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"Creepy?"

"I was going to say unusual."

"It would be creepy, Hakeem."

"Okay, but what if the writing was good?"

Layla stared at him. "Did someone write about you?"

"It's a hypothetical."

"It is absolutely not a hypothetical. Your face is doing six things right now, and none of them are hypothetical."

Hakeem looked toward the street. A man was walking a senior dog past the tire shop. The dog looked like it had given up on ambition, which Hakeem found privately relatable.

"I just want to know," he said, "if it's possible for someone to use your life as material and have it not be a violation. Like, is there a version of that where it's just what artists do?"

Layla leaned back in her chair. "Are you asking me to give someone permission to steal your life and make it beautiful?"

"I'm asking if the beauty changes what the stealing is."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she said, "This sounds like the verge of a spiral."

"I'm not spiraling."

"Fine. You’re circling the spiraling. Whatever is going on with your roommate, you need to either talk to him about it or stop reading too deeply into things. Those are kind of the only two options."

Hakeem finished his water.

"Record the self-tape," Layla said, softer now. "Do one thing soon that's about you. Not about him or whoever's writing what. Go full force after the thing you actually want."

Hakeem met her gaze across the plastic table and thought, not for the first time, that Layla might be the only person in Los Angeles who saw him clearly.

Though Antonio was complicating that assertion.

"Fine," he said.

"Soon."

"Fine."

"If you don't send me proof in the next seventy-two hours, I'm going to come to your house, and I'm going to meet this roommate, and I'm going to make it everyone's problem."

"That is a terrorist threat."

"It is a promise from a woman who loves you. Eat your radishes."

Hakeem pulled into the driveway still carrying the conversation with Layla like a fish bone caught sideways in his throat—too small to be dangerous, too sharp to ignore. Does the beauty change what the stealing is? He sat in the car for a moment with the engine ticking and the late afternoon doing its slow golden damage to the street, and wondered when his life had started requiring this many metaphors about theft.

The front door was unlocked, which meant Antonio was home. Hakeem set his keys in the bowl and heard a page turn from the front room.

Antonio was on the couch with one leg folded beneath him and a book open against his thigh. His glasses were on. He was wearing a dark shirt Hakeem hadn't seen before, and the color did something to Antonio’s skin that made Hakeem feel like he should file a grievance. The lamp on the side table was on, throwing a warm circle of light that caught the edge of the bookshelf and made the room look like a set somebody had dressed for an intimate two-hander.

Antonio looked up. "You were up early."

Hakeem moved into the doorway. "I had lunch."

"Before noon?"