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Instead, Antonio kept doing things that complicated the architecture of the threat. He encouraged him and listened too closely. He offered small smiles in tiny doses that Hakeem worked hard to earn. He let sentences land and walked away before Hakeem could recover his footing. It had the unnerving shape of someone lowering the lights in a room before you realized they had gone dark.

Hakeem sat up hard, annoyed with himself, and grabbed his phone off the bedspread.

Battery at seven percent.

“Of course,” he muttered.

His charger was downstairs. He had left it in the living room that morning because he had been half-asleep and focused on his possible and increasingly inevitable demise, which in his experience was now a deeply codependent condition.

He scratched his scalp, ruffling his coils, got up, and convinced himself to crack open the bedroom door.

The upstairs hall was dim—old paint and gentle shadows. The wallpaper still looked diseased in low light. Hakeem moved toward the stairs with the caution of someone who didn’t want to move at all.

Halfway down the hall, another door opened.

Antonio stepped out of the bathroom, drying one hand on a towel.

Hakeem stopped. Antonio went still.

For one suspended second, they both stood there in the narrow hallway as if somebody had blocked out the scene and forgotten to give them the next instruction.

Antonio was in a gray T-shirt and dark sleep pants now, looking approachable in a way Hakeem found encouraging, but he ignored the deep part of him that wanted to pursue. The danger that was once a theory and now seemed more like a plausible outcome turned his attraction into something difficult to manage. Antonio was tearing him apart and seeming to enjoy it.

That did not quell Hakeem’s growing concerns.

“Phone charger?” Antonio asked.

Hakeem frowned. “Do you always know where I’m going?”

“You looked downstairs and sighed like past-you disappointed present-you.”

“You’re too observant for your own good,” Hakeem said.

Antonio lifted the towel once in surrender and started down the hall.

At exactly the same time, Hakeem started forward.

They moved left together.

Stopped.

Moved right together.

Stopped again.

Hakeem let out a breath through his nose. “Oh, my God.”

Antonio’s mouth twitched.

They both tried once more, somehow making it worse.

“Do you want to dance?” Hakeem asked, exasperated. “Because this feels like dancing.”

That laugh came out of Antonio before he could hide it, warm enough to make Hakeem instantly regret being funny in his vicinity.

Then Antonio looked at him for one beat too long and said, “Come here.”

Before Hakeem could decide whether that was a request, an order, or a personal attack, Antonio stepped in.