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His body vibrated at a frequency he didn’t know how to turn off.

He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor, knees up, head back, staring at the ceiling.

His mind was a useless blank, offering no commentary on the fact that he had just dry-humped a man he was seventy percent sure was converting his life into a horror novel.

Seventy percent.

That number had been higher. It felt flimsy now. How could it hold up against the memory of Antonio’s face after that phone call, shadowed with a vulnerability Hakeem hadn’t been meant to see? Or the way he’d said 'disruptive' like the word was a confession?

The seventy percent—the careful architecture of suspicion—was nothing against the thirty percent that was all raw, physical data. It was the memory of Antonio’s hands in his hair and the sound he'd made when Hakeem bit him back. It was the man in the doorframe who had followed him upstairs and asked him to be the one to say stop. That thirty percent was louder than any evidence Hakeem had ever catalogued; it was drowning out the rest.

Hakeem pressed his fingers to his lower lip. It was tender. The cut was small, and he could feel the raised edge of it with his tongue. But it was there. Antonio had drawn blood. In a kiss. While pressed against him hard enough that Hakeem could have mapped the exact dimensions of his cock through two layers of denim.

He dropped his hand and stared at nothing.

His phone full of suspicious bullet points now read like the punchline to a joke Hakeem was too turned on to find funny.

He didn't reach for it.

Not because he didn't want to document what had just happened. The impulse was there. He wanted to open the app, scroll to the bottom, and type something that would make the last twenty minutes fit inside the framework he'd been building. Something clinical that sounded like an analysis instead of a want.

— kissed me. Initiated. Followed me upstairs. Drew blood.

That was what the list version would look like. Four data points. Clean. Containable.

But the truth version, the one that wouldn't fit in bullet points, was that Antonio had kissed him like he had been thinking about it for longer than tonight, and Hakeem had kissed him back like he stopped pretending he didn't want to. The truth version included the way Hakeem's hands had found skin under Antonio's shirt without hesitation, the way he had pulled instead of pushed, the way his body had made decisions his brain hadn't authorized, and every single one of those decisions had felt correct.

The truth version was that Hakeem had been building a case against a man he wanted to sleep with, and the case and the wanting had become so entangled that he could no longer tell which one was the structure and which was the shrine.

His legs protested as he got up off the floor. He crossed to the bed and looked at the wall that separated his room from Antonio's.

The wall was thin. He knew this because he had heard Antonio's desk chair, his drawer, and the sound of Antonio shuffling pages on multiple occasions. Tonight, the wall offered nothing. Antonio was either sitting in silence or moving with the practiced soundlessness that had alarmed Hakeem during his first week and continued to unsteady him.

Or, Hakeem’s brain offered, Antonio is on the other side of the wall doing exactly what I’m doing.

Hakeem pictured him sitting with the aftermath, running the scene back, trying to figure out what had just happened to his carefully maintained position.

Hakeem lay back on the bed.

Fuck. The self-tape. He was supposed to record the self-tape. Tabbi and Layla encouraged him. He had driven home with the intention of setting up his phone and favorite lamp and doing the thing that scared him. Instead, he got a little buzzed, confronted his roommate about surveillance, and then kissed him against a doorframe while bleeding from the mouth.

This was not the evening Tabbi had prescribed.

He rolled onto his side and looked at the nightstand. The lamp sat there with its crooked shade, the one he'd driven ten hours across the desert with because leaving it behind felt like leaving proof he'd existed somewhere before this. Beside it, his phone, and only a dark screen with no notifications. Layla was probably asleep. Tabbi was probably doing inventory. The world outside this room was continuing, populated by people who had not recently ground their erection against a potential murderer's thigh and liked it.

Potential murderer.

He turned that over.

Antonio could find Hakeem disruptive and still be dangerous. Those things were not mutually exclusive. The question was no longer whether Antonio wanted to kill him.

The question was whether Antonio wanted to kill him on the page as a character he was building or in the house they shared. Hakeem was starting to suspect that the answer was the page, which should have been a relief, except that being killed on someone's page meant being known thoroughly enough to be ended convincingly. Being known like that by someone who kissed him like that was its own kind of death.

He was in so much trouble.

Hakeem pressed his face into the pillow and let out a sound that was half groan, half laugh, muffled enough to stay private. His mouth stung against the fabric. He could still feel Antonio's hand in his hair. Could still feel the precise geography of Antonio's body against his. Hakeem now had hard, specific evidence of Antonio's wanting—an urgency too raw to be a performance.

Hakeem rolled onto his back again.