Page 76

The house was quiet. Tomorrow, he would have to see Antonio in the kitchen or the hallway and act like a person who had not just unraveled completely against a doorframe. Tomorrow, he would have to record a self-tape for a movie he was finally starting to admit he wanted. He wanted it really fucking bad, actually.

He reached for his phone. Not for the notes app. He opened his texts.

HAKEEM:

layla

He typed it and stared at it, and then deleted it because what was he going to say?

He followed me upstairs. I kissed him. He bit my lip, and I bled, and then I bit him back, and it was the best kiss of my life and I still don't know if he's going to kill me or write about killing me and I'm not sure which one is worse because at least if he kills me I won't have to feel this confused ever again.

He locked the phone and set it down.

Through the wall, a sound. The creak of a bed frame accepting weight, as if Antonio had just sat down or lain back, mirroring Hakeem's own position. Two men in adjacent rooms, separated by plaster and the terrible shared knowledge of what had happened in the four feet of hallway between them.

Hakeem touched his lip one more time. By morning, the cut would be a faint line, barely visible—the kind of mark only someone looking closely would notice.

Antonio, of course, always looked closely.

Hakeem closed his eyes.

Chapter Eight

Bad Idea, Right?

Hakeem left the house at six in the morning because staying felt like a confession he wasn't ready to make.

He'd been awake since four-thirty, lying on his back in the dark, listening to the house around him. His lip had turned into a faint, raised line overnight, and he kept touching it with his tongue like a rosary. Through the wall, nothing. Antonio was either asleep or doing his particular brand of silence that was indistinguishable from absence. Hakeem had lain there running probability calculations he wasn't qualified to perform, and eventually decided that the only responsible action was to leave before Antonio's door opened. Seeing his face in morning light with the taste of yesterday evening still inhabiting his mouth would require a level of emotional coordination Hakeem did not currently possess.

He dressed without turning on the lamp and grabbed his keys from the nightstand instead of the bowl downstairs. He internally thanked his past self for not using the key bowl in the hallway. The hallway was near the kitchen, and the kitchen was where Antonio materialized every morning looking criminally good. Hakeem knew he wasn’t anywhere near composed. Skipping out early was best for everyone involved.

The front door closed behind him with a click that sounded too loud for six a.m. He didn't look back.

Los Angeles at dawn was a different city. Less certain of itself. The light came in flat and gray through the marine layer, turning the palms into silhouettes and the parked cars into shapes that looked borrowed from a film someone was half-finished editing. Hakeem drove with the windows cracked and turned the radio off, which was unusual for him—he normally needed noise the way other people needed caffeine, a baseline hum to organize his thoughts against. This morning, his thoughts did not want to be organized. They wanted to replay the doorframe.

He took Sunset west because it was the longest version of going nowhere.

The boulevard unrolled in front of him in its usual parade of contradictions. A yoga studio next to a bail bonds office. A vintage clothing store with a mannequin in the window dressed like it was advertising funeral chic. A taquería was already open, steam rising from a vent in the roof, and Hakeem thought of lunch with Layla at Taquería Gloria. Replaying the conversation about stealing and beauty, Hakeem felt a pang of something he couldn't name that pointed back toward the house.

He passed a billboard for a horror movie he'd auditioned for a year ago and hadn't gotten. The lead actor's face, forty feet high and drenched in theatrical blood, looked down at him with the serene confidence of a man who had never been messy enough to kiss a roommate and then spent the night cataloging his poor decisions on the floor of his bedroom.

Hakeem could feel the exact shape of Antonio's teeth against his cut lip, and that specificity made it impossible to file under ordinary.

He pulled into a gas station on La Brea and parked. Sitting in a parking lot felt marginally less insane than driving in circles through a city that reminded him of things he was trying to avoid. He filled the tank and bought clearly stale coffee that tasted like it had been brewed during a previous administration. He sat on the hood of his car in the gray morning light and looked at his phone.

No texts from Layla checking in on the self-tape, and Hakeem was grateful. He still had another day to submit. He could do this. But would he?

The notes app sat in its folder with the quiet menace of a loaded weapon. He didn't open it.

Instead, he sat there drinking his bad coffee and thought about Las Cruces. He'd played the lead in almost every community theater production from the time he was eighteen until he left four years ago. He remembered what it felt like to be the best person in a room and know it. It wasn’t arrogance. It was simply the way you knew you were left-handed or afraid of heights. It was a fact about himself that didn't require defense.

He thought about Tabbi calling The Last Cue a hiding place, Layla saying record the tape, and Antonio calling him disruptive. He wondered when his life had become a thing that other people narrated better than he did.

The faint morning chill was starting to burn off. The city put on its daytime face, growing louder and more convinced of its own importance. Los Angeles was full of people driving to jobs they either loved or tolerated, and Hakeem wondered how The Last Cue fit into either category. He finished his coffee, crushed the cup, and sat there for another five minutes because going back to the house still felt like walking into a scene he hadn't memorized yet.

He went back anyway. His self-tape equipment was there. Truthfully, he was going back because Antonio was there. Avoidance had a shelf life, and Hakeem's expired somewhere on Sunset between the yoga studio and the billboard.

The house was not the way he'd left it.