Page 17 of Cassian is Getting Out

Colin had been sitting on the edge of their bed for forty-five minutes, waiting for Diwa to come home, and in that time he’d compiled a body count.

He heard the front door open, listened to the keys landing on the hall table, then the soft padding of Diwa’s trainers on the stairs. Colin stood up, crossed the room in three strides, and slapped his partner lightly across the face the second the door opened.

“I blame you,” he declared.

Diwa’s hand went to his cheek. He stood in the doorway with his laptop bag still on his shoulder and his mouth open in shock.

“For what?”

“For teaching Cassian stupid things.” Colin jabbed a finger at the hallway behind Diwa, in the general direction of Cassian’s room. “With all the stupid romance books you get him, and the shows you tell him to watch. The OC, Diwa. Really? That’s what you want him internalising?”

Diwa lowered his hand from his cheek. “You loved The OC. You cried when—”

“I did. But I’m a forty-one-year-old man who knows enough to understand that you can’t take life lessons from a TV show where a teenager dies in a car crash.” Colin dropped back onto the bed and reached for his mobile. “Is he going to end up like Marissa, Diwa? Is that what’s going to happen to that poor boy? Because I’ve just found out he’s been watching My Brother’s Alpha Best Friend, and the omega in that gets flattened by a car in the sequel.”

“That’s not—”

“And before that it was Dalton Academy, where the main omega gets kidnapped!”

“Cassian will not get kidnapped, Col.”

“Oh, fuck off! We both know that all a kidnapper has to do is wave something sweet under his nose, and he’d follow them, no questions asked. He doesn’t have a filter for this stuff, Diwa!”

Diwa set his bag on the floor, sank onto the mattress beside Colin, and wisely kept his mouth shut.

“I’ve been running through every single doomed romance you’ve fed that boy in the last month,” Colin said, “and the body count is staggering. The omega in Love Struck falls off a boat. The couple in that podcast drama he’s obsessed with break up four times before the beta gets mown down by a motorbike. Uptown Omegas had an actual funeral in the Christmas special.”

“That was a beautiful episode.”

“It was a funeral for someone who drowned in a river during their engagement photoshoot, Diwa.”

Diwa’s shoulders sagged, all the fight gone out of him.

“He put on your wanker shirt this morning. It looked fucking ridiculous on him. But that didn’t matter. The second he turned those big blue eyes on Ruari Thorne and fluttered those lashes, that alpha wanted him. I could smell it coming off him!”

Diwa’s thumb traced a slow circle on Colin’s kneecap, and when he spoke, he used the measured, let-me-reframe-this voice that meant he thought he’d homed in on the rational centre of the problem that Colin couldn’t quite see for himself yet.

“Okay. So why are you leading with funerals as the inevitable outcome here, Colin? When really, stay with me here, the most likely scenario is that Cassian’s found an alpha who owns a bakery, and the worst that happens is he puts on a stone from all the free pastéis de nata he’ll be getting off Ruari.”

“That’s your analysis,” Colin said. “Your big-brain, AI-company-owning take on this situation is that I’m overreacting, and that the real danger here is coming from access to carbohydrates?”

“I’m saying that not every romance ends in a car crash, Col. Some of them end up happy, with an adoring alpha who bakes feeding you Chelsea buns until the button on your trousers pops off.”

“Have you watched Hamish’s documentary on feeders, Diwa? Because I have, and I’ll tell you what the whole fucking thing is about. It’s about dependency. One person controlling what the other one eats, how much, and when, and making them need that guidance so badly they can’t function without the person who’s providing it.” His voice had climbed to a volume that would carry through the wall and into Cassian’s room if he wasn’t careful. “That boy spent twenty-two years in a place where they decided when he ate, and what he ate. But you’re still sitting there telling me that the worst-case scenario with Ruari Thorne is that Cassian gets a bit chubby?”

Diwa had gone still. “I’m…sorry, I just don’t understand how we’ve ended up talking about feederism…”

“I’m not really worried about feederism!” Colin snapped.

Diwa threw his hands up. “Oh, thank god for that!”

“I’m worried about Ruari Thorne.” Colin pulled up his mobile and scrolled until he got to the website that he was looking for. “Thirty-two. Six foot three. Played for Aston Villa until his knee exploded on national television, and has been running a bakery on Portobello Road ever since. Before the knee, he dated Emily Jones, a Sports Illustrated model, Diwa. Then that Page Three girl from the Monaco Grand Prix who was all over the tabloids for six months because of that thing with her poodle.”

Diwa took the mobile and thumbed through the page.

“You didn’t see him this morning around Cassian,” Colin said. “He turned up on our doorstep with enough pastries to feed a street party, and he was charming, Diwa. He was sweet. He asked after Tala. He picked up that box of nappies I’d been shoving around the hallway for three days, and when he bent down to lift it, his arms did this—” Colin made a gesture that conveyed the mechanical action of a hydraulic press. “—and I watched Cassian’s face, and that boy was feeling things that he didn’t have the framework to understand yet, and a good thing too! But I knew exactly what he was thinking, Diwa, because I wanted to feel Ruari’s biceps myself.”

Diwa blinked at him rapidly as he took in that confession.