Chapter Thirty-Six
The studio Lysander had hired was in a converted warehouse off Shoreditch High Street, and it was, by any honest assessment, worse than the one in Diwa’s basement.
The acoustic foam on the walls had gone grey at the corners, one of the headphone jacks crackled unless you held the cable at a specific angle, and the engineer who’d let him in had introduced himself as Baz before disappearing into a back room with a Pot Noodle.
Diwa’s rig would have run circles around all of it, and Diwa emphasised this.
But Diwa’s rig sat three floors beneath the bedroom where his daddy napped fourteen hours a day, and the nursery where Tala slept with her fists up by her ears.
Dane didn’t get to walk into any of that.
So Lysander had paid a stranger four hundred quid for half a day’s studio time, and considered it money well spent.
He’d arrived an hour early to set up. He got two mics up on boom arms, levels checked, and his notebook lay open on the desk with his question order written. He’d recorded thirty seconds of himself reading the room tone and played it back, and his voice had come out steady and tolerable.
Dane arrived twelve minutes late.
“Sander!” He came through the booth door with his arms already opening, bringing a wave of expensive aftershave in with him. “Look at this. Very professional. Very serious.” He took in the room. “You’ve gone all Louis Theroux on me.”
“Sit down, Dane.”
Dane dropped into the chair, hooked one arm over its back, and let his knees fall open to a width that annexed most of the space beneath the desk, exactly as he had for the seven years Lysander had been with him.
Then he leaned into the mic and flicked the pop filter with his fingernail.
It gave a soft thwack. He did it again, tilted the boom arm two inches towards himself, and tapped the mic capsule twice with the pad of his finger, sending a dull thump through Lysander’s headphones.
“Leave the mic alone, please,” Lysander said. “It’s set where it needs to be.”
“Just checking it’s on.”
“It’s on. That’s my job. Yours is to sit there and just talk.”
Dane raised both hands in surrender, grinning, and settled back. “Sitting and talking. My two greatest talents.” He paused. “Well. They’re at least in the top five.”
Lysander let that one sail past without rising to the challenge. He passed a pair of headphones to Dane, who settled them over his ears, adjusting the band so it wouldn’t disturb his hair.
“Say something for me. Use your normal speaking voice. I need to set your level.”
“Something for me,” Dane said, into the mic. “Normal speaking voice.”
Lysander watched the meter, nudged the gain down two notches, and made a note of the setting in the margin of his notebook. “That’s fine. If you hear yourself echoing, tell me. Don’t touch anything, just tell me.”
“You’re very stern like this.” Dane grinned. “I like it.”
Lysander opened his notebook and pressed record.
“So.” He’d rehearsed the opening in the shower, and once out loud in the empty booth. “I want to start at the beginning. Before the channel even got started. Tell me how we met.”
“You know how we met.”
“The listeners don’t.”
Dane laughed. “Right. Okay. So I’m driving out to Barking to see a mate about a business thing, and I’ve got the Range Rover at the time.
The white one. Absolutely obnoxious car.
Twenty-two-inch rims, tinted windows, the lot.
” He shook his head fondly at the memory.
“And I park it on this estate, and by the time I come back out there’s a whole gang of kids around it.
Proper little committee. One of them’s lying on the ground looking at the underside, one’s got his face against the driver’s window with his hands cupped round his eyes. ”
“That was Mikka,” Lysander said. “The window one.”
“And there’s this one kid standing a bit back from the rest. Not touching the car. Just watching it, with his arms crossed, like he’s decided the whole thing is beneath him but he can’t quite make himself walk away.” Dane pointed at him. “That was you.”
“I was eighteen. I wasn’t a kid.”
“You were all elbows. You had this jacket on that was two sizes too big and you were doing your absolute best to look like the Range Rover meant nothing to you, and failing, because your eyes kept going back to it.” He leaned into the mic now, properly, without touching it.
“And I got about ten feet from the car when the wind changed.”
Lysander’s pen stilled on the page. He knew what came next.
“I’d never smelled a male omega before,” Dane said.
“I’d heard about them the way I heard about — I don’t know, albino tigers.
You know they exist somewhere. You never expect one to be standing on a kerb in Barking.
” His voice had dropped and slowed. “The other kids were nothing, just background noise. There was only you, as far as I could see. Gawky, gangly, and so, so beautiful but without even realising it. You smelled like syrup, Sander. Like the ripest fruit on the tree.” He sat back.
“Eighteen years old, and you genuinely didn’t know what a prize you were. ”
Lysander kept his face neutral while his skin crawled. Prize. Dane had been twenty-nine. He’d been looking at a teenager on a housing estate like a car he wanted to buy, and eight years later he was telling the story with a fond half-smile, as though it reflected well on both of them.
“So you came over,” Lysander said, steering them forward. “And you asked me if I was hungry.”
“Did I?” Dane’s brow creased in a performance of trying to remember. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”
“You did.” Lysander didn’t need to perform anything. Every detail of that evening was filed away in his brain. “You asked me if I was hungry, and I said —”
“‘I could eat.’” Dane’s grin widened. “With that little shrug you used to do. Like you were doing me a favour by letting me feed you.”
“You took me to Zuma,” Lysander said.
“Zuma!” Dane slapped the desk. “Forgot about that. Knightsbridge. Christ, that was a good night.”
It had been incomprehensible to someone who lived on pot noodles and Easy Mac.
Lysander had walked into a restaurant where the starters cost more than Colin earned in an entire shift, wearing trainers held together with superglue.
The ma?tre d’ had looked at him with a lifted brow, and then Dane had said something quiet to the man’s ear, and the expression had rearranged itself.
They’d been seated at a corner booth with a candle and a wine list that might as well have been written in Mandarin as far as Lysander was concerned.
Dane ordered for both of them. Champagne first, Lysander’s first glass ever, the bubbles stinging the inside of his nose, then lobster, which arrived with a pair of silver crackers that Lysander had no idea how to use.
Dane had taken the claw from his hands, cracked it open in three clean movements, and slid the white meat onto Lysander’s plate without a word.
“I’d never had champagne before,” Lysander said into the mic. “I’d never had lobster. I’d never been inside a restaurant where they put the napkin on your lap for you. And you knew that.”
“‘Course I knew that.” Dane shrugged. “That was half the fun, wasn’t it? Watching you try everything for the first time. You made this face when you tasted the champagne; your whole nose scrunched up, like a rabbit.”
He also remembered what came after the restaurant: the Range Rover gliding through Barking with the seats heated and the stereo playing something Lysander had pretended to recognise, Dane’s hand resting on his thigh.
Dane had parked in the dark corner of the estate, beneath the broken streetlight where the hedgerow from the neighbouring gardens screened the car from the nearest windows, and kissed him before the engine had finished ticking down.
It was his first kiss with an alpha, and it tasted of champagne and the miso glaze from the black cod. Then Dane had pulled back, taken Lysander’s jaw in one hand, and pushed two fingers past his lips.
“Get them nice and wet for me, babe.”
Lysander had sucked on them because Dane’s voice hadn’t left room for a question, and then those fingers had gone between his legs, slick with nothing but Lysander’s own spit, and pushed inside him.
Two fingers, no preamble, while Dane’s other hand pressed flat against Lysander’s stomach to hold him still.
Lysander had gripped the door handle above his head and come so hard his vision went white, his thighs clamped around Dane’s wrist.
“You drove me home,” Lysander said. “And you fingered me in the front seat of the Range Rover, on the estate, the night I met you.”
Dane’s laugh was warm and nostalgic. “You were gagging for it. I barely touched you and you went off like a firework.”
“I was eighteen, Dane. I’d have gone off if someone had looked at me sternly.”
“Fair point.” Dane tilted back in his chair, arms folded behind his head. “That was a good night, though. You have to admit that.”
Lysander didn’t admit anything. He turned the page in his notebook and moved to the next question, because the point of this recording wasn’t to let Dane curate a highlight reel.
“The first video,” Lysander said. “Tell me how that came about.”
Dane’s posture shifted, his arms coming down from behind his head. “That was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“No, Dane. It wasn’t.”
“I remember it being a mutual decision.”
“Then your memory’s shit,” Lysander said evenly, because this was the moment that mattered, and if he lost his composure Dane would use it to reframe the entire conversation.
“I was on the cusp of my heat. I needed somewhere to ride it out that wasn’t a council flat with walls so thin my dad and my twin brother could hear everything.
You had a flat in Knightsbridge with underfloor heating and a lock on the bedroom door.
I rang you and asked if I could come over. ”
“Right. And I said yes.”