Chapter Thirty-Eight
The outside world came back to them in increments.
First it was Diwa’s mobile, buzzing against the nightstand at half five in the morning with a frequency that suggested someone in a distant time zone had run out of patience with him.
Then the alpha’s laptop, which appeared on the breakfast table between the papaya and the scrambled eggs.
By noon of their second to last day on the island, Diwa had taken four calls in three languages, pacing the length of the deck in his linen shirt with one hand in his hair.
Colin watched him from the lounger. He’d got good at reading Diwa’s calls from the outside, judging how bad things were going by the pitch of his voice, or the speed of his Tagalog. The easy calls made him louder; the hard ones caused his voice to drop down to a murmur.
By the afternoon, Diwa had gone very quiet indeed.
Colin found him on the deck with his laptop open to a spreadsheet dense enough with numbers to give a person a migraine. His shoulders sat high and tight, the way they’d been when Colin first met him.
Colin draped himself over Diwa’s back. His chin rested against the dip of Diwa’s shoulder, his arms looping loosely around his alpha’s chest. Diwa’s hand came up and covered both of Colin’s where they rested against his sternum, fingers threading through without looking away from the screen.
“I’m sorry I’m leaving you on your own,” Diwa said, taking Colin’s hand and bringing it up to his lips.
Colin shook his head against his shoulder. “No. You’re doing what you have to.” He rested his hand over Diwa’s chest, where he could feel the alpha’s heart hammering away too fast for a man sitting still. “Proud of you, Diwa. So proud.”
He pressed his mouth to the hinge of Diwa’s jaw and stayed there. The laptop displayed columns of figures that represented the dismantling of something Diwa had spent his twenties building. Colin didn’t need to understand the specifics, only the toll that it was taking on the man that he loved.
Diwa was twenty-eight years old, and he was being forced to let go of the company that had been his crowning achievement so far. Colin turned Diwa’s face towards him with two fingers under his chin and kissed him, soft and unhurried, his mouth warm against Diwa’s. Diwa’s hand tightened on his.
“It’s not even losing the money that’s hitting me hard, Colin,” Diwa said, after a while.
His voice had gone rough at the edges, the polished Californian drawl stripped back.
“It’s everything else that I’m going to miss.
The way people move towards me when I walk into a room.
Being the big man. Everyone treating me like I’m this pioneering genius who’s changing the world.
” He squeezed Colin’s hand. “I know that sounds awful.”
“It’s human, Diwa.” Colin settled his chin back against Diwa’s shoulder. “I’m guessing all that is addictive. I mean, I only get that treatment from one person.”
He turned Diwa’s face towards him and kissed the tip of his nose. Diwa’s breath caught.
“And I’m obsessed with it,” Colin said, quietly. “So I can only imagine what it’d be like getting that from everyone.”
Diwa’s laugh came out wet. “It’s pretty fucking crazy.”
Colin cuddled close. He could feel the tension in Diwa’s back. “Look at the two of us,” Colin murmured, his lips still close enough to brush against Diwa’s skin when he spoke. “Forty and twenty-eight. Both starting over again.”
Diwa’s hand came up to rest against the back of his neck. His thumb pressed into the tight muscle there, working it loose. “I couldn’t do it with anyone else, Colin. You know that, right?”
“I wouldn’t want you to, Diwa.”
Colin pulled Diwa down onto him until the alpha’s full weight was on him, and they lay chest to chest, Diwa’s hips settling between his thighs. The lounger creaked beneath them both.
He’d always slept light, waking at every creak in the flat, every footstep on the landing, every shift in the dark that might have been a door handle turning.
His nervous system had been wired for decades to read weight above him as threat, as something to brace against or get out from under.
Diwa’s body on his registered as none of those things.
This was the man he’d chosen, covering him.
Diwa braced on his forearms. “Your shoulders—”
“Don’t care.”
“Colin, the sunburn—”
“Diwa.” Colin cupped the back of his neck and pulled him down the last inch between them. “Shut up about the fucking sunburn.”
Diwa shifted between his thighs, one hand sliding under Colin’s lower back to tilt his hips, and even then, even with the scent of Colin’s slick rising thick between them, and Colin’s heel pressing into his arse to hurry him along, he paused.
“I’m just saying, the friction on the burn on the sun lounger is going to—”
“Diwa. Get in me.”
Diwa got in him. Slowly, because that was apparently non-negotiable, one hand still hovering near Colin’s shoulder as though he might need to perform emergency dermatological triage mid-stroke. Colin’s breath left him in a single long exhale as Diwa sank in to the root.
His alpha moved slowly. His hips rolled in deep, even strokes that Colin felt all the way to his spine, each one pressing the air out of him in a way that made his ribs ache with how good it was.
Colin’s legs fell open wider. His heels dug into the backs of Diwa’s thighs, pulling him closer, taking him deeper, until the stretch sat right at the edge of too much and held there.
The sun had gone amber through the palms. It caught Diwa’s face in warm slashes, the sweat at his temples, his jaw tight with the effort of keeping the pace slow when his body wanted to go faster. Colin could feel that effort in the tremor in Diwa’s arms where they braced on either side of him.
“Love you,” Colin said, into the shell of Diwa’s ear, so quiet the words barely displaced air.
Diwa’s hips stuttered. His arms tightened, pulling Colin closer, and when he found his rhythm again it was deeper, his face pressed hard into the crook of Colin’s neck.
Colin said it again — the same two words, the same ear — and felt Diwa’s whole body respond, his spine curving, his grip on Colin’s hip turning fierce.
They came within seconds of each other. Colin first, his back arching off the lounger into the warm evening air, his hands fisted in Diwa’s hair. For a while they just lay there, with no other sound than the surf beating against the beach. Diwa lifted his head to look at Colin.
“I’m ready to go home,” he said. His thumb traced its habitual arc against Colin’s ribs. “But fuck me, I’m going to miss the holiday sex.”
Colin’s eyebrows rose. “We have plenty of good sex at home, Diwa.”
“We do. But you don’t smell like sun and coconuts in Notting Hill.”
Colin considered this. The evening air sat warm on his bare skin, Diwa’s weight still on him. Somewhere beyond the villa, a bird was making a sound he’d never be able to identify and probably wouldn’t hear again. He ran his thumb along the line of Diwa’s jaw.
“That’s because there’s too much to do around the house.”
Diwa’s thumb paused on his ribs. “Oh?”
“The grout in the downstairs loo is already lifting. I told you those contractors used the wrong compound, and you said I was being paranoid, but I’ve had a look, and it’s exactly what I said it’d be.
Shrinkage cracking along the full width of the shower tray.
” Colin shifted beneath him, settling into the topic with more energy than he’d shown all day.
“And the sash window in the spare room sticks when it’s humid.
Needs re-cording, not just a shave. The whole mechanism’s buggered.
I’ll do it myself, but you’re holding the ladder. ”
Diwa’s mouth had begun to curve.
“The kitchen extractor was making that noise again, right before we left. The one you said you couldn’t hear.
Even though I know you can, because you turn the radio up every time I’m frying anything.
And the gate latch I fitted is fine, structurally, but the post has shifted a quarter inch since spring, so the whole thing needs re-hanging before winter.
” Colin ticked the list off against Diwa’s collarbone with his forefinger, one tap per item.
“The skirting in the hallway was never finished properly. I’m not having that.
And someone’s put the wrong bulb in the porch light.
It’s a warm white, Diwa, when the rest of the front is cool. It looks daft.”
Diwa was smiling so wide now that his dimples had dimples. Colin narrowed his eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Diwa propped himself on one elbow, still between Colin’s thighs, still heavy and warm on him. “You’ve really made the townhouse your own, haven’t you, Colin?”
Colin opened his mouth to answer, and then stopped.
Ledbury Road. The yellow door, the breakfast nook, the kitchen island where he’d first drunk a spirulina smoothie and hated it.
The cream sofa he’d been picturing when Diwa said the word home.
He hadn’t thought at all of his flat in Barking with its peeling paint and leaking tap.
It was the house in Notting Hill where his work boots sat on the shoe rack beside Diwa’s trainers, and where his favourite cardigan lived on the back of the armchair.
He’d been talking about Ledbury Road whenever either of them had brought up the subject of ‘home’.
Diwa reached over the side of the lounger to where his shorts had been thrown, and dug his keyring out of the pocket.
He took Colin’s left hand and hung the keys off his ring finger; two Yale keys and a Chubb, threaded on a plain steel ring.
Then he raised the hand between them and turned it in the amber light, admiring it like it was a gigantic diamond solitaire.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
Colin’s lip twitched. He didn’t throw the keys back. He curled his fingers around them and let the metal settle warm into his palm, looking up at the man lying on top of him.
“Right,” he said. “Well. If I’m doing the sash windows, you’re sanding the conservatory door frame.
It’s swollen at the top, and I’m not getting up a stepladder for that when you’ve got the height.
And you’ll have to pull your weight a damn sight more round the house, once I start my course.
I’ll not have the time to be chasing you about a bleed schedule. ”
“You’re definitely doing your course then?” Diwa asked, already grinning.
“Yeah. Rang the college earlier.”
“Okay. Yeah. I’ll do the door frame. I’ll take on the bleed schedule.
” Diwa propped himself up on one elbow, warming to the idea.
“I could be your apprentice. Officially. You’d have to teach me hands-on, really walk me through your technique.
I’m very teachable, Colin. You could do all sorts of things to me with that big caulking gun of yours. ”
“It’s a mastic gun,” Colin said. “And I wouldn’t trust you with it as things stand. You’d have the nozzle blocked inside a week.”
Diwa bent down to capture his mouth in a kiss, and Colin kissed him back with the keys digging into his palm and the last of the sun warm on his burnt shoulders. Behind his closed eyes, the yellow door on Ledbury Road stood waiting, bright and ridiculous against the white stucco.
Colin pulled away from the kiss, but stayed pressed against his alpha. “We’ll start with the porch light, Diwa. I mean it. It needs to be changed the very day we get back, and you’re going to do it.”
END