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Three dots.

LAYLA:

she's right. you ok?

HAKEEM:

no

LAYLA:

record the tape

tonight !!

HAKEEM:

i know

LAYLA:

hakeem

HAKEEM:

i know

He pocketed the phone and stood in the alley for a minute, letting the late afternoon melt into his brown skin. The sun made everything look cinematic, regardless of merit. A man across the street was carrying a potted plant to his car with the focus of someone transporting small, fragile life, and Hakeem watched him with the dislocated tenderness of a person who had just been told the truth by two women, back to back, and was running out of ways to avoid hearing it.

He drove home with the windows down and Tabbi's sentence turning in his head like a blade on a slow wheel.

Being the best person at The Last Cue is not a career. It's a hiding place.

Hakeem came through the front door with Tabbi's voice still in his chest and the particular exhaustion of having been emotionally deconstructed in a folding chair.

Antonio was in the front room, sitting on the couch with a glass in one hand and a bottle of whiskey on the low table in front of him. Not the kind of whiskey that came in a plastic handle from a liquor store with bars on the windows. This was booze with intention, in a bottle with a label totally unfamiliar to Hakeem.

Antonio looked up. His glasses were off. His face had a lucid quality Hakeem had started to recognize from the night before—the reserve still there, but more lucid. He looked like he was at the end of something he wasn't going to explain.

"Bad day?" Hakeem asked from the doorway.

"Bad enough for whiskey."

"Is that an invitation?"

Antonio reached for the bottle and poured a second glass without answering, which in itself was an answer. He set it on the edge of the table nearest the armchair and leaned back.

Hakeem crossed the room and dropped into the chair. He picked up the glass, careful not to spill something he couldn’t afford to replace. The whiskey was a deep copper color and smelled like smoke and something sweeter underneath—vanilla, maybe, or caramel, or whatever flavor profile expensive liquor used to justify its cost.

"Rough shift?" Antonio asked.

"I wasn't working. I went in to return a prop."

"And?"

"And Tabbi decided it was a good time to destabilize my entire sense of self."

Antonio's eyebrows lifted slightly. "Voluntarily?"