Page 46

Need Actual Proof

He sat on the edge of the bed and reread what was already there.

— weird late-October jokes

— knows house too well

— private / withholding

— unsettling timing

— maybe flirting? still annoyingly unclear

He frowned at the list. Some of it still looked weak. Too vibe-heavy. Vulnerable to mockery in front of anyone who mattered.

Then he added:

— writes down things I say

He stared at the new bullet point.

To its right, the cursor blinked with infuriating neutrality, as though waiting to see if he was going to be dramatic or useful.

Hakeem typed after a second:

— could be a fixation

He deleted fixation, typed surveillance, hated that, deleted it too, then wrote:

— too interested in exact wording

That felt safer. Dumber, maybe, but safer.

He set the phone down, then picked it up again instantly and added one more line beneath it.

— makes me feel weird about being noticed

He read that over and grimaced.

It sounded less like evidence and more like the opening sentence of a problem he did not want to have.

He locked the phone, unlocked it again, and added, against his better judgment:

— encouragement may be suspicious???

Hakeem stared at the three question marks, then left them there.

That was the hardest part to explain, even to himself. The late-night porch talk had not made Antonio seem less… off. It had made him stranger in a way that was harder to defend against. Hakeem knew how to handle obvious ominousness. The badly timed jokes about his birthday and a notebook page full of violent, house-specific language. Those things fit inside an existing framework and allowed him to stay on alert.

But encouragement? Shoulder nudges? Looking at him like what he wanted mattered?

That was messier. It pulled the danger somewhere raw and therefore harder to pin down.

Hakeem lay back on the bed with the phone on his chest and stared up at the ceiling fan. It was on and making an intermittent clicking sound that had once convinced him the house contained a hidden camera until he remembered its age.

Maybe Antonio wrote everybody down.

It was one thing to suspect Antonio was watching him. It was another to discover Antonio was listening hard enough to keep pieces.