Chapter Twenty-One
Colin’s flat was on the fourth floor of a brutalist estate in Barking that looked, from the outside, like something designed to withstand artillery fire rather than house families. The communal bins were overflowing.
Diwa climbed the stairs behind Colin, who took them two at a time, and tried not to think about the fact that the lift had an out-of-order sign on it that had been laminated.
That implied that it had been in place for a while, or that outages were frequent enough that the sign had to be used pretty regularly.
The flat itself was small, made up of a narrow hallway that opened onto a kitchen barely wide enough for two people to pass each other, a living room that contained a sofa, an ancient television, and not much else. The linoleum in the kitchen was worn through to the backing in front of the sink.
It was also spotless. Every surface wiped clean, every edge squared.
While Colin filled the kettle, Diwa stood in the doorway of the living room and looked at the photographs of the Huxley family.
They covered most of one wall, encased in a mishmash of frames.
Diwa stepped closer and tracked the growth of the twins through them.
Two babies in a hospital cot, both screaming, wrapped in NHS blankets.
The same babies a few months later, propped against cushions on a sofa, their round faces identical down to their furious expressions.
The twins at around four, in matching school uniforms, one grinning, the other scowling at the camera with an intensity that meant this could only be Stephen.
Both of them were little Colin minis, down to the same stubborn cowlick.
In a frame smaller than the rest was a photograph Diwa almost missed.
A boy, narrow-shouldered and hollow-cheeked, his collarbones sharp above the neck of a T-shirt that hung off him.
Colin sat on a single bed in a room with pale institutional coloured walls, a sleeping baby in each arm.
Colin was looking at the camera, exhausted, holding the two small bodies against his chest like they were the only thing keeping him upright.
Colin had been so small. Just a child holding his own children, in a room that held no supportive family members.
“Tea’s ready,” Colin said from the kitchen doorway.
Diwa turned to meet his gaze. “They were gorgeous,” Diwa said.
“Yeah. They were also a fucking handful.” Colin settled onto the sofa and tucked one foot under himself.
“Lysander used to eat sand. I’d take them to the playground and turn my back for thirty seconds and he’d have a fistful of it in his mouth, happy as anything.
The health visitor thought he had pica. Turned out he just liked the texture. ”
Diwa sat down beside him, careful with the mug. The sofa cushions were shaped by years of the same body sitting in the same spot. Colin’s end had a permanent dip.
“Stephen was the opposite. He was a proper English baby. Wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t beige.
Only interested in toast, chips, plain pasta, chicken nuggets.
I used to hide vegetables in the nugget batter and he’d find them, Diwa.
He’d pull apart a chicken nugget like a pathologist and fish out a single piece of carrot smaller than his fingernail and hold it up and look at me like I was trying to poison him.
Then he’d argue with me about why he didn’t need veggies to get big. ”
Diwa laughed. Colin’s eyes crinkled at the corners in response, though his mouth barely moved.
They ate schnitzel and chips at the kitchen table.
Colin had pounded the pork thin with a rolling pin and fried it in a shallow pan with enough oil to crisp the breadcrumbs golden, and the chips were hand-cut and cooked twice.
Diwa cleared his plate and accepted seconds because the schnitzel was genuinely excellent.
Colin leaned back in his chair and watched him eat.
Later, in the bedroom, which was barely large enough for the double bed and a chest of drawers, Colin pulled Diwa’s shirt over his head and ran his rough palm down the centre of Diwa’s chest.
Diwa let himself be pushed onto his back. The mattress dipped under both their weights, and Colin swung a leg over him, settling across his hips with his hands braced on Diwa’s ribs. The car park light threw the rest of his face into shadow.
“You’re staring,” Colin said.
“You’re worth staring at.” Diwa ran his thumbs along the creases of Colin’s hips, where the skin was thinner and softer than anywhere else on him, and Colin’s breath caught.
Over the weeks since their first time, Diwa had been making note of these spots; the places where Colin’s body hadn’t been roughened by work.
The insides of his wrists. The pale strip of skin below his navel where the hair narrowed to a fine line and his scent pooled, warm and green and so thick Diwa sometimes got lost in it.
Colin’s hands moved him. That was how this worked. Colin’s calloused fingers on him, guiding Diwa where he wanted him with small, certain adjustments that Diwa followed without thinking. Lower. There. Slower. Colin didn’t say any of it out loud, but his hands were fluent in their guidance.
Afterwards, Colin slept, curled onto his side with one arm tucked under the pillow and his knees drawn up, compact as a closed fist. Diwa lay on his back beside him, wide awake, and stared at the ceiling while the mattress tried to kill him.
It started as a minor irritation. A spring beneath his left shoulder blade, pressing up through whatever was left of the padding like a finger prodding him in the back.
He’d shifted. The spring followed. He’d shifted again, and a second spring introduced itself to the base of his spine as the bedframe let out a loud creak.
Diwa held perfectly still. Colin had a full day of work scheduled the next day, and he didn’t want to risk breaking his sleep. He counted to sixty, twice, and tried a micro-adjustment of his hips to the left.
The bed frame groaned like it was dying. Colin shifted onto his other side with a grunt, and the entire mattress cratered towards the centre, rolling Diwa into his omega’s back. Colin weighed nine stone, and yet the bed still reacted as though a rhino were performing calisthenics on it.
By three in the morning, he had mapped every spring in the mattress with his spine. There were at least nine that he could identify by position and temperament, and the one directly beneath his right hip had developed a personal vendetta against him.
Diwa picked up his mobile from the floor, where he’d left it beside his folded jeans, and shielded the screen against his chest. He opened his messages, found his house manager’s thread, and began typing with his thumb.
Diwa: Hi Patricia. I need a mattress and bed frame delivered to an address in Barking tomorrow.
Best you can source. Emperor or super king, whatever fits the room.
I’ll send measurements in the morning. And I need the old one taken away and disposed of.
You should absolutely torch the mattress. Can you make this happen?
Patricia, who managed two of his properties across three time zones and had once sourced a high-altitude espresso machine for Diwa’s Denver apartment on two hours’ notice, replied in under a minute.
Patricia: Of course. Budget?
Diwa: None.
Patricia: Noted. I’ll have options for you by 7am your time. Re: the mattress — I have a contact at London Zoo. They have access to a crematorium.
Diwa: Patricia. It’s a mattress, not a dead giraffe.
Patricia: You said torch it. I’m giving you options.
He locked the screen, set the mobile face-down on the floor, and looked at Colin. Even in sleep, Colin’s face held a set quality, his brow not quite smooth, some part of him remaining on alert.
Diwa opened a podcast about mangrove restoration, putting on just one earbud and keeping the volume low enough that he could still hear Colin breathing.
He got through two episodes and the first twenty minutes of a third before his attention drifted to his email, where Ezra had sent a thread about a sustainability conference in Copenhagen.
At half six, the sky through the window turned from black to grey. Colin’s alarm went off, and his hand shot out to silence it. He sat up, rubbed his face, and looked at Diwa, who was lying beside him with both eyes open and his mobile on his chest.
“Have you slept?”
“Loads.”
Colin’s gaze dropped to the phone, the earbud, and the dark circles that Diwa could feel sitting heavy under his eyes. His mouth flattened, but he didn’t push it. He swung his legs off the bed and padded off to the bathroom.
Diwa got up, went to the kitchen, and began opening cupboards. The fridge held eggs, milk, half a block of cheddar. By the time Colin came out in his work clothes, Diwa had scrambled eggs with the cheddar and made toast for the two of them. Colin ate everything set in front of him.
“I’ll drive you to work,” Diwa offered.
“No.”
“It’s on my way.”
“You don’t even know where I’m going, Diwa.”
“I know it’s somewhere in London, Colin. Notting Hill is very central, that’s why I bought there. It’s on the way to heaps of places.”
Colin pressed his mouth into a line. He rinsed his plate, stacked it in the drying rack, and picked up his bag before following Diwa out of the flat.
Colin sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover with his holdall between his feet and his elbow on the armrest, watching the terraced houses of Barking slide past through tinted windows.
He didn’t say much until they got three streets away from the job.
Then Colin put his hand on the dash. “Pull over here.”
“We’re not there yet.”
“Pull over, Diwa.”
Colin unclipped his seatbelt as the car drew to a stop, then leaned across the centre console, and kissed him once, closed-mouthed, his calloused hand resting on the back of Diwa’s neck. “Thank you.” He grabbed his holdall from the footwell.