Chapter Twenty
The walk had taken them from Ledbury Road through Holland Park and down into Kensington, two hours for what should have been forty minutes, because Diwa de la Vega could not pass a dog without dropping to his knees on the pavement and having a play.
Colin had counted. He’d fussed over eleven dogs. The alpha’s standout favourite: a golden retriever puppy that Diwa had allowed to put both paws on his chest and lick his chin while he said, with complete sincerity, “You are the most important person I’ve met today.”
Each time, Diwa would look up at Colin from the pavement with those ridiculous dimples and say something like, “Colin, look at his ears,” as though Colin had not been standing three feet away watching the whole performance.
“You’re going to get fleas,” Colin said, after the eighth dog, a spaniel whose owner had been trying to get it to heel for the past thirty seconds while it rolled onto its back between Diwa’s knees.
“Worth it.” Diwa scratched behind the spaniel’s ears with both hands. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime dog, Colin. Look at that face.”
“You’ve said that about four dogs in the last hour.”
“And I’ve meant it every time.”
Colin watched him there on the pavement, kneeling on damp concrete to rub a stranger’s spaniel’s belly, and felt the heat sit low behind his navel.
It had been building since that morning.
It wasn’t the ambush of three months ago.
The suppressants were doing what Dr Gu had promised they’d do, keeping the edge off, holding the flood at a trickle.
What he felt now was warmth, a banked glow between his hips that pulsed when Diwa’s shoulder brushed his on the pavement, or when Diwa’s hand rested on the small of his back to steer him across a road.
They walked home in the last of the afternoon light with Diwa talking about a podcast he’d listened to that morning about the declining bee population and whether urban beekeeping was helping or making it worse.
Colin contributed the occasional “mm” and let his shoulder stay where it had drifted against Diwa’s arm.
The yellow door came up on their left, and Diwa fished for his keys with one hand while the other stayed at Colin’s back.
Inside, the house was warm. Diwa’s home automation had done its job, the heating coming on forty minutes before their return, the hallway lamps glowing amber.
Diwa kicked his trainers off and padded through to the kitchen to fill the kettle, still mid-sentence about colony collapse disorder.
Colin hung his jacket on the hook and stood in the hallway, listening to the tap run and the kettle click on.
He went upstairs to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his socks, setting them in a neat pair on the floor by the nightstand.
One floor below him, he heard the kettle come to a boil.
He heard Diwa open the cupboard, the clink of mugs, and the soft pad of his bare feet coming up the stairs.
Diwa appeared in the doorway with a mug in each hand and stopped when he saw Colin sitting on the edge of the bed in the middle of the afternoon with his socks off. “Come to bed, Diwa,” he said.
Diwa set both mugs on the dresser without looking away from him. “Colin.”
“I’m not in heat.” He said it flat and clear. “The suppressants are working. I can feel it starting, but it’s not here yet, and I want to do this before it gets here. While it’s me choosing, not my body deciding for me.” He looked up at Diwa. “Come here.”
Diwa crossed the room and came to stand in front of Colin between his knees. Close enough that the smell of him filled Colin’s next breath. His hands stayed at his sides.
Colin reached for the hem of his own jumper and pulled it off over his head, folding it once by habit and dropping it onto the floor beside his socks.
His T-shirt went next. The cool air of the bedroom raised the fine hairs on his arms, and he sat there bare from the waist up, his hands back on the duvet. Diwa’s throat moved as he swallowed.
“What do you want?” Diwa asked. His voice had gone low and careful.
“You.”
“You have me. I just need you to tell me how you want it.”
Colin looked up at him. In the half-light from the curtains, Diwa’s face was open and serious. “Take your shirt off.”
Diwa pulled his T-shirt over his head in one motion and dropped it. His chest was smooth and tanned, the muscles across his stomach defined without being sculpted. Colin put his hand flat against Diwa’s stomach, feeling the warmth of his skin, the slight catch of his breathing under his palm.
“I want you inside me.”
Diwa’s stomach contracted under his hand, a single hard clench, and his breathing stopped before it came back in a slow, controlled exhale through his nose.
Colin could feel his own slick building, a wet warmth between his thighs that the suppressants had done fuck all to control. His body couldn’t help but respond to the alpha standing between his knees.
Diwa’s hand came up. He cupped the side of Colin’s jaw, tracing the sharp jut of his cheekbone with his thumb, and bent down to kiss him.
The kiss stayed soft, Diwa’s mouth warm against his, his free hand finding Colin’s bare shoulder and resting there without pressing.
Colin kissed him back and reached for Diwa’s belt.
His fingers worked the buckle, pulled the leather free, popped the button.
Diwa held still for all of it, his mouth barely leaving Colin’s, his breath coming warm against Colin’s upper lip.
His jeans came down, and Diwa stepped out of them, kicking them sideways.
Colin hooked his fingers into the waistband of his boxers and pulled those down too.
Diwa’s cock was hard, standing thick against his stomach. Colin let himself look, and let his hands shake. The fear was doing its old work. He let it sit with the want, and with the quiet fact of Diwa, the alpha who made him feel safe.
Colin wrapped his hand around him. Diwa was hotter within his palm than he’d expected, the skin smooth and tight over the hardness underneath. Colin’s calluses caught against him on the first stroke, and Diwa’s hips jerked forward into his grip.
He let go and lay back on the mattress, working his trousers and boxers down over his hips. They got as far as his thighs and stuck there; the denim caught on his arse, the boxers bunched in with it, and Colin made a noise of low disgust and kicked once without much effect.
Diwa stood between his knees and watched the performance with his arms folded, and his expression working against his smile.
“Colin.”
“What?”
“Anyone ever told you that for a man built like a length of rebar, you’ve got a really impressive set of male omega birthing hips on you?”
Colin’s laugh punched out of him before he could catch it. He kicked at Diwa’s hip, foot still half-trapped in his trouser leg, and Diwa caught his ankle with both hands and held it there, grinning down at him.
This was how Diwa took care of him: by being so bloody ridiculous that Colin couldn’t stand to hold him at arm’s length.
“Get them off me, you cheeky bastard.”
“Yes, sir.”
Diwa worked the cuffs free of his ankles in one pull, Colin’s jeans and boxers coming off together, and tossed them over his shoulder onto the floor.
Diwa was looking at him with his jaw set tight, both hands flexing at his sides.
Colin was intimately familiar with that look, the hunger that came through before an alpha could mask it.
With every other alpha he’d taken it as a sign that he was in danger, that he should run.
But Diwa stayed right where he was, not doing a single thing Colin hadn’t asked for.
Colin’s cock twitched against his stomach as he lay there pinned under Diwa’s hungry gaze. “I want you, Diwa.”
Diwa stepped forward between his knees and set his hands on Colin’s thighs, palms warm against his skin. He reached across to the bedside table without taking his other hand off Colin’s leg and pulled the drawer open, grabbing the bottle of lube, and a condom.
Colin watched him tear the condom wrapper with his teeth, roll it on with steady hands, and slick himself up with more lube than was strictly necessary.
The excess ran down over his knuckles and dripped onto the carpet, but Diwa didn’t seem to notice or care.
Then his wet hand moved between Colin’s thighs, and Colin’s breathing went shallow.
Diwa didn’t go straight for it. His slick fingers traced the crease of Colin’s thigh first, following the line where his leg met his hip, spreading lube along his skin in slow warming strokes.
His other hand stayed on Colin’s knee, rubbing an idle circle against the inside of it.
When his fingers moved inward, tracing the ring of his entrance, circling without pressing in, Colin’s hands fisted in the sheet at his sides.
“Breathe,” Diwa reminded him. “You need to keep breathing.”
Diwa was watching his face. His eyes tracked the furrow between Colin’s brows as he pressed one finger in, slow and steady, and Colin’s thigh locked under Diwa’s hand.
He hadn’t meant to tense, but his body had done it without him meaning to the way it always did. The old flinch arrived before the rest of him could catch up and remind itself that this was Diwa, that he was safe, and that he could let him in.
Diwa’s movements stilled. He didn’t withdraw, just held himself in place, with his finger inside Colin, and waited.
Colin breathed out. His thigh under Diwa’s hand softened, and Diwa’s finger pressed deeper.
The stretch was nothing he hadn’t done to himself.
But his own fingers had only ever been his own fingers.
Diwa’s were longer, thicker, reaching further than Colin’s ever had, and they moved in response to him.
Curving when Colin’s breath caught, pressing deeper when his hips lifted, and reading his body from the inside.
Diwa’s free hand pressed flat against his hip, holding him steady without pinning him down. “There?”