Page 19

— this is maybe the worst one actually

He stopped there, thumb hovering over the screen. It was ridiculous, but organized. That made him feel both better and worse.

He set the phone down on his chest and stared at the ceiling. The old plaster had a faint water stain in one corner that looked, in the dark, like a face turning away. Down the hall, the bathroom pipes gave a small metallic tick. Somewhere outside, a car passed slowly enough to drag light across his window and then disappear.

Nothing definitive or useful happened, but enough details were adding up to make his mind catch on them like the loose thread of a sweater on a nail.

He slept badly, woke twice, and dreamed once that Antonio stood at the foot of his bed holding the thrifted lamp and saying, in a tone of mild correction, “This shade is all wrong for you.”

The next morning, he woke to sunlight already in the room and the sound of a cabinet closing downstairs.

For a second, he lay still, recalibrating. Morning in the house was almost ordinary in a way that made him feel foolish. The wallpaper went back to being faded roses instead of a set decorator’s idea of dread. The floor was only a floor. His VHS stack on the windowsill looked less haunted than earnest.

His brain reloaded.

Roommate. Notebook. White lighters. Possible murder.

He dragged a hand down his face and wiped the sleep from his eyes. He put both hands in his hair to shake out his loose, almost-afro and rolled his shoulders before getting out of bed.

He dragged on a faded Creature from the Black Lagoon T-shirt and ripped black denim shorts, did a quick check in the mirror that revealed a face still handsome enough to survive. He kept a clean-shaven face pretty much at all times and was glad that he didn’t really need to shave today. There was only a light suggestion of shadow, but he decided to ignore it.

The kitchen was different.

Hakeem stood in the doorway and tried to identify what had changed. Nothing was missing, but the room felt corrected. The glass he'd left on the counter the night before was gone—washed and put back in the cabinet. The dish towel he'd draped over the faucet handle was folded into a neat square beside the sink. The salt shaker he'd used and left slightly off-center on the table had been returned to its position next to the pepper, aligned with a precision that suggested someone had opinions about where seasonings belonged.

Hakeem opened the cabinet. His glass was there, dry, placed rim-down among the others as if it had never been used.

The kitchen counters were wiped, and the floor looked swept, though not recently enough to smell like a cleaning product. Everything was in its rightful position, the one it had occupied when Antonio first showed him the room during the tour, as if the house had been gently returned to a factory setting overnight.

Hakeem had lived with enough people to know that some of them cleaned. His second apartment in LA had a roommate who vacuumed at midnight. His first had a woman who labeled her shelf in the refrigerator with a label maker she kept in a locked drawer, which was a level of organizational commitment Hakeem respected and feared in equal measure.

This wasn't cleaning. This was restoration. Antonio had walked through the common spaces while Hakeem slept and put the house back the way it was supposed to look, as if Hakeem's presence in it was something that needed to be corrected for each morning. Hakeem tried not to think about the fact that the house looked like a set between takes.

Antonio was at the counter making coffee.

He had one hand braced against the counter and the other around a French press. He wore a heather gray t-shirt that was lifting slightly as he leaned, revealing a thin strip of tight brown skin. Dark jeans slung low on the waist, showing off (of course) Calvin Klein underwear. Hakeem knew he was a millennial and was thankful that Antonio got the message that skinny jeans were no longer in fashion.

His vintage glasses sat casually on top of his wavy black hair, and Hakeem couldn’t move for a moment. He was taking him in before his mind could catch up to stop his gawking.

Morning light from the back window caught on the thin gold cross chain at his throat and made him look briefly, annoyingly, like the kind of man in an indie movie who would ruin you, but not before exposing you to all the things that would make you a more interesting human for a future partner.

He glanced up eventually, and Hakeem cleared his throat, but wasn’t sure if it came out as casually as he would have liked.

“Morning.”

“Allegedly,” Hakeem muttered.

Antonio poured coffee into a mug, then another. “You look like you fought for your life.”

“I work in the service industry.”

“Right.” Antonio set the second mug on the counter and nudged it toward him. “That was implied.”

Hakeem went to it automatically, then immediately realized that accepting coffee from a potential threat compromised the optics of his whole internal case.

The coffee smelled good. That overcame his paranoia, but only slightly. He accepted the mug.

Antonio leaned one hip against the counter. “What nights do you usually close?”