Chapter Six
The yellow door opened before Colin had got his hand off the knocker, which suggested Diwa had been hovering in the hallway waiting for him.
“You came back.”
“I said I would.”
“I know, but I gave you an out in the texts and you didn’t take it, so I just wanted to…” Diwa stepped back to let him in, scanning his face for damage. He started to reach out towards Colin, but stopped himself when Colin visibly tensed. “Are you all right? You said you’d been sick.”
“I’m fine now.”
“You still look a bit peaky.”
“I’m forty, mate. I always look a bit peaky.”
That got a startled laugh out of Diwa, and Colin let himself past the alpha and into the hall.
The brass pendant was still glowing. He set his bag down on the floorboards and unzipped it, taking stock of his immediate surroundings.
The skirting had been fitted since his last visit, mitred neatly at the corners, and whoever had done the plastering knew what they were about; there was no rippling, no patches of filler where they’d bodged the finish.
Diwa was paying through the nose, no doubt, but at least he wasn’t being fleeced.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll get to the garden gate first, while it’s still not raining. Then the radiator. Then the tap. Lead the way.”
The garden gate was at the end of a narrow side passage between Diwa’s house and the next, and the latch was, as he’d noted, hanging off.
Colin crouched in front of it and ran his thumb along the wood where the screws had pulled out.
Diwa crouched beside him, close enough that Colin caught the warm, clean smell of him through the cooler air of the passage.
He kept his eyes on the gate.
“Wood’s gone soft round the holes,” Colin said. “If I just put the same screws back in, they’ll work loose again in a fortnight. So I’ll drill out the old holes, plug them with dowel and glue, and let it set. Then I’ll drill fresh holes into the new wood, and the screws bite proper.”
Colin reached for his bag, expecting Diwa’s retreat back into his house. People generally drifted off at this point. They had emails to answer and lives to be getting back to that didn’t involve watching a man drill holes into a gatepost.
Diwa stayed where he was, crouched a foot away, watching Colin’s hands with the focus of a Labrador who had been told to sit and was now waiting to be told what came next.
“Hold the latch flush against the post for me a sec.”
Diwa held the latch flush against the post. Colin marked the pencil through the screw holes onto the wood, took his cordless drill out of the bag, and walked Diwa through the size of the bit and why he’d chosen it.
“Too small a bit and the dowel won’t sit. Too big and you’ve made the problem worse. You’re matching the dowel, not the screw.”
“How do you know which dowel to pick?”
“Eyeball it. After a while you just know. For now, I know.”
He drilled. Diwa held the latch where it was supposed to go and watched his hands as Colin talked.
He talked about the difference between hardwood and softwood, and about why outside fittings rotted at the screw points first. He went on about the brand of wood glue he used and why the cheap stuff was a false economy.
Colin kept the patter going because the alternative was thinking about how his lower back was still grumbling at him from the heat, or about how Diwa de la Vega had got down on his haunches in the dirt of his own side passage in jeans that probably cost hundreds of quid, holding the broken latch where Colin had told him to hold it.
And if he stopped talking, he might end up hyper-focusing on how close the alpha was to him.
The radiator was upstairs in the back bedroom, cold at the bottom, hot at the top.
Colin showed him the bleed key, and showed him where the valve was.
He had Diwa hold an old pillowcase under the valve while Colin turned the key a quarter turn and let the trapped air out in a thin steady hiss.
A dribble of brown water followed it, and the pillowcase soaked it up.
“Why’s it brown?”
“Sludge. It’s iron oxide off the inside of the pipes. The system wants flushing eventually, but not today. Today we just want the air out.”
“How d’you know when it’s done?”
“When it stops hissing and starts running clean.”
They waited a moment until the hiss shifted, and the water ran clearer.
Colin closed the valve, and the radiator started warming at the bottom inside a minute.
Diwa put his palm flat against it and made a small, pleased sound.
Diwa’s shoulder pressed against his as they both leaned in to watch the panel.
Colin stood up too quickly and had to wait a beat for the room to stop tilting.
Diwa’s hand closed round his elbow. “Whoa, hey —”
Colin pulled his arm back hard enough that Diwa’s fingers slid off, and stepped sideways out of reach before he’d thought about it.
Diwa’s hand stayed where it had been, hovering between them. Then it dropped against his side.
“Sorry,” Diwa said. “Sorry, you went a bit grey, I just —”
“Tap next.”
The leaky tap was in the upstairs bathroom, and Colin sat himself down on the edge of the bath rather than crouching again. Diwa sat down on the closed loo lid opposite, knees nearly touching Colin’s. The drip was on the cold side, exactly as briefed.
“You’re doing this one,” Colin said.
“I’m what?”
“You’re doing it. I’ll talk you through. It’s a washer. Fifteen minutes’ job.”
“Colin —”
“Put the towel under the tap. Turn the water off at the isolator under the sink. Both of those are jobs you can do without me telling you twice.”
Diwa got down on his back on the bathroom tiles to find the isolator under the sink, and Colin watched him fumble with it for a moment before guiding him through which way to turn the little screwdriver slot.
The tap went silent above them. Diwa came back out from under the sink with a smudge of dust across one cheekbone and his hair sticking up at the back, and Colin had to look very hard at the spanner in his own hand to distract himself.
“Right,” he said. “Now plug the plughole.”
“Why?”
“Because the bits you’re about to take off are small, and they will, on the laws of physics, fall down the plughole if you don’t. Plug it.”
Diwa plugged it with the rubber stopper on the chain.
Colin handed him the spanner and walked him through unscrewing the chrome cover, then the brass nut underneath, and then lifting out the cartridge.
Each step came in the same flat, unhurried voice, and each time Diwa’s hands moved a little slower than they needed to, checking back with Colin’s face before he committed to doing anything.
The old washer was hard and split across the middle.
Colin held it up in the bathroom light. Diwa leaned in to look, his shoulder brushing Colin’s, and Colin breathed in through his teeth and put the new washer in Diwa’s palm.
The man had no concept of personal space.
Colin had worked in bathrooms smaller than this one and never once had trouble concentrating on the job.
“That goes in where the old one came out. Same way up. Then everything goes back the way it came off, in reverse order. Don’t crank the nut. Hand-tight plus a quarter turn on the spanner.”
Diwa worked. The cartridge dropped back in, the brass nut went on, and the chrome cover screwed down. He went under the sink for the isolator without prompting this time, and the tap above their heads gave a small gurgle as the water came back up the pipe.
“Turn it on.”
Diwa turned it on, let the water run for a moment, then turned it off. They both watched the spout. Four seconds passed. Eight. Twelve, and there was still no drip.
Diwa looked at Colin, with the same delight written clear on his expression that he’d shown with the light bulb.
“High five?” Diwa said, hopefully, holding his hand up.
Colin huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh, raised his hand, and met Diwa’s palm with his own.
Diwa stood up first, all six foot of him unfolding, and Colin registered, a half-second too late, that the bathroom doorway was now behind Diwa.
It was a small bathroom. Diwa wasn’t blocking the way out on purpose, he was busy admiring the tap.
The bath was at Colin’s back, the sink was at his knee, and the only way out was past this densely-built alpha.
Colin’s heart kicked up. For half a second the wall behind him was cold concrete, and he was thirteen again, in a stairwell that smelled of stale piss.
Then Diwa turned round and grinned at him, dimples and all, and the panic cut out.
“It’s lunchtime,” Diwa said.
Colin nodded.
“Have lunch with me.” Diwa was still standing in the doorway, oblivious to the momentary break in Colin’s composure. “There’s a place a couple of blocks down. My treat. To say thank you for schooling me.”
“I’ve got a sandwich.”
“Yeah?”
“Ham cheese and tomato.”
Diwa shook his head slowly. “Colin. You don’t want that. You want a buddha bowl. Or, hear me out, a salmon miso poke bowl.”
“What the fuck?”
“Listen, listen.” Diwa leaned in, both hands open.
“You’ve been expanding my world view. You’ve shown me how to deal with light bulbs and radiators.
Demoed the proper way to threaten someone with electrocution.
Let me return the favour. There’s this Melbourne-style café down the road.
They do a deconstructed eggs benedict on a slate.
The hollandaise comes in a little pipette, the coffee is genuinely transcendent —”
“On a what.”
“A slate. Like a roof slate. The point is it’s not a plate. They use anything but a plate. I’ve seen them do avo toast on a miniature easel, and then you kind of paint the avo smash on.”
Colin’s lip twitched.
He shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t.
He’d been in this man’s house for less than two hours and his body had already produced a panic flash and several stomach-flips.
The only sensible thing for him to do was to take his hundred quid and his sandwich and get on the bus home.
He’d given himself an easy day and didn’t have any afternoon jobs lined up.
“All right then,” Colin found himself blurting out instead.
He bent to his bag and started packing, fitting the spanner into its slot, and rolling the offcut of dowel into the side pocket.
He took his time about it, because his only other option was looking up at Diwa de la Vega’s fucking ridiculous dimples.
Then he zipped the bag shut, stood, and followed the lad out.