Page 78 of That Defining Moment

Lysander pulled back. Every instinct Hamish’s self-defence-obsessed alpha brain had drilled into him over six months was screaming at him to drive his knee upward into the space between Dane’s legs, but he needed this man to show up to a recording studio in a fortnight’s time feeling cooperative.

“I’ll message you about the recording day,” Lysander told him, and stood.

He left a tenner on the table for the coffees, said goodbye to Gale, then he walked out of the café into the bright July afternoon.

His mobile was already in his hand before he’d crossed the pavement. He rang his father first, because he’d promised.

“I’m out,” Lysander said, when his father picked up on the first ring. “It went fine. He said yes to the podcast.”

Colin was quiet for a moment. “And how do you feel?”

Lysander looked up at the sky above the King’s Road, cloudless and offensively blue, and searched himself for the wreckage he’d been bracing for since five that morning. His pulse remained steady. His hands weren’t shaking, and he was looking forward to getting home where his alpha and his family were waiting for him.

“I’m hungry,” Lysander said.

“Oh, thank God.” Colin let out a breath so forceful it crackled the speaker. “Diwa’s making pancit. Get home.”

Lysander ended the call and stood on the pavement for a moment longer, letting the foot traffic stream around him while the July sun warmed his shoulders through his shirt. Then he opened WhatsApp, found Hamish’s name, and typed three words.

He said yes.

Hamish’s reply arrived before Lysander had finished pocketing his mobile.

Proud of you, Sander. Now come home so I can congratulate you properly. And by properly, I mean I’ll make you a cup of tea and we can watch telly, because your father is in the next room and I’m not an animal.

Lysander laughed, flagged a cab, and went home.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The studio Lysander had hired was in a converted warehouse off Shoreditch High Street, and it was, by any honest assessment, worse than the one in Diwa’s basement.

The acoustic foam on the walls had gone grey at the corners, one of the headphone jacks crackled unless you held the cable at a specific angle, and the engineer who’d let him in had introduced himself as Baz before disappearing into a back room with a Pot Noodle. Diwa’s rig would have run circles around all of it, and Diwa emphasised this.

But Diwa’s rig sat three floors beneath the bedroom where his daddy napped fourteen hours a day, and the nursery where Tala slept with her fists up by her ears. Dane didn’t get to walk into any of that. So Lysander had paid a stranger four hundred quid for half a day’s studio time, and considered it money well spent.

He’d arrived an hour early to set up. He got two mics up on boom arms, levels checked, and his notebook lay open on the desk with his question order written. He’d recorded thirty seconds of himself reading the room tone and played it back, and his voice had come out steady and tolerable.

Dane arrived twelve minutes late.

“Sander!” He came through the booth door with his arms already opening, bringing a wave of expensive aftershave in with him. “Look at this. Very professional. Very serious.” He took in the room. “You’ve gone all Louis Theroux on me.”

“Sit down, Dane.”

Dane dropped into the chair, hooked one arm over its back, and let his knees fall open to a width that annexed most of the space beneath the desk, exactly as he had for the seven years Lysander had been with him. Then he leaned into the mic and flicked the pop filter with his fingernail. It gave a soft thwack. He did it again, tilted the boom arm two inches towards himself, and tapped the mic capsule twice with the pad of his finger, sending a dull thump through Lysander’s headphones.

“Leave the mic alone, please,” Lysander said. “It’s set where it needs to be.”

“Just checking it’s on.”

“It’s on. That’s my job. Yours is to sit there and just talk.”

Dane raised both hands in surrender, grinning, and settled back. “Sitting and talking. My two greatest talents.” He paused. “Well. They’re at least in the top five.”

Lysander let that one sail past without rising to the challenge. He passed a pair of headphones to Dane, who settled them over his ears, adjusting the band so it wouldn’t disturb his hair.

“Say something for me. Use your normal speaking voice. I need to set your level.”

“Something for me,” Dane said, into the mic. “Normal speaking voice.”