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“Even you?” Hakeem hadn’t meant for it to come out flirty, but it had anyway.

Antonio offered an almost-smile, there and gone.

The listing for the house said it was queer-friendly. Hakeem was surprised that a man living alone had stated that in the ad. He definitely didn’t need to. Hakeem felt it was fair to assume that Antonio was at least bisexual. I mean, how else would he know to use queer and not LGBTQ-friendly?

It was small, but Hakeem caught it, and that meant safety in a city that could never really promise it.

Hakeem hung the garment bag carefully over the closet door and set the lamp on the floor. “Well. She’s hideous,” he said, looking around. “But I do think she could be made beautiful.”

“The room or the lamp?”

“Don’t pit sisters against each other.”

Antonio rested one shoulder against the doorframe. “Kitchen’s downstairs. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. I usually work late, so if you hear me up, I’m not haunting you.”

A beat.

The sentence landed with just enough weight to make Hakeem look at him.

Antonio looked back, unreadable as stone.

“Great,” Hakeem said. “That was definitely my first concern.”

“Shouldn’t it be?”

Antonio spoke with an edge—not quite flirtation, not quite menace, but enough to make the hairs on Hakeem’s arms prickle.

Hakeem smiled because that was often the easiest thing to do when he didn’t know what category a man belonged in yet. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Antonio pushed off the doorframe. “Take your time getting settled.”

Then he left, footsteps receding down the hall and onto the stairs with the confidence of somebody who knew exactly which parts of the house would complain under him.

Hakeem stood very still in the middle of the room, realizing Antonio’s footsteps had made hardly a sound as he left. No creaking stairs, no complaining wood.

Then he shut the door, turned the lock out of instinct, and immediately unlocked it again because that felt dramatic.

He was fleetingly worried that even the click of the lock carried.

“This is not forever,” he told the room.

The room did not answer, though it did feel judgmental.

He opened one bag and started unpacking enough to create the illusion of stability. Toiletries in the caddy he’d take back and forth to the bathroom, because even though it would be a pain in the ass, a caddy was impermanent. He plugged his phone charger into the wall by the bed and placed two pairs of black jeans onto the shallow shelf in the closet. He hung up his small collection of work shirts for The Last Cue, all in differing shades of oxblood, faded from so many washes. Doc Martens with black ribbon laces lined up under the window.

Then, he turned towards the box that carried his very essence. This was the one he was looking forward to unpacking the most.

He crouched and peeled back the flaps. Books, DVDs, old horror paperbacks with creased spines, a couple of battered VHS tapes, and a framed pulp horror print he’d wrapped in a T-shirt. His treasured items, the small clutter of self he always carried from one sublet to another. Not enough to make any place fully his, but enough to insist he had existed somewhere.

He set a stack of movies on the windowsill, then stopped and laughed softly to himself.

This was what his life was turning out like, apparently.

A theater-school dropout with more opinions than credits that worked at The Last Cue, a horror bar and dinner theater where he was a full-time bartender, sometimes stagehand, and ever auditioning actor. He carried his future around in duffels and cardboard, telling himself every compromise was just one bridge on the way to being discovered.

Well, discovered wasn’t the goal, not really. He wanted to be seen correctly. That was different.

He didn’t want fame in the broad, disgusting sense. He wanted obsession. He wanted the kind of role where people clipped together playbills and screenshots of his face and wrote essays about how nobody else could have played it. He wanted to be the kind of horror actor people loved with an embarrassing intensity. Final-boy energy, a smile with blood on his teeth. Beautiful and terrifying and unforgettable. He wanted somebody, somewhere, to watch him on a screen and feel rearranged.