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"Around that time. It happens." Hakeem shrugged and hoped it came across as nonchalant.

"To you?"

Hakeem dropped onto the armchair across from the couch because avoiding the room would have been more revealing than entering it. Antonio set the book facedown on his thigh—spine up, page held, a gesture that managed to communicate both patience and the expectation that this interruption would be temporary.

"You look like you've been thinking too hard," Antonio said.

"I always look like this."

"No, you don't. You usually look like you're fighting a monologue. Right now, you look like the monologue won."

Hakeem sank into the chair. Layla's sentence was still in his mouth: are you asking me to give someone permission to steal your life and make it beautiful? He couldn't repeat it. But he could test the edges of the thing it pointed at.

"I was talking to Layla about acting," he said. "About how you build a character."

"Mm."

"The stealing part."

Antonio's eyebrows shifted slightly. Not up, exactly. Toward attention.

"When I'm working on something," Hakeem said, "I take from real people. Somebody's walk, the way a person holds a glass or pauses before they answer a question they don't want to answer." He let that land for a half-beat. "A thing someone said to me once that I never forgot. I put it in the performance, and the person never knows I took it."

Antonio closed the book around one finger, holding his place. "That sounds like a confession."

"I don’t think so. I mean, every actor does it," he said breezily. "I assume every kind of artist does."

"Probably."

"But there's a version of it that feels different. Where you're not just borrowing a gesture. You're—" He pretended to search for the word. "Mapping someone. Studying how they move through a space. What they notice and what they do when they think nobody's watching." He looked at Antonio. "That's a different kind of taking."

Antonio was quiet for a moment. His thumb pressed against the edge of the book's cover, a gesture so minor Hakeem would have missed it a month ago. He didn't miss anything Antonio did anymore.

"You're describing surveillance," Antonio said. "Not craft."

"Where's the line?"

"Intent."

"That sounds convenient."

Something flickered across Antonio's face. Recognition, maybe. The look of someone hearing their own logic played back at them from an angle they hadn't anticipated.

"What brought this on?" Antonio asked.

Hakeem shrugged. "Layla and I were talking about the industry. How everyone in L.A. is performing all the time, even when they think they're not. And I started thinking about the difference between watching someone and studying them. Because one of those is just attention, right? And the other one is⁠—"

He stopped.

"Is what?" Antonio said.

"Material."

The word arrived in the room and sat down between them. Antonio's eyes held on Hakeem's face. The lamp threw his shadow long across the floor and up the base of the bookshelf, where the row of spines Hakeem had browsed weeks ago—the poetry collections, the film books, the battered Mercy House with its margin notes—stood quiet as witnesses.

"You think about this a lot," Antonio said.

"I'm an actor."