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Antonio rinsed a knife and set it in the rack. “Doing what?”

“Hovering near me like I’m about to walk into traffic.”

The faucet dripped once into the silence. Antonio looked at him sidelong and said, “Would you prefer I didn’t?”

The question undid something small and essential in him. Antonio was asking for real. It was not a joke. It held the possibility—terrifying and bright—that Antonio cared what the answer was.

Hakeem opened his mouth, but nothing useful arrived.

Antonio waited exactly one second, then turned back to the sink as if he had not just asked something that changed the atmospheric pressure in the room.

Hakeem dried the same glass for too long.

“No,” he said finally, voice rougher than he wanted. “I didn’t say that.”

Antonio did not look at him, but his lips parted, just slightly. That motion felt more intimate than being pinned against a wall would have. Not that Hakeem would have protested being pinned against a wall by Antonio’s firm forearms.

By the time the dishes were done, Hakeem’s nerves were lit up enough to qualify as weather.

Antonio dried his hands, then leaned one hip against the counter and studied him in the kitchen’s yellow light.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Antonio said.

“What thing?”

“The one where you look like you’ve decided I’m either dangerous or interesting.”

Hakeem laughed once, because the worst truth was that Antonio felt increasingly like both.

“That sounds like a trap,” he said.

“Most true things do.”

The line sat between them with everything else: the dinner, the touching, the question Antonio had not really taken back, the impossible possibility that this might not just be Hakeem spiraling alone in his own body anymore.

Antonio glanced toward the stairs. “I’m gonna shower.”

“Okay.”

He pushed off the counter, then paused beside Hakeem.

“If you’re going to hang outside the bathroom,” Antonio said quietly, “at least be subtle.”

Then he walked away, leaving Hakeem in the kitchen, frozen with the damp dish towel like a man who had just been flirted with at gunpoint.

The bathroom door shut upstairs a minute later.

He set the towel down and went into the hall on feet that no longer felt fully supervised by his brain. The upstairs landing was dim except for the line of light under the bathroom door. Antonio’s bedroom door, a little farther down, stood not fully closed.

Hakeem stopped outside it.

This was, objectively, a terrible idea.

It was also the first real chance he had gotten since making the note. He was too wound up—by suspicion, by want, by the terrible possibility that the two were feeding each other. He couldn't go to bed and let his questions rest.

He edged closer.

From the hall, he could see the corner of the bed, the chair with Antonio’s jacket over it, and the desk near the window. On the desk sat a mug, clipped pages turned facedown, and a black notebook.