Page 11

“Don’t do this to me, Layla.”

“Older.”

“Barely.”

“How much is ‘barely’?”

“Thirty-two.”

Layla was twenty-four, and visibly impressed. “Okay, hot again. Is he emotionally repressed?”

“I think so?” Hakeem frowned, but he believed Layla’s guesstimate. She was legendary at clocking.

Layla groaned. “You are such a predictable genre.”

He salted the rim of a glass with maybe more force than necessary. “I am not interested in him.”

“Sure.” She dragged the word out like it was an after-sex cigarette.

“I’m not,” Hakeem insisted. He needed that to be true.

“Okay.” Layla’s hands went up in surrender.

“He’s just…” Hakeem trailed off.

Layla waited, blinking her large blue eyes rapidly in anticipation.

He poured, shook, and strained. Bought himself exactly six seconds. “Off.”

That got her attention in a different way.

Not because she thought he was right, necessarily. Because she knew him well enough to hear when his tone shifted out of performance.

She picked up a towel and started drying already-dry glassware, which was what she did when she was listening carefully while pretending not to. “Off how?”

Hakeem thought of the notebook page, the house tour, the bizarre precision of Antonio’s questions and warnings. The way Antonio always seemed to know exactly how much silence to leave before speaking, and his unnerving stillness. He felt intentional, and Hakeem wasn’t sure how to take that.

He also thought of how insane this was going to sound spoken aloud under a bat-shaped light fixture while a woman at the end of the bar demanded three more Final Grrrls for her friends.

“I don’t know yet,” he said finally.

Layla lifted one eyebrow.

“That is frustratingly vague, yes,” Hakeem said. “I hear it too.”

“You think he’s dangerous?”

“I think he’s…” Hakeem lowered his voice, though nobody around them was paying attention. “Too calm.”

Layla let out a tiny breath through her nose. “That’s your evidence.”

“There’s other stuff.”

“Like?”

He hesitated.

The notebook page felt weirdly difficult to confess to. Reading it had been such an intimate little trespass, and worse, the fragments themselves sounded ridiculous when isolated from the feeling they’d produced. It wasn’t proof of anything except maybe an overactive imagination and a man whose writing invited concern.