Chapter Thirteen
The fish and chips arrived in brown paper bags dark with grease, and Diwa spread it out on the kitchen island. Ezra pulled up a third stool and planted himself between them.
Colin had shaken vinegar all over the chips without asking whether anyone else wanted it first, and the smell of it cut through the kitchen with a tartness that made Diwa’s nose sting.
“So,” Ezra said, pointing a chip at Colin. “How long have you two been a thing?”
“We’re not a thing,” Colin said, at the same time Diwa said, “A while.”
Ezra looked between them and ate his chip, his grin widening.
“There was a kiss in the kitchen,” Diwa clarified. “Last week. It was a really good kiss.”
“It was fine,” Colin said.
“It was an exceptional kiss, Colin. Don’t undersell it.”
“It was three seconds long.”
“Quality over quantity. That’s a universal principle everyone needs to live by.” Diwa turned to Ezra. “The kiss was incredible. Moving on.”
Ezra grinned and settled deeper onto his stool.
He was not, under any circumstances, moving on.
“Good. Don’t commit fully to him yet, Colin.
You need the full picture first. You’re very lucky I’m here to give you the rundown on his many, many faults.
” He pointed his chip at Diwa. “Has he told you about the Atherton thing?”
Diwa’s fork stopped. “We’re not talking about the Atherton thing.”
Colin raised a chip. “I think I would like to know about the Atherton thing.”
“So Diwa’s twenty-four,” Ezra said, already facing Colin, who had paused his inhaling of his food and was listening to Ezra intently.
“We’ve just closed our Series A. Fifteen million.
Diwa decides this means we need to throw a party, because he’d read somewhere that founders are supposed to throw parties.
He doesn’t know any party people. His entire social circle is made out of software engineers and one guy from church.
But he has a house in Atherton now. That’s a pre-requisite when you close your A.
You buy a four-bedroom in Atherton that you’re going to rattle around in by yourself. ”
“I had a vision for the space,” Diwa muttered.
“His vision for the space was a reformer in the living room, and flooring that he could ride his e-scooter on. That was it. That was the entire vision. Anyway. He throws this party. Hires a caterer, organises the full thing, but he doesn’t hire a bartender because he’s decided he can handle it.
So he’s behind his own kitchen island, which, by the way, is the only piece of furniture in the house apart from the reformer at that point, and he’s serving drinks.
He’s Googled cocktail recipes on his phone and he’s got it propped up against the blender.
He makes one mojito. It takes him eleven minutes. There’s a queue of fourteen people.”
Colin’s chip had made it to his mouth at some point during this, and Diwa watched the corner of his lip twitch.
“By the third mojito he’s abandoned the recipe and he’s just putting rum in things,” Ezra went on.
“Rum and orange juice. Rum and sparkling water. At one point I watched him pour rum into a glass of milk because someone asked for a White Russian and he didn’t have Kahlúa.
The woman drank it. She drank the entire thing. I think she’s in Congress now.”
“It was a perfectly serviceable drink,” Diwa defended himself.
“It was rum and milk.”
“The fat in the milk smooths out the alcohol. There’s a whole science behind it. I’ll send you both an article.”
Colin set his fork down. “My nan used to give us warm milk with a drop of whisky in when we couldn’t sleep.”
“See?” Diwa said. “Colin’s grandmother agrees with me.”
Ezra let out a bark of laughter and nearly choked on his haddock. He thumped his own chest, recovered, and pointed at Colin. “I like him. Diwa. I like him very much.”
“Thank you, Ezra.” Colin made a quiet, satisfied sound in the back of his throat.
Ezra told two more stories over the last of the chips. The most relevant one to Colin was about Diwa’s most recent relationship, an omega called Mariel who’d come down with the flu three months in.
“She texts him saying she feels awful,” Ezra said.
“Normal person response would be: bring soup, sit on the sofa, watch something bad on Netflix together. Diwa’s response: he has a portable air purifier delivered to her apartment within the hour.
Then a pulse oximeter. Then a grocery delivery with a note that says ‘zinc lozenges in the bag, take one every two hours, studies show earlier supplementation correlates with reduced symptom duration.’ She’s lying in bed with a temperature of thirty-nine and this man is citing her medical factoids through text. ”
“The zinc thing is real,” Diwa said.
“She broke up with him the next week. He called me at two in the morning asking what he’d done wrong, because he’d tried, and his response time on every single one of her messages had been under four minutes.”
Colin had finished his food. “Four minutes,” he said. “That’s your approved text response benchmark, is it?” Diwa opened his mouth to respond, but Colin talked over him. “You reply to my texts in about twelve seconds.”
Diwa’s neck went red from the collar up, and he became suddenly very interested in the arrangement of the chip on his plate.
Ezra’s gaze moved between the two of them. His chewing slowed. He set his fork down quietly on the edge of his plate, then pushed back from the counter and stretched, his spine cracking. “Right. I’m about to fall asleep on this stool.” He looked at Diwa. “Guest room?”
“Second door on the right. Linens are in the wardrobe.”
“The Cromarty room.” Ezra slid off his stool and collected his carry-on from the hallway, the wheels clicking on the floorboards as he dragged it past them. He paused in the kitchen doorway and looked back at Colin.
“It was good to meet you, Colin.”
“You too, Ezra.”
Ezra pointed at Diwa. “We’re going to call Adhya together first thing in the morning.”
“All right, all right, Ez!”
The kitchen went quiet with Ezra’s departure. Diwa stood at the sink with his back to Colin, rinsing the grease off the plates.
“Colin.”
“Mm.”
“What Ezra said at the door? The cleaner thing.” Diwa set the plate down in the rack and dried his hands on the tea towel, turning round. “That was shit. I should’ve said something straightaway. I should’ve corrected him before you’d even got through the door, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
Colin was still on his stool, his eyes on the middle distance past Diwa’s shoulder. His face had settled into the flat composure that Diwa had learned, over the past month, could mean a dozen different things.
“I’ve had worse thrown at me,” Colin said.
“That doesn’t make it all right. And especially not here in my house.”
“No.” Colin shrugged. “I’m used to people not seeing me, Diwa. I preferred it that way. Until you…”
Diwa crossed the kitchen. He came round the island and stood beside Colin’s stool, close enough that his hip touched the edge of his seat.
He didn’t try to touch Colin. He just stood there, letting his presence do the work.
“Stay tonight,” Diwa said. “Not on the sofa, obviously. We’ll stay in my room where there’s a proper bed, proper pillows.
I’ve got a spare toothbrush still in the packet. ”
“I haven’t got anything with me.”
“I’ll lend you a T-shirt to sleep in. I don’t care. I just want you in my house tonight. These days I only sleep really well when you’re here with me.”
Colin didn’t answer. He leaned into Diwa’s side and let himself stay.
? ? ?
Diwa’s bedroom was on the second floor, at the back of the house overlooking the garden.
Colin stood in the doorway while Diwa moved round the room turning on lamps and pulling the curtains shut with more fuss than the task required.
The bed was a wide low platform in dark wood, made up in white linen, and there were too many pillows on it for any reasonable person.
Diwa threw three of them onto the floor without explanation.
“Bathroom’s through there.” Diwa nodded at the en-suite. “Get the spare toothbrush from the cabinet. Then there’s towels on the rail. Use whatever you want.”
Colin went through. Diwa heard the tap run, and the sound of brushing teeth.
He came back out in the T-shirt Diwa had left folded on the edge of the bathtub for him.
It was an old Stanford one that was a faded maroon from too many washings over the years.
It was too big in the shoulders for Colin, and the hem came down past his hips and down his thighs.
Colin tugged at the hem. “I look a right state.”
He didn’t at all. Without the work jacket and the bag, Colin was just…
Colin. With his bare legs, bare feet on the carpet, and his hair still mussed from pulling the T-shirt over his head.
He looked rumpled and soft, and everything in Diwa’s hindbrain narrowed to the following imperatives: keep this man warm, keep him fed, keep him here with you.
“It suits you,” Diwa said.
“It’s down to my knees.”
“Yeah.”
Diwa propped himself up against the headboard with the duvet pulled to his waist. He’d put on a clean T-shirt and his sleep shorts, and had been rearranging the pillows for Colin while he’d been in the bathroom. “Which side of the bed do you want?” Diwa asked.
“I’ll take the one by the door.”
Diwa shifted across without being asked, and Colin pulled the duvet back and sat on the edge of the mattress. He stayed there for a moment, feet on the carpet, hands in his lap. Then he swung his legs up and lay down on his back like he was submitting himself to an MRI.
He reached across and found the hem of the Stanford T-shirt where it had rucked up above Colin’s knee.
He smoothed it down over his thigh, then he turned the bedside lamp down to its lowest setting.
The room went amber. Through the curtains, Ledbury Road was quiet, the occasional sweep of headlights tracking across the ceiling.
They lay side by side, a foot of white linen between them.
“You all right?” Diwa kept his voice low.
“Mm.”
“You can have more of the duvet. I run hot. I’m basically a space heater.
” He pushed a gathered handful of it towards Colin’s side.
“There’s a fan on the nightstand if you need it.
And the window opens from the top, if you want air.
The handle’s the brass one on the left. It’s stiff, but if you give it a proper —”
“Diwa.”
“Yeah.”
“Shut up.”
Diwa shut up. Beside him, Colin’s breathing hadn’t settled.
Diwa rolled onto his side, facing Colin, and put his hand on the mattress between them, palm up.
He didn’t reach for him. He just left it there, the way you’d leave a door open.
A minute passed, then Colin’s hand moved across the sheet, and found Diwa’s.