Page 84

Antonio's face did not change. He was listening with his whole body, the way he always did, and Hakeem could not tell if it was composure or something else.

"I told myself it was nothing," Hakeem continued. "A journal thing. Poetry, maybe. Whatever. But then you started making jokes about my birthday. About turning twenty-seven and surviving October. They weren't normal jokes, Antonio. They were specific. Every time I started to relax, you'd say something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up."

Hakeem was talking faster now. He could hear himself building the case the way he'd built it in the notes app—point by point, puzzle piece by puzzle piece—and the structure that had felt so solid in private sounded different in the open air of the room.

"Then you got a package, and you took it and walked away so quickly, I thought… I dunno. Maybe that means something. Maybe you have something to hide."

Antonio's mouth opened slightly, then closed. He did not interrupt.

"Then you started writing down things I said. My exact words. On the porch, after we talked about the audition. I watched you go inside and write down a sentence I'd said five minutes earlier, like you were collecting me. I couldn't figure out why someone would do that unless they were—" He stopped. "Unless they were building something. Using me for something."

The room was very quiet. The lamp buzzed faintly. Outside was the distant thrum of a city that did not care what was happening inside this house.

"Then I found the manuscript," Hakeem said.

Antonio went still.

There was a different quality to this stillness, like something was pulled taut behind his face. A wire being tested.

"Your desk drawer," Hakeem said. "The one you closed on me when you caught me near the notebook. I opened it. I know I shouldn't have. I know that was a violation of your privacy, and I know you drew a line and I crossed it. But I opened it, and I found editorial correspondence, revision notes, and a manuscript. With your handwriting in the margins."

He watched Antonio's expression. It was changing by degrees—the composure thinning, the stillness becoming less like control and more like bracing.

"The manuscript describes this house," Hakeem said. "The hallway where sound carries. The kitchen window where you double-checked the lock. The room where” —he made air quotes around the words—‘the floorboards announce you six seconds before you arrive.’ A character who is young and restless and fills a room by entering it and then pretends not to notice. A kitchen scene where someone watches from a doorway while someone else cooks, and the watching is too specific⁠—"

His voice caught.

"It's me," he said. "The character is me. Or close enough to me that the distance doesn't matter. You've been writing about me, in this house, while living with me, and you didn't tell me."

Antonio was looking at him with an expression Hakeem had never seen. It was not the guarded reserve or the distant, dry amusement. It was not even the rawness from the doorframe. It was something closer to exposure. He looked like he’d been carrying something for a long time and was watching it be set down in front of him by someone who had found it without permission.

"That's a draft," Antonio said. His voice was quiet. "It's fiction. It's what I do."

"What do you do?" Hakeem stared at him. "You told me you didn't write. I asked you in this room, sitting right there, if you annotated novels for fun, and you said⁠—"

"I said sometimes."

"That's a lie by omission, and you know it."

"It's privacy."

"It's privacy about me. You're writing about me, Antonio. My words, my house, the way I move. You put the tinga dinner in a manuscript. You wrote a scene about someone standing in a doorway watching someone cook, and you filed it with an editor. That's not privacy. That's⁠—"

He was losing the thread. The case was sprawling. He could feel it spreading in directions he hadn't planned, each piece of evidence pulling loose another piece until the whole thing felt less like a presentation and more like something spilling.

"And the research," Hakeem said. "The page in the recycling. Biomechanics of Blunt Force Trauma in Residential Settings. With your handwriting. Hallway too narrow—adjust or use kitchen instead? You're researching how people get hurt in houses, Antonio. In this house. While checking every lock and testing every window and telling me October is hard on old houses, three weeks before my twenty-seventh birthday."

The sentence hung in the room. Hakeem heard it from outside himself and felt, for the first time, the full shape of what he was saying. He was accusing Antonio of planning to hurt him. He was standing in their shared living room and telling this man—this quiet, careful, infuriating man who had kissed him with blood on both their mouths—that he believed the attention was predatory.

Antonio's face had gone still.

"You think I want to hurt you?" he said.

It was not a question. It was a sentence being held up to the light, examined, and found almost too heavy to hold.

Hakeem's throat tightened. "I think something is going on that you haven't told me. I think you've been watching me and documenting me and keeping secrets and making jokes about whether I'll survive, and I think I need you to explain why, because the alternative is⁠—"

"The alternative is that your roommate is a murderer who also cooks you dinner and follows you upstairs to kiss you against a doorframe." Antonio's voice was flat. "That's the theory?"