Chapter Nineteen
The bill came, and Stephen had his wallet out before the waiter had finished setting the card machine down on the paper tablecloth.
“Ryland and I will drive you home, Dad.”
It wasn’t a question. Stephen already had his coat off the back of his chair, threading his arms through the sleeves, while Ryland aligned his knife and fork on the plate.
Under the table, Colin’s hand came down onto Diwa’s thigh. He pressed down once, firm and brief, his thumb against the seam of Diwa’s jeans. Diwa’s leg went rigid under his palm.
They’d had plans. Nothing spoken aloud, because it hadn’t needed to be. But Colin was meant to go back with Diwa to Ledbury Road, with the evening unspooling from there in whatever direction it wanted to go.
“All right, love,” Colin said, to Stephen.
Diwa’s hand came down over his under the table, closing around Colin’s fingers for a count of two before letting go.
Colin didn’t look at him. If he looked at him, Diwa would see his distress, and know what it cost him to sit here while his son picked apart the one thing he’d ever chosen for himself.
Diwa leaned in to kiss Colin’s cheek, careful and restrained. His mouth was warm and dry against Colin’s skin, and he lingered half a second longer than was strictly appropriate for a public goodbye. “Night, Colin.”
“Night, love. I’ll message you.”
The yellow warmth of the restaurant fell behind them as they stepped out onto the Broadway.
The March air was cold and damp, carrying the flat mineral smell of wet tarmac and the distant bass thump from a pub two doors down.
Stephen walked ahead with his hands in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched, and Ryland fell into step beside Colin with his car keys already out.
Ryland’s car was a sensible grey Volvo parked on the side street behind the restaurant. Ryland unlocked it with a press of his thumb against the key fob. Stephen pulled open the front passenger door, got in, and shut it behind him with far more force than required.
Colin got into the back seat, set his bag on the floor between his feet, and pulled the seatbelt across his chest.
Ryland started the engine, checked his mirrors in sequence: rear-view, left wing, right wing, and pulled out. They made it as far as the roundabout on Longbridge Road before Stephen broke. “I don’t like him.”
Colin watched the streetlights slide past the window. A takeaway on the corner was lit up, its orange glow spilling across the pavement where a bloke in a puffer jacket was eating chips out of a tray.
“Well, I like him, love.”
“He’s smug.” Stephen was facing forward, his reflection ghosted in the windscreen.
“He’s smug like…” The sentence hung there for a moment, searching for its own ending.
“He’s smug like someone who’s never had to worry about whether the money for heating’s going to last the winter.
He walked into that restaurant like he owned the building.
He brought a sixty-quid bottle of wine to a place with paper tablecloths, Daddy. Who does that?”
“A man who was nervous,” Colin said.
Stephen scowled. “He wasn’t nervous. He ate half the bread basket and then tried to change your dinner order.”
“He was nervous, Stephen. He ate half the bread basket because he was nervous. He does that. Eats when he doesn’t know what to do with his hands or what to say next. It’s a stalling tactic.”
The car moved through the Barking Road traffic at Ryland’s careful pace, and Colin let the quiet sit, because Stephen needed it. His son’s hands were in his lap now, fingers knotted, picking at the skin around his thumbnail.
“He’s twenty-eight, Daddy.”
“I know how old he is.”
“He’s only two years older than me. I could’ve been at school with him. I could’ve sat next to him in a lecture theatre and asked to borrow his notes, and now he’s what? Just kissing you on the cheek in front of everyone whenever he feels like it?”
Stephen’s reflection in the windscreen had that set to his jaw that meant the verdict on Diwa was in and no amount of new evidence was going to shift it.
“I know it’s strange, Stephen.” Colin kept his voice level.
“I do. And the age thing, it normally would have put me off. Everything about him would normally put me off. How casual he is with money. How much of it he’s got.
How American he is. But he makes me feel safe, love.
” The words came out quieter than Colin had meant them to.
“He takes care of me…in a non-overwhelming way. I’m with him, and I relax. ”
Stephen didn’t turn round. His reflection stared back at Colin from the windscreen, mouth pressed thin, and the silence in the car was heavy enough that Colin could hear the indicator ticking as Ryland signalled left onto Ripple Road.
There was more he could have said. He could have told Stephen about how the smell of warm alpha next to him had helped him sleep properly for the first time in years.
He could have said all of it. He wanted to.
He wanted to lay his whole case out, piece by piece, the way Stephen himself would have done in a courtroom, and make his son see that this wasn’t recklessness.
That a man who’d spent most of his life not being touched had found someone whose touch didn’t make him flinch, and that was worth protecting even if it looked, from the outside, like a forty-year-old omega making a fool of himself over a rich boy with dimples.
But Stephen’s jaw hadn’t loosened. His thumbnail was bleeding where he’d picked it raw, and the line of his shoulders said that nothing Colin offered tonight was going to land anywhere except against his wall of judgement, so Colin let it go.
In the rear-view mirror, Ryland’s eyes met his.
It was a brief, but deliberate thing. Ryland’s gaze didn’t slide across Colin’s the way it usually did, deflecting off eye contact. He looked straight at Colin, held it for two full seconds, and then returned his attention to the road.
He hadn’t said a word since Ripple Road. He knew better than to insert himself into this, to take sides between a father and his son, and Colin was fairly sure that was exactly why he’d done it this way, giving him the only show of support he could offer without crossing the line.
Colin breathed out through his nose and watched Barking come up around them in the dark.
“When this goes wrong, because it will go wrong, Daddy, it absolutely will with flighty types like him. He’ll go back to San Francisco or Manila or wherever billionaires go when they get bored, and you’ll still be in Barking with a broken heart.”
Colin’s throat tightened. He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth and waited for it to pass, because Stephen’s voice had cracked on broken heart, and he didn’t want Ryland to be driving two sobbing Huxleys through Barking at twenty miles an hour.
“You’ve spent your whole life looking after us, Daddy,” Stephen said.
“You’ve given us everything. Every single thing.
You worked double shifts so we could have school shoes, and you walked home in the rain so we could have the bus fare, and you never once — not once — asked for anything for yourself.
I want you to have everything that you want out of life.
I want to believe that this’ll work out.
But you can’t expect me to just nod and say lovely, how wonderful, my forty-year-old father is dating a tech billionaire he met while changing a light bulb? ”
“Yes,” Colin said. “That is what I’m asking you to do, Stephen.
” He watched his son take in the shine on his cheeks that Stephen was pretending wasn’t there.
“I want you to let me take this risk, and trust that I’m not just a desperate old omega looking for any alpha to help him through a heat.
I’m letting this happen. It scares the shit out of me, but I’m seeing it through. Even if it does end badly.”
Stephen didn’t answer. He didn’t nod. But he didn’t argue either, and for Stephen, that was as close to permission as Colin was ever going to get. His son brought both hands up to his face and pressed them over his eyes.
Ryland pulled the car into the space outside Colin’s building, and the handbrake came up with a soft click. He turned off the engine, checked all three mirrors again, and folded his hands on the steering wheel.
Colin leaned forward between the front seats and put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder.
His baby’s head dropped sideways until his cheek rested against Colin’s knuckles, and they stayed like that for a long moment, the three of them sitting in the dark with the engine off and the orange streetlight drawing a line across the dashboard.
“I’m going to be all right, love,” Colin said. “Whatever happens.”
Stephen sniffed. “You’d better be.”
“When have I ever not been all right?”
“Three months ago, when you were in St Mary’s and I was just sat there watching your heart monitor.”
“Apart from that.”
“That’s a massive apart-from-that, Daddy.”
Colin squeezed his shoulder. Stephen reached up and gripped his wrist, holding him there, the way he’d done as a boy when Colin would try to leave his bedroom after lights out.
“Bring him round to family dinner at yours next week,” Stephen said, into Colin’s hand. “I promise…we’ll talk properly this time.”
Colin kissed the back of his son’s head, fumbled for his bag, and let himself out into the cold. The security light above the entrance flickered on as he approached, buzzing at its usual frequency.
He took the stairs slowly, his knees protesting on the second landing the way they always did, and let himself into the flat.
The hallway was dark and cold and smelled of the pine cleaner he’d used on the lino before he’d left that morning.
His keys went on the hook, his bag on the chair. His bed was waiting for him, empty.