THE SPACE BETWEEN US

Chapter Five: The Wedding

November, and somehow — Ada was fairly sure Chiamaka had engineered it, possibly with Funke's help, the two of them having apparently formed an alliance devoted entirely to Ada's love life — Ada and Emeka ended up assigned to the same car for the three-hour drive.

"This feels like a setup," Ada said, sliding into the passenger seat while Emeka loaded her bag into the trunk.

"It absolutely is a setup," Emeka said. "Chiamaka told me herself. She said, I'm quoting her exactly, 'my sister needs to be trapped in a car with you until she admits something.'"

Ada groaned and put her head against the window. "My sister has no boundaries."

"I like your sister," Emeka said, starting the car. "She's direct. It's refreshing."

The drive was easy in a way Ada hadn't expected. They talked about everything and nothing — his job at the engineering firm he'd joined, her latest project and the maddening client who kept changing his mind, a school trip they'd both been on at thirteen that had ended with their entire class stranded at a broken-down bus depot for six hours, singing hymns badly to pass the time because someone's radio had died along with the bus. She found herself laughing more in three hours than she usually did in a week, and somewhere past the halfway point, she realized she'd stopped checking her phone entirely, hadn't even noticed it sitting untouched in her bag for over an hour, for Ada Okafor was practically a religious event.

They stopped at a roadside stall for suya, and stood eating it off newspaper by the side of the road while the sun went down behind them, the sky turning the particular orange-pink that only seemed to happen on the road out of Lagos.

"You're different than you were in September," Emeka said, watching her lick pepper off her thumb without any of her usual self-consciousness about it.

"Different how?"

"Looser," he said. "Like you've stopped bracing for something."

Ada considered that. It was true, though she hadn't noticed it happening. "You make it hard to stay braced," she admitted, which was as close to honest as she'd let herself be with him yet.

At the wedding the next day, she watched him dance with his mother during the family segment, watched him make an entire table of elderly aunties laugh, watched him catch her eye across the reception hall more than once and hold it a beat longer than friendship usually allowed. Funke, seated beside her, leaned over at one point and murmured, "You're doing the thing where you pretend you're not watching him, but you're watching him," and Ada elbowed her hard enough to spill a little of her drink.

When the DJ played a slow song near the end of the night, Emeka found her by the drinks table and held out his hand without saying anything.

"One dance," he said. "For old times."

She took his hand.

They didn't say much while they danced, which surprised her, given how much they'd talked in the car. It didn't need words. His hand was warm at her waist, steady, careful — the same steadiness she'd noticed in the way he fixed pipes and held babies and answered hard questions without flinching. She was aware, in a way she hadn't let herself be aware of anything in years, of the exact distance between them, and of how much she wanted to close it.

"Ada," he said quietly, close enough that she felt the word more than heard it.

"Don't," she said, though she didn't move away either. "Not here. Not like this."

He nodded, and stepped back first, giving her the space she'd asked for, though something in his face told her the conversation wasn't over. It was only postponed. On the drive home the next day, they were both quieter than they'd been on the way there, the unfinished moment sitting between them like a held breath, neither of them quite ready to let it out.