Page 31

He read it over.

Then he added one more line:

— ideally before my birthday

That, more than anything, made the whole thing feel real.

He didn’t believe with certainty that Antonio was planning something. He couldn’t. But Antonio had made late October feel personal. He had made Hakeem’s age feel like part of some private joke that he wasn’t invited into.

Hakeem, for all his instincts toward theater, did not actually enjoy being the last person to understand the premise of a scene.

Downstairs, a cabinet door shut softly.

Hakeem locked his phone, set it face-down beside him, and stared toward the dark window over his bed.

This was no longer just a vague sense that his roommate was strange. It had become a question.

Hakeem had never been good at leaving questions alone.

Actual proof, it turned out, was hard to gather when the person in question kept doing things like feeding you.

By the following evening, Hakeem had spent most of the day trying not to think about what was living in his notes app and the questionable almost-flirtation that seemed to be gaining velocity whenever he and Antonio crossed paths.

He spent most of the day failing.

The house smelled different when he came downstairs just after seven.

Not the particular moth-y scent of an old home or the ghost of coffee, as it usually was by evening. Not the faint medicinal sweetness of a too-strong candle from two rooms over wafting throughout the home. This was a warmer, richer smell. Garlic and something smoky enough to make his stomach tighten with interest before the rest of him had caught up.

He slowed in the doorway.

Antonio was at the stove in a charcoal henley with the sleeves pushed up and the top two buttons undone in that effortless, sexy way he always presented. The kitchen light caught on the thin gold cross at his throat when he moved. His glasses were on tonight, which made the whole thing worse. Less dangerous-looking in theory. More dangerous in practice. Like he had been translated into a version of himself that should have read softer, and instead only came off more precise.

A pot simmered on the stove. Tortillas sat warming in a clean dish towel. There was a bowl of chopped cilantro on the counter, limes quartered neatly beside it, and a little dish of radishes sliced into thin pink moons like Antonio had decided presentation mattered and refused to apologize for it.

For one quiet second, Hakeem just stood there and watched him.

Antonio looked up.

There was the smallest pause, and then recognition settled into place.

“You’re hovering,” Antonio said.

Hakeem leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “You’re cooking like somebody with a point to make.”

Antonio turned back to the stove and stirred once. “Maybe I’m hungry.”

“That’s not what this looks like.”

“What does it look like?”

Hakeem let his gaze move, deliberately, over the whole kitchen. The laid-out toppings. The folded towel around the tortillas. The extra plate was already waiting near the sink.

“It looks,” he said carefully, “very intentional.”

Antonio’s mouth twitched.

“Good,” he said.