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"You're telling me I'm a distraction."

"I'm telling you you're disruptive." Antonio's eyes were on him with an intensity that had stopped pretending to be casual. "There's a difference."

"What's the difference?"

"A distraction goes away when you stop looking at it. A disruption changes the thing it's in."

Hakeem's heart was beating at an intensity that alarmed him. His pulse hammered against his wrists and at the backs of his knees. Antonio had just told him, in the plainest language he'd ever used, that Hakeem had altered something structural in him.

He should have been afraid. The manuscript evidence said he should be afraid. The notes app with the ever-growing list, the weeks of accumulated suspicion, the borderline not-quites—they all told him to treat this as confirmation. Antonio admitting that Hakeem had gotten under his skin was not the same as a romantic confession. It could just as easily be a predator lamenting the inconvenience of caring for his prey.

But Hakeem's body was not listening to the notes app.

His body was listening to the sound of Antonio's voice when it dropped below its usual register. To the way disruptive was said, like a word Antonio had been carrying for a while, turning it over in his mouth the way he turned phrases over in his notebook, looking for the version that was most true.

"You should stop saying things like that," Hakeem said breathlessly.

"Like what?"

"Like you've been thinking about me when I'm not in the room."

Antonio's jaw tightened enough for Hakeem to see the muscle flex once beneath the shadow along his face.

"Would it help if I lied?" Antonio asked.

"It would help if you made sense."

"I make perfect sense. You're just not ready to hear it in the order it comes in."

Hakeem abruptly stood up. He didn’t want to leave, not exactly, but sitting was too vulnerable, and standing gave him something to do with the energy that had been building since the first pour of whiskey.

"I need to—" He gestured vaguely toward the stairs. "I have to do something."

"The self-tape?"

"Something."

He set his glass down on the table and moved toward the hallway. The stairs were right there. His room was right there. The door he could close, the bed he could lie on, the ceiling fan he could stare at while his body did whatever it was going to do with what Antonio had just said to him. Safety was twelve steps up and one closed door away.

He heard Antonio get up behind him.

He didn't turn around. He took the stairs and his hand found the banister. The old wood creaked once under his weight, announcing him to the house the way it always did, and he thought briefly about Antonio's comment from weeks ago—the floorboards announce you about six seconds in advance—and it hit him with a small, sickening thrill that Antonio may have been tracking his movements through the house by sound. Learning his rhythms. Knowing where he was by the particular note the wood made under his weight.

He reached the top of the stairs. His bedroom door was open, and he could see the edge of his bed and his small stack of favorite cult horror VHS tapes stacked in a messy pile on top of his nightstand.

"Hakeem.”

Antonio's voice came from behind him.

Hakeem turned around.

Antonio stood three steps below the top of the staircase, one hand on the banister, looking up at him. The hallway light was behind Hakeem, which meant Antonio's face was half-lit and half in darkness. Hakeem had the disorienting thought that this was how Antonio probably appeared in his perception of self—entirely composed of edges and shadows, revealing only the parts he chose.

"What?" Hakeem asked with a voice that was barely there.

Antonio came up the last three steps, and Hakeem did not move. Couldn’t move. Didn’t want to move.

He should have. He had an open, available place he could retreat into. He could close the door and be alone with his spiraling and his notes app and text Layla until she finally convinced him to move. He had twelve inches of hallway between his body and the threshold of safety, and he did not take a single one of them.