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"You write things down."

It was not a question. Hakeem said it the way you set a card face up on a table. He was waiting to see what got played next.

Antonio's glass stopped halfway to his mouth for a fraction of a second. Then he drank, set it down, and said, "Yes."

"Things I say."

"Sometimes."

"Not sometimes. I've seen you do it. On the porch, after we talked about After Amy. You went inside and wrote down something I'd said. My exact words."

The room recalibrated around the admission. Hakeem felt the particular density that entered a space when something previously suspected became something openly stated. Antonio did not look away. He didn't flinch or deflect either. He sat with it in a way that suggested he had been expecting this conversation longer than Hakeem had been planning it.

"Yes," Antonio said again.

"Why?"

"Because you say things worth remembering."

The sentence was simple enough to sound innocent and precise enough to mean something else entirely. Hakeem wanted to be flattered. He reached for the feeling, but it slipped through his hands.

"That's not an answer," Hakeem said. "That's a compliment disguised as one."

"It's both."

"Why my words specifically? I said one thing on the porch about feeling like a placeholder, and you went inside and wrote it down before the conversation was even room temperature. That's not casual. What is that?"

Antonio looked at him for a long moment. The humor had left his face entirely. What remained was something Hakeem had seen only once before: the night of the bad phone call, when Antonio's composure had crumbled enough to show the effort it took to constantly hold himself together. He looked like he was deciding how much truth to trade for how much trust.

"You're hard not to notice," Antonio said. He looked at his glass after speaking, and it was the closest Hakeem had ever seen him show even a semblance of vulnerability.

Hakeem's breath caught. He masked it immediately, the way he always hid his tells. With the physical discipline of someone trained to control what his body communicated to a room. But Antonio saw it. Hakeem could tell by the way his eyes tracked the adjustment without commenting on it.

"Hard not to notice," Hakeem repeated.

"Yes."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning you walk into a room and it changes shape. You talk about horror like it's a moral position. You say things at night, with a grumpy old man on a porch, that most people don't say sober in daylight." Antonio's voice had dropped into a register Hakeem hadn't heard before—lower and stripped of the usual careful modulation. "You're… noticeable. That's not a decision I made. It's a fact I'm managing."

A fact I'm managing.

“Six years apart doesn’t make you old.” Hakeem hated how much his voice sounded like it was trying to convince Antonio.

Antonio had never given him that much at once, and it arrived without packaging, without being held at arm's length. He admitted that his roommate had become a problem he was actively dealing with. Hakeem wasn’t sure what to make of that.

From a guy with a notebook, that would have been flattering. From a guy with a manuscript draft featuring a character who performed nonchalance so badly it became its own kind of honesty, a character whose voice got brighter when he talked about something he loved, a character sketched with the kind of attention that hovered between tenderness and study… it was something else.

It was evidence. Or intimacy. Hakeem could not tell anymore, and the whiskey was not helping with the distinction.

"You manage me," Hakeem said. His voice came out too exposed. He didn’t put enough performance into it.

"I manage what you do to my concentration."

"That's worse."

"I know."