Waiting On a Text

I Figured

The rest of her first year passed the way most first years do—a blur of deadlines, portal crashes, lecturers who threatened attendance more than they took it, and hostel lights that always seemed to go out just before she finished an assignment. She learned about the campus the way everyone eventually did: which gate the keke drivers overcharged you at, the bend behind the library where reception disappeared mid-call, and exactly which lecturer's office door needed two knocks before anyone answered.

Zuri didn't talk to Toby much after that first meeting. No group chat, no crossing paths, no shared classes to force the issue — their worlds just didn't overlap like that. She wasn't avoiding him, exactly. She wasn't expecting conversations or run-ins either, not really. If anything passed between them, it was small: a random text every so often, a reply to a funny status update, a reaction to some Snapchat snap that vanished ten seconds after she'd seen it. Nothing that added up to much of anything on its own.

There was one evening, walking back from a night class that had run late, when the rain caught the whole campus completely unprepared. One minute it was just a warning wind, the next it was coming down in sheets, and everyone scattered for shelter under whatever roof was closest — a small, damp crowd of them squeezed under the narrow overhang outside the departmental building, waiting for it to pass. Water dripped steadily off the edge of the roof onto someone's shoes, someone else complaining loudly about a phone that had gotten wet, a burst of laughter somewhere in the crush when a boy tried to make a run for it and immediately regretted it, soaked through in seconds.

Toby had been among them, further down the same overhang with a friend, and Zuri hadn't expected him to notice her at all in the crush of bodies. He didn't come over. Didn't say anything. Just, on his way past once the rain eased, dropped a spare umbrella into her hands without breaking stride — "saw you didn't have one" — and kept walking to join his friends before she could even properly thank him. Not waiting around for her reaction. Nothing.

She stood there holding it long after he'd gone, oddly unsettled by how small a thing it was, and how much it had somehow mattered. She used it all the way back to the hostel, and then, somehow, for the better part of a week after — forgetting, every single time it rained, that it wasn't actually hers to keep.

She ran into him properly about a week later, crossing paths near the cafeteria, the umbrella swinging from her wrist out of pure habit by then. His eyes landed on it, and something like recognition crossed his face.

"You were planning on stealing that permanently?"

Zuri froze. "Oh." She looked down at it as if she was seeing it for the first time. "I forgot I still had it."

"I was wondering where it went," he said, though there was no real accusation in it, just easy amusement.

"You can keep it," he added with a shrug. "Looks like you've already adopted it."

She noticed things about him after that, more than she meant to. He was tall — six feet, easily, the kind of height that made him hard to lose even in a packed lecture hall. That he laughed loud and easy, that people gravitated toward him without him seeming to try for it. That there was a senior — Audrey, someone mentioned eventually, though Zuri never actually asked — who he seemed to light up around in a specific way, a way that was different from how he was with anyone else.

She wasn't sure what to do with any of it, the noticing. It wasn't a crush — she was fairly certain of that, or told herself she was — just a strange, low-grade awareness that sat somewhere she didn't have a name for yet, the way you might notice a song was stuck in your head without remembering exactly when it got there. She didn't examine it too closely. Examining it felt like it would make it into something, and she wasn't ready for it to be something.

Zuri filed it all away without much feeling attached to it, or tried to. It wasn't her business. She was a freshman who barely managed two full sentences in a conversation; whatever Toby's love life looked like belonged to a world several floors above whatever she was currently occupying.

By the time the first year ended, she couldn't have said she knew him. Not really. Just knew of him, the way you know the shape of someone from a distance — familiar outline, no real detail filled in.

The second year started differently. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because absence has a strange way of making room for things that presence never did.

Toby left for his internship in the first few weeks of the semester — six months, some company two states away, the kind of opportunity people back home would call "a very good one for a boy his age," said with the specific reverence Nigerians reserve for anything involving a real salary and a real office. Sam mentioned it once, off-hand, between complaints about a horrible 8 a.m. class, and Zuri hadn't thought much of it. Why would she?

It was Toby who reached out first, actually, a few weeks into his internship — a random text asking how second year was treating her, whether the department had changed much since he'd been buried in an office all day answering to people twice his age. She almost didn't reply. Old habits — the two-sentence version of herself was still close to the surface, still the default setting she reached for around anyone she didn't know well. But something about talking to someone who wasn't physically around, who couldn't see her hesitate before answering, who couldn't watch her fumble for the right words in real time, made it easier.

She hadn't expected it to turn into anything. It started with a story she'd posted late one night, some small complaint typed out mostly for her own satisfaction — if this lecturer says "this is not secondary school" one more time — the kind of thing she never expected anyone specific to respond to.

Her phone buzzed. Toby replied to your story.

She rolled her eyes automatically before she'd even opened it. The smile arrived anyway. "Here we go."

Toby: 😂😂😂 did he finally release the test results?

Zuri: Yes. I survived somehow.

Toby: Congrats. Buy yourself shawarma

Zuri: With what money?

Toby: fair point

She expected the conversation to end there, the way these things usually did. It didn't.

Toby: what did you do today?

She stared at that one a beat longer than the rest. It wasn't a line, wasn't flirting, just a plain, ordinary question — and somehow that was exactly what made it feel like something had shifted, quiet and unannounced, the two of them crossing from people who occasionally exchange texts into something with slightly more weight to it. She answered. He asked something else. Before she'd fully registered it, it was past midnight, and neither of them had noticed the hours going by. She fell asleep with her phone still in her hand, mid-reply, and woke the next morning to find the thread still sitting there, unfinished, waiting.

That was longer than we'd ever talked, she thought, staring at it before she'd even gotten out of bed, faintly embarrassed by how much she wanted to pick it back up.

After that, it became something like routine — not a decision either of them made out loud, just a shape their days quietly took on.

Monday

Zuri: survived work?

Toby: barely. you?

Zuri: barely. we match

Saturday

Zuri: Bread and egg woman came late today. The whole hostel was suffering.

Toby: I miss that woman honestly.

Zuri: She doesn't know who you are, Toby

Toby: doesn't matter.

It was somewhere in the middle of that stretch of small, ordinary texts that her phone rang instead — an actual call, his name lighting up the screen with no warning at all. Zuri stared at it for a second, oddly nervous about something as simple as a phone call, and almost let it ring out before finally answering.

"Hello?"

Silence.

"... Hello?" she tried again, half-convinced the call had dropped.

"You answered," he said finally, sounding faintly surprised by his own fact.

"You called."

"I know."

Another pause, longer this time, neither of them quite sure what came next — and then they both laughed at the same moment, the awkwardness breaking apart as easily as it had arrived.

"You're easier to talk to on the phone than I thought."

She blinked.

"That's because you're not standing in front of me."

He laughs.

"Fairs," he said, and something about how easily he said it made her sit down properly on her bed, settling in for a conversation she hadn't planned on having.

They didn't talk about anything important. She couldn't have said afterward what most of it was even about. But it was the first time a conversation with him had a voice attached to it instead of just words on a screen, and something about that made the whole thing feel realer than it had before — like the difference between hearing about a place and actually standing in it.

She was still lying there, phone on her chest, staring at the ceiling with an expression she hadn't bothered to check, when Daisy, her closest friend, walked in.

Daisy looked from Zuri to the phone.

"Who was that?"

"No one."

Daisy raised an eyebrow.

"You're smiling."

Zuri touched her face instinctively.

"...Am I?"

Daisy only smiled.

There was one night, a few weeks after that, when she fell asleep mid-conversation without meaning to, phone slipping from her hand somewhere between one reply and the next. He noticed before she did.

Toby: sleep

That was all. No question mark, no follow-up. She woke the next morning to find it sitting there, and something about the plainness of it — no complaint, no "hello?", just permission — settled in her chest in a way she didn't examine too closely.

Zuri: sorry, I passed out mid-text

Toby: I figured

She locked her phone and set it on the pillow beside her. It was ridiculous, really. Two words. I figured. Not goodnight. Not sleep well. Not even talk tomorrow. Just two ordinary words, and somehow they lingered with her long after she'd switched off the light. She couldn't have explained why.

The next morning, before she'd even checked the time, her hand reached automatically for her phone. Nothing new. No message.

She set it back down again, laughing quietly at herself.

She hadn't been waiting.

...Had she?