Saturday
830 Words
It was Emeka who suggested it.
On Friday evening, while they were packing up the lab, he said — carefully, casually, like it hadn't been on his mind — "Do you have plans tomorrow?"
Adaeze looked up. "Tomorrow is Saturday."
"I know what day it is."
"I usually do my grocery shopping on Saturday."
A pause. "Before or after lunch?"
She looked at him. He looked back. Completely serious. Completely patient.
"Before," she said.
"Then after lunch," he said. "There's a place I want to show you."
She considered asking what place. She decided against it.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine," he agreed.
He was smiling slightly as he left. She pretended not to notice.
He picked her up at one.
She had changed three times — which she refused to examine too closely — and settled on something simple. She was a practical person. It was a practical choice.
He was waiting outside in a clean dark car, leaning against the door with his phone in his hand, and when he looked up and saw her he put his phone away immediately. Like she had his full attention before she had even reached him.
"You look nice," he said simply.
"Thank you," she said simply back.
They drove through Lagos with the windows slightly down, the city flowing past them — market women and buses and children in school uniforms even on a Saturday, because Lagos never fully stopped. He drove the way he did everything else — calm, unhurried, certain.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"You'll see."
"I don't like surprises."
"I know." He glanced at her briefly. "You'll like this one."
It was a bookshop.
Not a large one — tucked between a tailor and a pharmacy on a quiet street in Surulere, with a hand-painted sign and a door that stuck slightly when you pushed it. Inside it smelled of paper and wood and something faintly like coffee. Shelves from floor to ceiling. Books arranged by feeling rather than any system she could identify. A ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.
Adaeze stood in the doorway and felt immediately at home.
"How did you find this?" she asked.
"Exploring." He was already moving between shelves with the ease of someone who had been here before. "I come here on weekends when the gospel music gets too loud."
She walked slowly through the shelves. Nigerian fiction. African history. Medical journals mixed in with poetry. A whole shelf of books in Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa.
She picked up a novel — one she had been meaning to read for two years and kept forgetting.
"That one is good," Emeka said from the next shelf, without looking up from his own browsing.
"You've read it?"
"Twice." He pulled out a thin volume of poetry and examined the cover. "The ending will frustrate you."
"I like frustrating endings."
He looked up at that. Something warm in his expression. "Of course you do."
They spent an hour in the bookshop. No work. No data. No professional distance to maintain. Just two people moving through shelves, pulling out books and putting them back, occasionally reading passages aloud to each other, occasionally just standing in comfortable silence in the particular peace that bookshops create.
She bought three books. He bought two and the poetry collection.
Afterwards they found a small café nearby and sat outside under a blue umbrella with cold drinks and the unhurried ease of a Saturday afternoon.
"Tell me about your father's pharmacy," he said.
She smiled at the memory. "It was always busy. He knew every customer by name. He knew their families, their health history, which ones were managing money carefully that month and needed a quieter conversation about their prescriptions." She turned her glass slowly. "He treated medicine like a relationship, not a transaction."
"That's where you get it," Emeka said.
"Get what?"
"The way you talk about your patients. Your samples." He looked at her steadily. "You talk about data like it belongs to real people. Because to you it does."
Adaeze looked at him.
"Most people don't notice that," she said quietly.
"I notice everything about you," he said. Simply. Directly. Without drama.
The afternoon sun was warm on her face. Somewhere nearby someone was playing music — soft and familiar, floating out of a window above the street.
"This is a good Saturday," she said finally.
"Yes," he agreed. "It is."
He was looking at her when he said it. Not at the street or the café or the blue umbrella overhead.
At her.
Adaeze looked back at him and let herself, just for this Saturday afternoon, not think about Abuja or countdowns or the complicated mathematics of thirty days minus whatever today was.
She just sat there in the Lagos sun with a man who noticed everything about her and a bag of books she had been meaning to read for two years.
It was enough.
For now it was more than enough.
- Writer
