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He picked up Invasion of the Body Snatchers because it was perfect and because watching a movie about the terror of being replaced by something that looked like you but wasn't felt, given their history, like the kind of thematic joke they earned.

Antonio appeared in the doorway with a bowl of popcorn and two glasses of water. He looked at the case in Hakeem's hand.

"Good choice," he said.

"You stacked the deck."

"I stacked it with options. You chose the one about paranoia."

"That feels like a comment."

"It's an observation."

They got into bed.

Not with the charged, heavy-breathing energy of the doorframe, or the carefulness of the forgiving kiss they shared in this same room. Antonio propped pillows against the headboard. Hakeem climbed in on the other side. Antonio set the popcorn between them and aimed the remote at the projector. The wall filled with light, then color, then the opening frames of a movie about a man who discovers that the people around him are being quietly replaced by something alien and exact.

Hakeem settled against the pillows and felt the strangeness of the ordinary wash over him. He was in Antonio's bed, watching a movie, on his previously dreaded birthday. The manuscript was somewhere in this room; the man who wrote it was beside him, and Hakeem was here too, all three present in different ways, at the same time. Together, in a space that had been the site of secrecy and violation and fear, now converted into something that looked, in the blue projector light, unbearably domestic.

"You moved your desk," Hakeem said.

"I did."

"For this."

"For you."

Hakeem looked at the wall where the desk had been. The outline was still faintly visible, a slightly lighter rectangle where the wood had blocked the sun. The ghost of the workspace. The ghost of Toni's process, displaced by a twenty-seventh birthday.

"This is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me," Hakeem said, "and I'm including the time a man in college wrote me a sonnet that rhymed Hakeem with fever dream."

"That's a good rhyme."

"It was a terrible sonnet."

"But a good rhyme."

Hakeem threw a piece of popcorn at him. Antonio caught it in his mouth with an efficiency that should not have been attractive but absolutely was.

They watched the movie, and the popcorn disappeared. The water was forgotten. At some point, Hakeem's shoulder found Antonio's and stayed. Antonio didn't move toward him or away. He let the contact exist, steady and content, while the movie played its slow, paranoid unraveling across the wall above them.

Hakeem was aware of Antonio's body beside him with a clarity that had nothing to do with suspicion and everything to do with need. The warmth of his arm against his. The way his breathing shifted when something on screen was well-paced—a filmmaker's instinct, or a writer's, the recognition of craft in motion. The faint smell of his soap and something underneath it that was just specifically him, the scent that had been steadily dismantling Hakeem's resolve since the first week.

The movie reached its final act. The paranoia peaked. The famous last shot filled the wall, and Hakeem felt Antonio's body go still beside him with the attention of someone experiencing a perfect ending.

The screen went dark.

The room held its silence for a moment while the projector hummed. The blue light settled into a steady glow on the wall, blank now, waiting.

Hakeem turned his head.

Antonio was already looking at him.

Antonio was six inches away, wearing an expression that had nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with the fact that they were lying in his bed in the near-dark on the night Hakeem turned twenty-seven. The house was quiet and neither of them was pretending anymore.

"Hi," Hakeem said.

"Hi."