Page 24

“Anything interesting?” Hakeem asked.

Antonio glanced down. “Mostly capitalism.” He left the room with it.

Antonio came back a minute later without the mailer and went straight for the coffee.

Hakeem’s eyes followed him, betraying his self-control. Unfortunately, Antonio was not becoming less noticeable as he moved around the kitchen. The shirt fit him too well. His jeans hugged strong thighs but not in a dated sort of way. Antonio simply made everything he wore look specifically tailored to his exact measurements, and a warmth bloomed low in Hakeem’s stomach.

The house had bad lighting in many places, but the kitchen in the morning was cruelly generous. Hakeem found himself looking away from Antonio with the stiff self-control of a man trying not to seem too interested in someone who might one day stab him.

That was a humiliating sentence to think, even to himself.

Antonio reached for the coffee tin on the counter. “You working tonight?”

“Yeah.”

Antonio nodded once, measuring grounds into the filter. “I’m making dinner tomorrow.”

That should have been a neutral statement of logistics between roommates. Something in Hakeem’s body took it as an intimacy.

Hakeem leaned back against the counter and tried to sound casual. “Are you informing me or inviting me?”

Antonio glanced over at him, unreadable for half a second. “Depends. Are you planning to be weird about it?”

“I’m often weird. It’s part of my mystery.”

“You’re not as mysterious as you think, Hakeem. I’ll have you figured out.” Antonio shrugged easily, like he hadn’t said something dangerous but also borderline enticing.

Hakeem snorted before he could stop himself.

Antonio’s mouth ticked up in a crooked smile, one dimple facing Hakeem. Hakeem suspected that Antonio was sparring with visible amusement on purpose, like he knew exactly what a fully unleashed smile would do to the average person and chose violence through restraint.

Antonio turned back to the coffee maker. “Try not to die before nine.”

There was that same wry tone that made something in Hakeem tighten.

“I think your recurring confidence in my demise is a bit odd,” Hakeem said, his tone making it clear he found it intensely odd.

Antonio set the scoop down. “More like confidence in your flair for catastrophe.”

“That’s barely different.”

“It is from where I’m standing.”

The coffee maker clicked on. Steam rose. Outside, somewhere beyond the kitchen window, a crow made a sound like an old hinge giving up.

Hakeem watched Antonio reach for a mug and was struck, again, by the maddening split between his instincts. Antonio could be unsettling without doing anything overtly menacing at all. He moved quietly. He looked too closely when he wanted to. He joked about death with a little too much ease. And yet there was also this: a man making coffee in the morning light, asking about dinner, sounding almost domestic in a house Hakeem still mostly experienced as a set.

It would have been easier if Antonio were actually cold, or if Hakeem did not keep noticing stupid details, like the lines of his shoulders or the way his hair looked when it was falling half over his forehead. Hakeem felt like reaching out and touching the thick strands; consequently, he shoved his hand in his pocket.

Antonio lifted the second mug without looking. “You want some?”

Hakeem blinked. “You’re making me coffee?”

“You look like you’d need supervision to make it yourself.”

“You’re not that much older than me, you know. That’s also not an answer.”

Antonio handed him the mug.