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His hands landed low on Hakeem’s hips.

Not high enough to be mistaken for an accident. Not low enough, either. Antonio placed large, warm hands on the sharp front edges of Hakeem’s hip bones, thumbs settling with careful pressure through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.

Antonio guided him one easy step to the side. It was a small correction, barely any force at all. Antonio ended up close, their bodies lined almost straight in the skinny strip of hallway. His hands stayed there one second longer than necessary. Maybe two.

Hakeem could feel every place Antonio touched him as if his body had become a map with only one country on it.

He looked up.

Antonio was already looking at him.

It was the eyes that made it worse. The hands were one thing. They could maybe be explained away as efficient. A man solving a traffic problem in a hallway.

His deep, tired, brown eyes ruined Hakeem.

Antonio’s gaze dropped to his mouth with slow, unmistakable awareness, then came back up. His breathing had changed, and he wasn’t hiding it. So had Hakeem’s. The air between them felt too dense to belong to a normal house.

Hakeem became intensely aware of everything at once: the faint smell of crisp soap and night air clinging to Antonio’s skin, the way his own mouth was watering in anticipation of something, and the slight shift of Antonio’s thumb against the fabric over one hip as though he had thought better of it half a second too late.

This, Hakeem thought dimly, was exactly how people got murdered in thrillers.

With terrible judgment and excellent eye contact.

Antonio’s voice, when it came, sounded like it was taking great effort just to speak.

“There,” he said.

It was such a useless word for the amount of damage it did.

Hakeem’s mouth parted on reflex. His eyes dropped without permission to Antonio’s lips this time. He studied their shape in the low hall light, the shadow at his jaw, and thought with humiliating force, how badly he wanted to know the texture of Antonio’s lips.

That was when he felt the undeniable shift in his body. Desire hit him low and immediate, impossible to misread. He was hard. There was no softening it into chemistry or tension or some prettier word that would let him keep a shred of distance and dignity from what was happening. His body had already made the decision for him.

And because the universe had no mercy, Antonio noticed.

Hakeem saw it happen in real time. Antonio’s expression changed by a degree. His breath caught so slightly that another person might have missed it. His eyes dropped once between them and came back up heavier.

Hakeem followed the glance before he could stop himself.

The evidence was there. His own erection was obvious enough under the thin fabric of his sleep pants, and he could see the answering tension in Antonio’s pants, too—less visible only because Antonio had frozen, as if stillness itself might disguise it.

For one hot, silent second, Hakeem understood with catastrophic clarity that Antonio knew what he was looking at. Understood that they were both standing in a hallway in the middle of the night, arousal aching between them, and trying not to react like men who had accidentally stepped into the wrong genre.

Antonio’s jaw flexed, and then he removed his hands.

The loss of contact felt indecent.

Hakeem swallowed with difficulty. “Okay.” It came out breathless and much too soft.

Antonio’s eyes stayed on his face. “Okay.”

Worse. Much worse. His voice sounded like it had been pulled across gravel.

Hakeem hated that his first instinct was still suspicion. It rose right alongside the want, braided so tightly into it he could not separate the strands. Antonio had to know what he was doing. There was no way a man could put his hands there, look at him like that, let silence stretch to the point of pain, and not know. Maybe charm was part of the method. Maybe this was exactly how a person got disarmed: not by safety, but by becoming too aware of his own body to think straight.

The thought should have cooled him down; instead, it made everything worse.

He stepped back first. Then, because retreat on its own felt too much like surrender, he added, “You are a public hazard.”