Chapter 20 - Halfway
860 Words
She did not sleep.
This was becoming a pattern she did not appreciate.
She lay in the dark of her room in the Ikoyi mansion listening to the rain slow and stop and the night settle into the particular quiet that followed Lagos rain. Clean and heavy and smelling of wet earth and flowers.
She stared at the ceiling.
Six inches.
That was how close they had been standing.
She had measured it approximately and involuntarily and now she could not unmeasure it.
She turned onto her side.
She was five months into a twelve month contract. Halfway. The exact mathematical midpoint of this arrangement sat in her chest like a stone she had not expected to find there.
Halfway meant six months left.
Six months left meant an ending she had agreed to and signed her name to and understood completely when she had sat across a desk from this man and said tell me the terms.
She understood it now too.
She just understood it differently than she had then.
She turned onto her other side.
The problem was not that anything had happened on the veranda.
Nothing had happened on the veranda. Two people had stood in the rain and looked at each other and then gone inside for dinner and been completely normal about it.
The problem was how much she had wanted something to happen.
That was new information she was not entirely sure what to do with.
At 3am she heard footsteps on the stairs.
She did not pretend this time that she was going down for water.
She got up put on her robe and went downstairs because she wanted to and she was tired of lying to herself about why.
He was in the kitchen. Of course he was. Dark shirt. Coffee. Looking out the window at the wet garden.
He turned when he heard her.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
She went to the kettle. Put it on. Got her chamomile. Sat on the counter the way she always did now.
He leaned against the opposite counter and watched her.
"You could not sleep either," he said.
"No."
"The rain."
"Yes," she said. Because that was easier than the truth and they both knew it was not the whole truth and neither of them pushed it.
The kettle boiled. She poured her tea.
Held the mug in both hands the way she always did.
"Emeka," she said carefully.
"Adaeze."
"We are halfway."
He was quiet.
"Five months," she said. "Roughly."
"I am aware," he said.
She looked at her tea.
"I want to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly."
"I always answer honestly."
"I know." She looked up. "Is this still just an arrangement to you."
The kitchen was very quiet.
He looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that went somewhere deeper than surface. The kind that cost something to give and something to receive.
"No," he said.
One word. Quiet and certain and without any of the careful control he usually kept around everything.
Her chest did something complicated.
"What is it then," she said softly.
He pushed off the counter. Crossed the kitchen slowly. Stopped in front of her where she sat on the counter. Close. She was at his eye level this way. Face to face. Nothing between them but the small careful distance of two people who had been circling something for months.
"I do not know yet," he said quietly. "But it is not nothing."
She looked at him.
This man who had dismantled her life and rebuilt it into something unrecognizable. Who ate her mother's jollof rice and remembered the difference between her quiets and moved over on piano benches and kept chamomile in the cupboard without being asked.
Who had stood on a veranda in the rain and looked at her mouth and then gone inside for dinner like a man exercising considerable restraint.
"It is not nothing for me either," she said.
The words landed between them like something fragile and real.
He reached out.
Tucked her hair back the way he had in the piano room. But slower this time. His fingers staying at her jaw for just a moment longer than necessary.
She did not move.
He did not move.
"What do we do with that," she said. Very quietly.
"I do not know yet," he said again.
"That is not a very satisfying answer."
"No," he agreed. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "But it is an honest one."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she reached up and covered his hand with hers where it rested against her jaw.
Just for a second.
Then she lowered it gently.
"Goodnight Emeka," she said softly.
His eyes held hers.
"Goodnight Adaeze," he said.
She went upstairs.
She lay in the dark and pressed her hand to her jaw where his fingers had been and thought about halfway and endings and the particular terrifying thing that happened when an arrangement stopped feeling like one.
She thought about it for a long time.
Then she slept.
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