Page 45

“It is.”

Then Antonio pushed open the screen door and disappeared into the house, leaving the porch with that faint shift in atmosphere that seemed to follow him everywhere, as if stillness itself got rearranged when he left a room.

Hakeem stayed where he was.

The neighborhood had gone quiet. A television flickered blue through somebody’s front window across the street. Dry wind moved through the palms with a sound like paper dragged slowly over a table. The porch boards still held warmth.

He should have gone upstairs.

Instead, he sat there replaying the conversation as if his brain had mistaken it for incriminating material. The casting call. The nudge to his shoulder. The way Antonio had said then audition seemed like the answer was obvious, and Hakeem was only delaying it. None of that was inherently suspicious. In fact, the problem was almost worse than suspicious. It had been kind.

Kindness from Antonio arrived with enough restraint that it held more significance than if it had come from anyone else.

Hakeem hated how much space that took up in him.

After a minute, he got up, stretched the ache from one shoulder, and went back inside.

The living room lamp was still on. Warm light spread across the old floorboards, the faded rug, and one arm of the couch. The house had settled into its late-night face: smaller sounds, deeper corners, every creak gained importance. Hakeem was halfway to the stairs when he noticed Antonio at the dining table.

He had changed positions rather than clothes. One elbow on the table. Head slightly bent. A notebook lay open in front of him, a black one Hakeem had seen more than once and liked less every time. Antonio wrote with his left hand in a quick, controlled slant, pausing every few seconds as though listening for the next sentence somewhere slightly outside himself.

Hakeem slowed. Antonio had not noticed him yet. Or maybe he had and was pretending otherwise.

Hakeem stood perfectly still in the archway between the living room and hall, half-concealed by the wall in a manner that would have humiliated him if anybody had asked. Antonio turned one page back with his fingertips, glanced at something already written, and then added another line.

Then Antonio paused, the pen hovering for one second, and said under his breath, barely audible from where Hakeem stood, “placeholder with okay cheekbones.”

For one absurd second, Hakeem thought he had misheard. Maybe Antonio had said something else. A phrase with the same cadence. An innocent string of words that merely happened to sound exactly like the sentence Hakeem had said out on the porch, only a few minutes ago, while feeling unusually open and therefore, in hindsight, deeply unwell.

But then Antonio added, quieter still, “beneath me,” and wrote again.

Hakeem stared at the notebook as if staring harder might let him see through the page.

A ridiculous cluster of feelings hit him, so tangled he could not sort them cleanly.

Exposure came first, fast and hot. The ugly sensation of having left something important visible, and uncertain if anyone had seen it.

Irritation followed on its heels. Antonio could not pull a conversation out of him in that low, attentive voice only to turn it into… something before the warmth had even left the air.

And under both of those, low and humiliating, was the unmistakable flicker of flattery.

Antonio wrote it down.

Not the casting-call name. Not some broad summary like Hakeem in one of his moods. He wrote Hakeem’s words. His exact phrasing. The strange shape of a sentence he shared because Antonio had listened closely enough to hear where it bent.

Antonio drew a line through something, rewrote it, then leaned back and rubbed once at the corner of his mouth with the side of his thumb. Hakeem noticed with a flicker of disdain that Antonio looked good thinking.

Hakeem backed away before he could be caught watching and took the stairs in near silence, though the old house objected with a faint complaining groan under his weight. He kept waiting for Antonio to call after him.

Nothing came.

His room felt too warm when he stepped inside. He shut the door, leaned against it for a second, and stared at nothing.

“Absolutely not,” he said aloud, to the room, to the ceiling, to the general concept of being observed.

He pushed off the door, crossed to the bed, and snatched up his phone.

His notes app opened to the list he had already started the other night. The title still sat there with private, irritating sincerity.