Page 39 of My Roommate Is Trying To Kill Me

His pulse thudded once.

He stepped over the threshold.

The room smelled faintly of cedar, laundry detergent, and old coffee. Hakeem was braced for theatrical creepiness, but alas, there was no shrine to violence. Antonio’s bed (which Hakeem turned away from quickly) was made neatly. A pile of books stacked with care. A nicer lamp than Hakeem’s was angled exactly right over the desk. Enough restraint in the room to suggest discipline, taste, or secrets—possibly all three.

Hakeem moved closer to the desk. The notebook lay within reach.

“Looking for something?”

He jumped, a hot wave of shame, humiliation, and possibility rising in him all at once.

Antonio stood at the doorway with a towel wrapped around his waist, hair heavy and damp from the shower, glasses in one hand. He looked more tired than angry. Overall, he looked more disappointed than either.

“I can explain,” Hakeem said.

Antonio’s gaze moved from his face to the notebook, then back. “Can you?”

“Yes.”

Antonio waited, but nothing usable arrived.

He stepped into the room, not rushing Hakeem, not raising his voice, not giving him the clean relief of obvious anger.

“You do this thing,” he said.

Hakeem swallowed. “What thing?”

“You act like you want to accuse me of something.” A beat. “Or ask me out. I haven’t figured out which.”

Everything in Hakeem’s body stopped. Hope came first again. Bright and immediate. Fear followed right behind it.

Because if Antonio was joking, Hakeem was going to have to move to another planet. And if he wasn’t⁠—

He still did not know if that was safer.

“You think very highly of yourself,” Hakeem said.

Antonio smirked, but nothing about the situation was funny, not really. “No, I don’t.”

He stepped past Hakeem into the room, close enough that their shoulders almost brushed.

“I think,” he said, picking up the notebook from the desk, “you’re very easy to read when you want something.”

Then he slid the notebook into the drawer and closed it.

A boundary quietly set.

Hakeem stood there, pulse loud in his own ears, staring at the damp curl of hair near Antonio’s temple, the straight slope of his nose that he just noticed was faintly scattered with freckles, or how Antonio, having just caught him snooping, still seemed more like a man restraining himself than one shutting a door.

It was unbearable.

It was also, Hakeem thought with a burst of miserable clarity, maybe the most attracted he had ever been to someone while still feeling one wrong move from becoming a local cautionary tale.

Antonio turned back toward him.

“If you want to borrow a book,” he said, voice even, “you can ask.”

A beat.