do anything?
He’d been carrying the germ of an idea since that night.
But he’d been so focused on giving his omega the best possible version of this trip that he hadn’t let himself sit in the discomfort of that reality.
That he was still a very rich man even though he’d been cut off from what he saw as his source of power.
“Mama.” His voice came out rougher than he’d intended. “My life is good. It’s as close to perfect as I think I can possibly get it. But I need to do something about Orthos. The workers. The fucking awful settlement. I need your help.”
Maria Lucia lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him.
“I wrote what I did,” she said, “because I wanted you to hear it from me before others who cared less about you started asking the hard questions.” Her voice was steady.
“I thought if the message came from your mother, in a form you could sit with and re-read, you’d have time to think about it properly.
On your own terms. But I was too late. The journalists got there first, and by then the essay looked like a pile-on instead of a warning. ”
Diwa nodded. “I think I always knew that.” He couldn’t have said it six months ago, but Colin had cured him of the need to always dress things up.
“But I needed to be angry at someone other than myself while I figured out what to do. And you were right there, Mama. You’d put your name on it.
It was easier to be angry with you than to really think about how I’d built something that hurt people. ”
Maria Lucia’s eyes were bright. She didn’t reach for him or try to soothe his pain, she just let his admission of fault sit there out in the open between them.
“What do you need, anak?”
Diwa turned his palm up on the armrest between them, and his mother’s hand settled into it, her fingers fitting against his the way they’d done when he was still small enough to need to be led across a road.
“I want to pay them directly. Every worker on the Manila and Lagos teams. Not fifty thousand through a gagging clause. They need to get what they’re actually owed.
Retroactive hazard pay, the mental health fund, all of it.
Out of my own equity.” The corner of his mouth lifted.
“Colin told me I don’t need a board seat to do the right thing.
I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself long enough to pick up the phone, and he’s not wrong. ”
“No, he’s not,” Maria Lucia agreed.
“But I don’t know how to structure it all.
I don’t know about the legal implications, the tax implications across four jurisdictions, the mechanisms for reaching workers who’ve already signed NDAs under the board’s settlement.
I don’t know any of that, Mama. What I know is RLHF and how to make a room full of venture capitalists feel clever for giving me their money. ”
“I’ll make some calls,” his mother said. “I know people at ILO Geneva. And there’s a labour rights clinic at UP Law that’s been doing cross-border worker compensation cases for the last decade. We’ll need Ezra, too. He’s still inside Orthos, yes?”
Diwa nodded.
“Good.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll figure it out.”
They talked well into the night, until the hotel lobby below them emptied, Maria Lucia’s pen moving across the back of a drinks menu as she sketched out the architecture of what Diwa’s money could do when it was pointed at the right thing.