Page 56

Hakeem swallowed and moved to the desk.

The notebook wasn't there. Wherever Antonio kept it now, he had taken Hakeem's interest seriously enough to relocate it. The surface held only a mug with a pen resting across the top, a small pile of loose pages turned facedown, and a cracked-spine reference book on California architecture.

The drawer was right there.

He could still hear Antonio's voice from that night. The calm factual weight of the rest of it isn't yours. The boundary had been clear, and Hakeem had respected it for days, which he felt was a reasonable amount of time to honor a line drawn by a man who might be documenting your existence.

He pulled the drawer open.

Inside: a yellow legal pad with notes in Antonio's handwriting. A small stack of printed pages, clipped together. A manila envelope, unsealed, and thick enough to hold something substantial. Beneath that, a second stack of pages—heavier, marked up in pencil, with the dense formatting suggesting a manuscript in revision.

Hakeem's hands were trembling slightly. He told himself it was the temperature. He picked up the clipped pages first.

An email chain, printed. The top message was from someone with 'editorial' in a signature line Hakeem couldn't fully read in the low light. The tone was professional—notes on pacing, a suggestion about cutting a chapter opening, a line that read, "the house material is your strongest section, but you're over-relying on spatial description to carry tension that should live in dialogue." The response beneath it was brief, measured, and signed with an initial Hakeem didn't recognize. Not Antonio. Just a letter and a period, efficient as a door closing.

Hakeem set the email down and picked up the manuscript pages.

The formatting was clean. Chapter heading. Page numbers. Wide margins filled with pencil annotations in Antonio's slanted hand. Hakeem tilted the first page toward the window light and read.

The opening paragraph described a man walking through a house at night.

Not a haunted house. Not a horror set. Just a house—old, warm, full of the kind of sounds that only became noticeable after midnight when there was nobody to perform for. The prose was controlled and atmospheric. Each sentence arrived with the restraint of someone who understood that tension lived in what you withheld, not what you announced.

Hakeem read another paragraph. Then another.

The house in the manuscript had a hallway where sound carried. The kitchen had a window that let in too much morning light. There was a room upstairs where the floorboards announced arrivals six seconds in advance.

Hakeem's mouth went dry.

He turned the page. The character—the one being watched, or the one doing the watching, it wasn't entirely clear—was described in quick, economical strokes. Young. Restless. Expressive in a way that made self-consciousness look like a performance rather than a flaw. The kind of person who fills a room by entering it and then pretends not to notice the displacement.

Hakeem set the page down, then picked it back up because his body could not decide whether to keep reading or stop breathing.

He turned to the next page. A scene in a kitchen. Someone cooking. Someone watching from a doorway, cataloguing details with the wrong kind of attention—not suspicious, exactly, but too specific. Too practiced. The prose lingered on the sound of oil in a pan and the way a particular man moved through domestic space as if he had been choreographed by his own discipline.

Hakeem recognized the dinner.

Not the exact dinner. The details were transposed, shifted, and fictionalized enough to deny. But the architecture of the scene—the watching from the doorway, the quiet competence, the moment where proximity became its own form of language—was Thursday night. It was Antonio at the stove in the charcoal henley. It was the tinga. It was taste said like a word with too much force.

His pulse was loud enough to feel in his fingertips.

He flipped further into the manuscript, scanning now rather than reading, catching fragments. A line about someone's voice getting brighter when he talked about something he loved. A passage about a man who performed nonchalance so badly it became its own kind of honesty. A scene where two people stood too close in a hallway, and neither of them moved first.

Hakeem put the pages down.

He stood in Antonio's room with his hands flat on the desk and his whole body doing something he didn't have a clean word for. He wasn’t angry. What he felt was more layered and far less dignified. The feeling of discovering that you have been translated into someone else's language without being asked, and that the translation is⁠—

Good.

The quality of it settled into his lap like a cat he was allergic to—unwelcome, warm, and already making itself at home before he could decide whether to push it off. The writing wasn't obsessive. It was precise, careful, and unmistakably the work of someone who did this for a living. The editorial notes and revision marks confirmed it. The formatting, clipped correspondence, and professional tone of the whole operation confirmed it.

Antonio was a writer. A real one. Not a man with a creepy notebook and a suspicious hobby. A working, professional, apparently published writer who had been sitting across the hall from Hakeem, producing actual literature while Hakeem bartended and fake-died in themed environments.

And he was writing about Hakeem. Or at least, someone close enough to Hakeem that the distance between fiction and documentation felt uncomfortably thin.

Hakeem stared at the manuscript page in his hand. Antonio had not written these pages between shifts like a man with a compulsion and a notebook. The pacing was deliberate. The tension was structural, not accidental. He understood how to let a scene build pressure without releasing it, how to keep a character suspended in the space between knowing and admitting.

It was a real, practiced, undeniable craft.