Page 99

Then she walked away.

Hakeem looked at Antonio. "That was Tabbi being generous."

"That was terrifying."

"She’s also one of my favorite people. Welcome to the show."

Antonio drove them home.

Hakeem didn't usually let other people drive him. His father had taught him that a man should always know where his car was and how fast he could get to it, which was either practical advice or the worldview of someone who had grown up in a border town during the eighties. Tonight, however, Hakeem sat in the passenger seat of Antonio's car with his head back, the window cracked, and his birthday gifts in his lap. Antonio had brought the Marasco paperback and the manuscript page to the bar because he knew somehow that it physically hurt Hakeem to be separated from both. Hakeem felt a faint buzz from the White Lighter Layla had made him drink before he left The Last Cue because she insisted he couldn't work his own birthday without at least having his fill of his own invention.

The drive home was short. Antonio drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the console between them. Hakeem looked at that hand and thought about what it had done to him in a doorframe and what it had done on a manuscript page and how both of those things were the same gesture translated into different languages.

"You're staring at my hand," Antonio said.

"I'm composing."

"Composing what?"

"I'll let you know when it's finished."

Antonio's mouth curved. He didn't look away from the road, but Hakeem could see the smile in his profile.

They pulled into the driveway. The porch light was on; everything else was waiting. Hakeem spent weeks reading that darkness as a threat, but tonight it looked like a house that was glad to have them back.

Inside, Antonio dropped his keys in the bowl and said, "Go upstairs."

Hakeem looked at him. "That's ominous."

"It's a birthday thing."

"We have established that it doesn't reduce the ominousness."

"Go upstairs, Hakeem."

Hakeem went upstairs because, despite everything, he had apparently not developed any resistance to Antonio giving him instructions in that voice. The hallway was dim, but Antonio’s door was open. Hakeem’s was closed.

"Yours or mine?" Hakeem called back.

"Mine."

Hakeem stopped at the threshold of Antonio's room. This door had seen his apology, his snooping, his dismissal. It had become a locked gate. Now it stood open.

He went inside.

The room was different. It was transformed. The desk had been pushed to the far wall. The chair was tucked away. The bed was still in its place, neatly made, but the space between the bed and the opposite wall had been cleared. Antonio had placed a pair of sleep pants and an oversized T-shirt on the bed with a note that said: “for you.” Against the wall, propped on a low shelf that Antonio must have assembled while Hakeem was at work, sat a projector. An actual projector aimed at the blank white wall above the headboard, its lens angled to fill the space with whatever it was about to show.

Hakeem quickly changed out of his work clothes while examining a small stack of Blu-rays and DVDs beside the projector. On top of the stack, a handwritten note in Antonio's slanted script:

Pick one. I'll make popcorn.

Something impossible to name filled the space, warm and heavy in Hakeem’s chest.

Antonio had set up a scene in his room for Hakeem's birthday. He had taken the most private room in the house, the room that represented everything he kept controlled and hidden, and turned it into a place for them to watch a movie together.

Hakeem looked at the top of the stack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the 1978 version, with Donald Sutherland, and the ending that had given Hakeem nightmares for a formative week when he was fourteen. Beneath it, The Changeling with George C. Scott. Beneath that, Suspiria. Beneath that, Let the Right One In.

Every single one was a film Hakeem had mentioned at some point in passing, or during a shift story, or on the porch. Antonio had been listening. He had listened to the specific titles, versions, and preferences Hakeem dropped into conversation, unaware he was building a map of his own taste.