Inventory

The second week, he sent a driver.

Adaeze was in her apartment when the knock came at 7:14 on a Thursday, which she noted because she had been about to leave for a dinner she no longer wanted to attend and the interruption gave her a reason. She had been standing in front of her mirror in her slip, watching the way the silk caught the late Lagos light, thinking about her own collarbones , she had been thinking about them because of him, which was a stupid, adolescent thing to be doing at thirty-four, and she had told herself to stop twice and not stopped.

She checked the peephole.

A man in a black suit. Not her usual Bolt driver. A different kind of black , the kind that came with an earpiece and a posture learned somewhere expensive.

"Madam," he said when she opened the door, his eyes respectfully past her shoulder. "Mr. Machi Johnson sent me. I'm to take you wherever you'd like to go."

"I have a driver."

"He knows, ma. I'm to follow your car. Or drive you. Whichever you prefer."

She almost laughed. It was the ma that did it , the easy Nigerian formality, the weight of a whole country's class system folded into a single syllable. This was what old money looked like when it decided to pay attention to you. Not flowers. Not texts. A man at your door in a suit pressed that morning, offering you transport the way a diplomat's office might.

"What's your name?"

"Tunde, ma."

"Tunde, I'm going to 1004. It's a birthday dinner for someone I don't particularly like."

"Understood, ma."

"Do you know where 1004 is?"

The smallest pause. The kind that said I drive Lagos for a living, I know where 1004 is better than you do. But he only said, "Yes, ma."

She laughed, finally. The first real one in days. "Come on then. Give me ten minutes."

She closed the door. She stood with her back against it. She breathed out through her teeth.

The dress she chose was black and cut low enough at the back that she would feel it all night , the slow drift of silk against her spine whenever she moved. She had not planned on wearing this dress. She chose it because Segun Machi Johnson had sent her a driver and she wanted him to know, somewhere in the part of her head that had started keeping score, that she had not gotten dressed for him. She had gotten dressed for herself. Which was, of course, a lie, because every woman knows the difference between a dress chosen for oneself and a dress chosen for oneself performed for someone else, and this was the second kind. She let herself have the lie.

She sprayed perfume at her throat and at the hollow behind her ear, where a man might put his mouth if he was paying attention. Then she felt stupid and sprayed it everywhere else too, as compensation.

At the dinner she was useless. Distracted, underprepared for the small talk, absent in the way women are absent when their bodies are in one room and their thoughts are in another. Ifeoma, the birthday girl, noticed within the first twenty minutes.

"Who is he?"

"There's no he."

"Adaeze."

"There's no he that matters."

Ifeoma raised both eyebrows and said nothing, which was worse than saying anything. They had been friends since King's College parents' weekends. Ifeoma had been there the year Adaeze's father died. Ifeoma knew the difference between no he and a he I don't want to explain yet.

"Fine," Adaeze said eventually, over the third glass of wine. "But I'm not explaining it."

"I haven't asked you to explain anything."

"You're about to."

"I'm not. I'm going to tell you something, actually." Ifeoma leaned in, her voice softening in that way Lagos women have when the honesty is about to be real. "Whoever he is, you've been smiling at your phone for ten minutes and your phone is face down. And you haven't eaten. You always eat. And you keep , " she gestured, vaguely, at Adaeze's throat, ", touching your neck."

Adaeze put her hand down.

She hadn't known she was doing it.

The contract said four nights a week, minimum. The contract said public appearances as agreed, calendared monthly. The contract said private time to be mutually negotiated.

What the contract did not say , because Kemi, her lawyer, had thought it vulgar to write it and Segun had not pushed , was when and how the two of them would first be alone in a room with no purpose but each other.

By the third week, Adaeze realised he was letting her choose.

Every public event was on the calendar. Gala at the Shell Centre, where he had put his hand at the small of her back to guide her through a crowd and left it there three seconds longer than the crowd required, and she had felt those three seconds in her skin for the rest of the night. Private viewing at the Yemisi Shyllon, where he had stood beside her in front of an El Anatsui and not touched her at all, and she had found the not-touching almost worse, a held breath that neither of them released. Dinner at his mother's house in Ikoyi, which was a different kind of test and one she felt she had passed, barely, by virtue of being willing to argue about Fela's politics with a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had opinions about everything and who had said, at the end of the evening, "You don't flinch. Good."

But the private time. The fourth night. The fourth night was always left open. He would text on a Wednesday: Friday. Anything you want. Your call.

And she would stare at the message and realise that he was doing the most expensive possible thing a man could do for a woman like her, which was to give her the one resource she never had enough of, which was choice.

She stared at her phone for twenty-six minutes the Wednesday of the fourth Friday. Twenty-six minutes. She timed it.

Then she typed: Your place. Come hungry.

She deleted it.

She typed: Your place. Nine.

She sent that one.

He wrote back within a minute: Okay.

One word. Okay. And her stomach had done the thing a stomach does when a man who has been measuring his distance for four weeks stops measuring.

On the fourth Friday, she chose his apartment.

She hadn't been inside it yet. She knew it was in the new tower on Glover Road , the one that had replaced the colonial bungalow everyone had mourned , and she knew it had been designed by a Nigerian woman who had trained in Copenhagen, which was exactly the kind of detail Segun would know and mention once and never mention again.

She told Tunde where to go. She wore black again , not the same dress, but the same language. A silk shirt, open one button lower than she usually wore it, and trousers that fit the way good trousers fit, which was barely. Her hair was down because she had decided, in the car, that she wanted it down. This, too, was a choice she hadn't asked permission to make.

He opened the door himself. No staff. He was in a t-shirt and dark jeans, and his feet were bare, and she had to recalibrate for a second because she had never seen his feet before and the intimacy of a man's bare foot in his own home is a thing that undoes you if you let it.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"Come in."

The apartment was what she expected and not what she expected. Warm , that was the surprise. She had expected the white-box minimalism of a man who owned too many things and performed restraint. Instead: deep wood floors, a kitchen that had been used that day, a record playing low in the next room, something she half-recognised as Oliver De Coque but slowed down, remixed , she couldn't tell and didn't want to ask. The whole apartment smelled faintly of something cooking. Onion, palm oil, and something green , scent-shapes she knew from her grandmother's kitchen, which was the last thing she expected to be thinking about at his door.

"Wine?"

"Please."

He poured. She watched his hands. She had noticed his hands in the first week, at Circa , the way he held a glass, the way he didn't gesture when he talked. She had noticed them again at his mother's house, folded in his lap while his mother quizzed her. She noticed them now. The veins on the back of his hand, the way his thumb rested against the bowl of her glass when he passed it to her. The specific small heat of his fingers brushing hers as the glass changed hands.

Four weeks of this. Four weeks of brushes.

"What are we doing tonight?" she asked.

"Whatever you want."

"That's not an answer."

"It's my answer."

She set the wine down. "Segun."

"Adaeze."

"I need you to stop doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Giving me every choice. I know what you're doing. I see it. I appreciate it. But it's a power move. It's making me the one who has to want things first, out loud. It's making me the one who has to say the thing."

He was quiet for a long moment. His eyes did not leave her face. Then: "What do you want me to do instead?"

"Want something. Out loud. You first."

He set his own wine down. He took one step toward her, not two. Still far enough apart that she could not feel the heat of him yet. Just close enough that she knew he was thinking about it.

"Okay," he said.

She waited.

"I want you in this kitchen. Right now. Not moving for a minute."

Her pulse went somewhere stupid. She did not move.

"I want to finish what I started cooking," he said, "because if I don't, you will not eat tonight, and I have learned in four weeks that you forget to eat when you are thinking. I want to feed you. That is what I want first."

"That's your want?"

"That's the first one."

"And the second?"

He took the second step.

Now she could feel the heat of him. Now the air between them had changed temperature. He did not touch her. He stood in front of her , her silk shirt, his t-shirt, four weeks of held breath , and he said, quietly, in the voice of a man who had been practicing this sentence for a very long time:

"I have been wanting to put my mouth on your throat since the second time we had dinner."

She did not answer.

She could not have answered if someone had paid her.

He leaned past her , past her, not into her , and picked up her wine glass from the counter behind her, and pressed it back into her hand. His chest did not touch her. His breath touched her. His forearm grazed the curve of her waist for half a second as he pulled back.

"Eat first," he said. "That was the deal."

And he went back to the stove.


She sat on the counter. She did not ask permission.

She watched him cook. The kitchen was open, island in the middle, and she could have sat at the island, on a stool, at a civilised distance from what he was doing. She chose the counter by the stove. She chose to be in his peripheral vision. She hooked one heel against the cabinet below her and let her trouser leg ride up two inches and watched him notice without looking.

He chopped an onion. She watched the flex of his forearm. She had never , and this was an embarrassing thing to admit to oneself, at thirty-four, with a master's from LSE and a company she had built from a laptop in her childhood bedroom , she had never realised before that a man's forearm, when he was chopping an onion with competence, was a specific kind of promise.

"Your jollof better be good," she said.

"It will be."

"You're very confident."

"I've been practicing."

"For this?"

He did not look up from the onion. "For some version of this. Yes."

The honesty landed somewhere low in her body. She took a slow drink of her wine to cover the fact that she had forgotten how to breathe for a second.

The record changed. Asa now , slow, smoky, a song her mother's generation had owned on CD. Adaeze reached across and set her glass down beside the cutting board. Her arm brushed his. Neither of them moved for a full second.

"Segun."

"Mm."

"Put the knife down."

He put the knife down.

"Come here."

He came. He stood between her knees, and she was on the counter, and they were almost the same height now. Her hands went, without asking her, to the soft cotton of his t-shirt over his waist. She felt the heat of him through the cotton. She felt the breath he took when she touched him , the small catch in it , and she understood, for the first time, that the calm she had been reading as power had been a kind of discipline the whole time. He was not calm. He had been performing calm. For her.

She tilted her chin up. He did not kiss her yet. He put his hand at her jaw , flat, palm open, the whole of his hand , and he held her face and he looked at her, really looked, for longer than was comfortable. Long enough that she felt seen. Long enough that she had to close her eyes for a moment because being seen like that was a thing she had not been ready for.

When his mouth finally met hers, she made a sound she had not made in three years.

He kissed her like a man who had been starving and refused to let it show. Slow first. Patient. Then less patient. His hand left her jaw and went into her hair, and his other hand , the other hand found the curve of her waist where her silk shirt had come untucked and pressed there, flat against her skin, and the flat warm palm of his hand against her bare waist was a thing she could feel in her knees.

She pulled back to breathe. She did not want to pull back. She needed to breathe.

"The jollof," she said.

"What about it."

"Is going to burn."

"I don't care."

"Segun. Turn off the stove."

He laughed , the first real laugh she had heard from him, a low broken sound , and he turned, reached across the counter, and killed the flame without letting go of her waist. He turned back. He was in front of her again, between her knees, and her silk shirt was doing something it had not been doing before, which was showing more of her than she had intended it to, and he noticed, and his eyes went dark in a way that made her feel like she had put her hand on a hot wire.

"I said mouth on your throat."

"You did."

"I was very specific."

"You were."

He leaned in. He did not kiss her mouth. He kissed the corner of her jaw, and then the line of it, and then down the long stretch of her neck to the place where her perfume had been drying for three hours , the hollow behind her ear, where she had sprayed on purpose, because she had known, she had known the whole time , and he opened his mouth against her skin and she lost the next eleven seconds of her life completely.

She heard herself say his name. Once. Quietly. Like a question she did not know the answer to.

His hand at her waist slid up. Not under her shirt , along it , and she felt him pause at the button she had undone on purpose and breathe, once, as if deciding something. Then his fingers found the button above it and waited.

"Yes," she said, before he asked.

He undid it. One button. Slow, like he was giving her time to change her mind. Then the next. Her shirt fell open over her chest in a way that was not undressed, exactly , it was a suggestion of undressed, which was worse, which was better , and the air of the kitchen hit her collarbones, and his mouth was there a second later, and she gripped the edge of the counter with one hand and the back of his neck with the other and held on.

She was not going to make it to the bedroom. She was not going to make it to the jollof. She was going to live, she thought dimly, the whole of the rest of her life from this counter.

Then he pulled back.

She almost made a sound of protest. She caught it behind her teeth.

"Eat," he said. His voice was wrecked. His hand was still at her waist. His thumb moved once, slowly, against her bare skin.

"Segun , "

"Adaeze. Eat. Then the bedroom." He leaned his forehead against hers. His breath was uneven. "I don't want this on a kitchen counter. Not the first time. I want you in a bed. I want to take my time."

She closed her eyes.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Feed me."

They ate on the sofa, not at the table. He had put her wine in her hand again. The jollof was , she told him honestly , better than her mother's, which was the highest compliment a Nigerian woman could give, and which she could take back in the morning if she needed to.

"You're allowed to take it back."

"I know."

"I won't be offended."

"I know."

She ate quickly. She ate like a woman who had remembered she had a body, which , after four weeks of pretending she didn't , was its own kind of revelation. He watched her eat. He did not eat much himself. When she was finished, he took the plate from her hand and set it on the coffee table and said ,

"Come here."

She went.

The bedroom was dim. One lamp on, the bedside one, warm and low. The bed was made. The sheets were white. She stood at the foot of it, and he stood behind her, and he put both hands on her shoulders , not to turn her around, not yet , just to be there, his palms warm through the silk, his breath at the back of her neck.

"The shirt," he said.

She unbuttoned the rest of it herself. She let it fall from her shoulders. He did not touch her. He watched her take it off, and the weight of being watched by him , of being chosen to be watched by him , made the back of her neck hot. She turned around. He looked at her. His eyes moved , over her shoulders, her collarbones, the lace at the top of her bra, the bare stretch of her stomach , and he did not hide that he was looking, and she did not hide that she was letting him.

"Come here," she said, this time.

He came.

What happened after was slower than the kitchen and louder than she had been prepared for. He undressed her the way a man undresses someone he has been imagining. Her trousers fell. Her bra came off at her asking. His shirt went over his head and she got her hands on the warm skin of his back finally, finally, and held on.

He put his mouth everywhere the silk had touched her. He took his time at her collarbone, at the hollow of her throat, at the soft underside of her breast, her very attentive nipples and when she said his name he said, "I know," as if he did, as if he had been listening for it. He laid her down and he looked at her for a long moment with her hair on his pillow and said, softly, "God. Look at you," and she did not know what to do with being looked at like that, so she pulled him down to her and put her mouth on his and did not let him speak for a while.

Segun swallowed the nipple whole into his wet mouth with a hunger of a wolf ready to devour its prey, it felt soft and hard at the same time, and loved how she wriggled under him every time he licked the tip. he let his hands trail down her wimpering stomach and let it linger till it got to her mound and felt the drip….the flowing wetness and sighed.

That move triggered something in him that reeked of ferality and hunger. Segun descended low and ate every part of that drip, he drank from her while she sang his name in this hollow yet ethereal tune, she was his tonight (contract or not). her moans were drowned out by the wizkid song playing low in the background

Finally, he couldnt hold his raging beast below, the beat and rythym in the room changed as he slid into her.. full, hard and hot.

He was patient where she needed him. He was not patient where she needed him. Somewhere in the middle of it she understood that he was not performing, had never been performing, that every careful thing he had done for four weeks , the driver, the contract, the open Fridays, the hand at her back held three seconds too long , had been the work of a man holding himself in check, and that tonight he had stopped holding back.

She came apart with her face against his shoulder and her fingernails at his back. He said her name , her full name, the one her mother used , and she felt the shape of it in his mouth against her skin and something in her came untied that she had been carrying for a very long time.

Afterward, he did not move. He stayed inside the moment with her. His hand was at the back of her head. He was breathing against her temple. For a long time, neither of them said anything.

Then he said, very quietly: "Adaeze."

"Mm."

"I'm in trouble."

She laughed. A small, cracked, honest laugh. Her eyes were wet and she did not know when that had happened.

"Yes," she said. "So am I."

Later , much later, when Lagos was quiet in the particular way Lagos only gets quiet at 3 AM on a weekday, when even the generators have given up and the city has agreed briefly to rest , she lay awake in his bed and listened to him breathe.

She was not thinking about the contract.

She was not thinking about her mother, or her sister, or the dinner party she had sat through earlier that night, or Ifeoma's eyebrows, or her lawyer Kemi, or the women in her office who would know within a week because women always knew.

She was thinking about her father.

She was thinking that her father, who had died when she was seventeen, had loved her mother with a plain and visible hunger for thirty-one years, and that her mother had spent those thirty-one years pretending not to notice because her mother had grown up in a house where love was a liability and you did not admit to having it.

And she was thinking: I don't want to spend thirty-one years pretending not to notice.

And then she was thinking: but he is not my husband. He is a man I signed a contract with. A contract that ends in ten weeks.

And then she was thinking: ten weeks is very short.

And then she was thinking: ten weeks is very long.

Segun shifted in his sleep. His arm came across her waist , not possessively, not performatively, just the unconscious gesture of a body that had decided, on its own, where it wanted to be. She did not move. She did not want to move. She wanted to stay exactly here, exactly like this, for as long as the night would let her.

The thing she did not know yet , the thing she would not know for another three weeks , was that at that exact moment, in a different house in a different part of Lagos, in the private office of a woman Adaeze had met exactly once, a phone was ringing with news about the Machi Johnson family that would change everything the contract had tried to hold still.

But that night, in his bed, she slept.

And in the morning, when she woke, he was already awake, watching her, and he said ,

"Stay for breakfast."

And she said ,

"Okay."