Page 17

He bristled instantly. “I am absolutely not.”

“You are.”

“It’s a reference.”

“It’s a fixation.”

“It’s a menu item.”

Layla grinned without mercy. “Sure.”

Hakeem took another sip anyway. It was a bad idea under impeccable lighting.

When he finally got home, the house was dark in a way that felt… self-aware.

The porch light was off. The front windows reflected back only the street and the tired shape of him crossing the yard with his keys in hand, work shirt clinging damply between his shoulder blades. The air had cooled, but Los Angeles never fully let go of the day in late September. It kept heat in the concrete and in the stucco and in the ribs, like a grudge.

Hakeem let himself in as quietly as possible.

No light under Antonio’s door. The low kitchen lamp wasn’t on, and the house felt like it was holding its breath around him. Old wood, stale coolness, and the faint smell of coffee grounds from earlier hung lightly in the air.

He locked the front door, then paused with his hand still on the knob.

He could not tell anymore if that was a normal thing to do in Los Angeles or if he was now doing it specifically because a handsome man with forearms that looked strong for someone seemingly reclusive had made one cursed joke and left one singular suspicious page out at the wrong time.

He grimaced as he took the stairs, and they did, in fact, scream in protest as Antonio said they would. So much for a low-key entrance, he thought.

Upstairs, his room was warm in a stuffy way that made him sneeze. The window had been shut all day, and the air inside had the stale, trapped feeling of a room that had spent too many hours thinking about itself. He kicked off his boots, sat on the edge of the bed, and opened his phone.

The recipe for The White Lighter was already in his notes app, written on top of an older grocery list in the quick, messy format of a man who believed genius was best stored wherever it first occurred:

WHITE LIGHTER

tequila

lime

smoked rosemary syrup

figure out not-birth-control-failure ash

He stared at it.

Then, without fully deciding to, he opened a new note. He looked at the blank screen.

Then he typed:

ROOMMATE THREAT ASSESSMENT

He snorted at himself.

Deleted THREAT ASSESSMENT.

Retyped:

Antonio Weirdness

Deleted that too, because it sounded flirtier than he intended.