Six in the morning

He opened the door before she could ring the bell.

This was the first thing, that he opened the door before she could ring the bell, which meant he had been awake, which meant he had heard the lift, which meant he had been listening for the lift, which meant Yemisi had told him.

Adaeze stood at his threshold with her overnight bag in one hand and her keys in the other. Her hair was down. She was wearing the cream slip dress under a black coat she did not need. The Lagos dawn was already warm outside, soft heat coming up off the lagoon, the city's first generators starting their first complaints in the building behind hers across town.

He was in a t-shirt. White. His feet were bare. He had not shaved. He looked, she noted with a small bright clarity, like a man who had not slept properly in five nights.

"Adaeze."

"Your mother told me."

"I asked her not to."

"I know. She told me that too."

He did not move from the doorway. He did not open the door wider. He stood there with one hand still on the door handle and the other at his side, and he looked at her, really looked, the way he had looked at her in the kitchen on the fourth Friday, the look that took its time and she felt herself be looked at without performing being looked at.

"Are you going to let me in," she said.

"Yes."

He did not let her in immediately.

He stood there for one more second, the door still half-blocking her, and he said, quietly

"Before you come in. I want to say one thing, and I want you to hear it, and then we can do whatever you came here to do."

"Say it."

"I made the choice without asking you, Adaeze. I did not tell you. I did not want it to count to you because I had told you. I wanted it to count because I had done it. That is the only reason I did not call you on Friday. If you had called me, I would have answered before the second ring. I want you to know that."

She did not say anything.

She set her bag down on his threshold. She set her keys down on top of the bag. She did not move into the apartment yet, because she had not been invited in yet, because he had not finished saying what he was saying.

"Is that all," she said.

"That is all."

"Open the door, Segun."

He opened the door.

She stepped inside.

He closed it behind her.

The apartment was the same. The deep wood floors, the warm light from the kitchen, the small lamp by the sofa he had been reading by — she could see the book face-down on the arm of the sofa, a slim hardcover she did not recognise, opened to roughly the middle. The record player was off. There was no smell of cooking. There was only the smell of him — sandalwood, sleep, and something else, something she could not name but which she had not realised, until this moment, that she had been missing for a week.

She set her bag down properly inside the door. She took off her coat. She hung it on the hook by the door — his hook, the one he used, the one she had used a half dozen times in three weeks without thinking — and she turned to face him.

He had not moved.

He was standing in the middle of the entry hall, three feet from her, with his hands at his sides, and she could see the small involuntary movement at the base of his throat where a man's pulse becomes visible if you know to look for it.

She knew to look for it.

"Segun."

"Yes."

"Come here."

He came.

He did not rush. He did not hesitate. He walked the three feet between them with the steady patient walk of a man who had been waiting forty-five hours and could wait another five seconds, and he stopped in front of her with his hands still at his sides, and he looked down at her — the small two-inch difference between their heights, less in flats — and he said, in a voice that was almost normal but not quite —

"I am not going to touch you first, Adaeze. I want you to do whatever you do first. I have been telling myself this for five days and I am holding myself to it."

She laughed. A small surprised sound. Not laughter, exactly — a release.

"Segun. I am going to kiss you. Will that count."

"That will count."

"Stand still."

He stood still.

She rose onto the balls of her feet. She put one hand flat against his chest — feeling the heat of him through the cotton, the give of muscle under it, the absurd shallow rhythm of his breathing — and she kissed him.

It was not the kiss from the kitchen.

The kiss from the kitchen had been slow first, then less patient — a kiss between two people learning each other in real time. This kiss was the kiss of a woman who already knew the man she was kissing, who had spent a week not kissing him, who had decided in her mother's porch chair that the slow man was a man worth choosing, and who was now arriving at her own conclusion with the whole of her body. She kissed him with her hand still flat over his heart, and his heart sped up under her hand, and she felt it, and she did not pull back.

He let her kiss him.

For one long moment, he let her — hands at his sides, mouth opening for her but not closing on her, holding the line he had told himself he was going to hold.

Then her teeth caught his lower lip. Just for a second. Just enough.

His discipline went.

His hands came up, both hands, one at her jaw and one at the small of her back, finding the curve of her waist through the silk of the slip dress and pressing there, flat, the way he had pressed there at the kitchen counter — and he kissed her back like a man who had spent five days running out of patience in a quiet apartment. He kissed her the way the kiss in the kitchen had threatened to be before he had pulled them both back. He kissed her with the line gone.

She made a sound against his mouth. He swallowed it.

She walked them backward. She did not stop kissing him. She walked them backward across the entry hall, into the living room, until the backs of her knees hit the arm of the sofa, and she sat down on the arm and pulled him down with her, and he came down with her, his hands now on either side of her hips on the leather, his mouth at her throat, his breath against her collarbone where the slip dress had slipped two inches lower than it had been when she had walked in.

"Segun."

"Adaeze."

"The bedroom is too far."

"It is not too far."

"Segun. It is too far."

He laughed — a low, broken laugh, his mouth still at her throat, his beard rough against her skin in a way she felt all the way down to the soles of her feet — and he lifted her.

He lifted her clean off the sofa.

She had not expected this. She had not, in the four nights they had spent together, been lifted Segun Machi Johnson, who weighed maybe seventy-five kilos, who was the same height as her in heels, who did not have the obvious body of a man who lifted women, lifted her without strain and carried her across his living room with her legs around his waist and her face against his neck.

The bedroom was twenty feet away. He covered them in five long strides.

He set her down on the bed.

He stood over her for a second — looking at her, the cream slip dress now somewhere between still on her and not quite still on her, her hair tangled where her hand had been gripping the back of his neck, her chest rising and falling in the way her chest did when she had stopped controlling her breathing — and his face did something she had never seen it do before. It came undone. The control he had been holding for five days, for seven weeks, for the entire span of their acquaintance — it came off his face in front of her.

"Adaeze."

"I know."

"I missed you."

"I know."

"I am not " he stopped. He shook his head. He pulled his t-shirt off in one motion, the way men do when they have stopped thinking, and she watched it land on the floor beside the bed, and she watched him kneel onto the bed over her, and she said

"Don't be careful."

He looked at her.

"Adaeze."

"Don't be careful tonight, Segun. Be careful the next time. Tonight I want — I want you to not be careful. I have been careful for a week. Be the way you would be if I had not asked for a week."

He looked at her for one more second.

Then he was not careful.

He undressed her slowly anyway.

This was the thing about Segun even when she had told him not to be careful, his hands knew what they knew. The cream slip dress came off slowly, in pieces, with him taking the time he wanted to take, with his mouth following his hands, with his breath at the inside of her wrist and the bend of her elbow and the curve where her ribs met her stomach. Every place his mouth went was a place she had not known was a place. Every breath against her skin, her soft mound, was a question and an answer at the same time.

She was already coming undone before he had touched the parts of her he had not touched yet.

He noticed.

He noticed everything. He noticed the way her hand gripped the sheet when his teeth grazed the soft skin at the side of her neck. He noticed the way she said his name when he kissed the place just below her breast, then lower, just before her sternum where she had a small scar from a childhood fall. He noticed when her breath caught and when it didn't, when she went still and when she did the small involuntary lift of her hips toward his lips that meant more, here, now, and he gave her more, and here, and now, and he gave it to her without the choreography of a man trying to perform.

There was no script tonight.

The script was the week she had asked for, and he had honoured it, and now the week was over, and what was left was a man and a woman in a bed in Lagos at six twenty in the morning with the city's first calls to prayer beginning somewhere across the lagoon, and the heat of the day rising through the open window, and his mouth at her sternum and her hand in his hair and her body, finally, finally, allowed to want what it had been wanting for a week.

She said his name. She said his name three times. The last time, she said it like a question, and he answered the question with his mouth, and her body answered back, and she came apart against him with the heel of her hand pressed against her own mouth because she did not want, even now, to make the kind of sound the apartment did not deserve.

He kissed the heel of her hand away.

He kissed each of her knuckles, slowly.

"Don't cover your mouth, Adaeze."

"Segun "

"I want to hear you. I have wanted to hear you for a week. Don't cover your mouth."

She did not cover her mouth.

What happened next was, by the small accounting Adaeze kept of her own body, the second time she had come apart in this bed, and the first time she had let him hear her do it without filter. She heard herself, distantly, from somewhere inside her own ribcage. She heard him say her name, full, low, the one her mother used. She heard the city begin its first proper Monday morning outside the window. She heard the small bright clatter of a bottle being kicked over somewhere on the street below.

She did not cover her mouth.

Afterward, he did not move.

He stayed inside the moment with her. He had done this on the fourth Friday too — the staying. He had not been a man who finished and rolled off and reached for his phone. He had been a man who stayed. He stayed now. His mouth was at her temple. His hand was at the back of her head, his fingers buried in her hair. He was breathing in a way she could feel against her hairline.

After a long moment, he said —

"Adaeze."

"Mm."

"You came to me."

"I came to you."

"I knew you would. I did not know I knew. But I knew."

"How."

"Your mother called me on Friday night."

She lifted her head.

"My — what."

"Your mother called me on Friday night."

He was looking at the ceiling, but his hand was still at the back of her head, and his thumb was moving very slowly against the place just behind her ear.

"Segun. What."

"She called me on Friday at 9:14 PM. She had gotten my number from Kemi. She said and I am going to quote her, because I wrote it down on a piece of paper afterward, because I knew I would forget the exact words and I did not want to forget — she said, Segun, this is Chika Okonkwo. Adaeze is my daughter. I am calling you because I have been thinking about you all afternoon. I do not know what you are doing about my daughter, but I want to tell you something. Her father took sixteen days. If you are a slow man, that is fine. We have had slow men in this family before. But do not be a coward. Do you understand me. And I said, Yes ma. I understand you. And she said, Good. And she hung up."

Adaeze did not move.

She lay against his chest and listened to him breathe and felt the small slow movement of his thumb behind her ear, and she did not know whether she was going to laugh or cry, and she did neither, and after a long second she said —

"My mother."

"Your mother."

"My mother — who has never once, in her life, used the phone for anything but emergencies."

"Apparently this was an emergency."

"Apparently."

"I think she likes me, Adaeze."

"I think she is going to like you."

"That is different."

"That is different."

He smiled. She felt the smile against her temple. She closed her eyes.

For a long time, neither of them spoke. The city did Monday morning outside the window. Somewhere across the lagoon a generator started, then another, then a third. Somewhere closer, a bird that Adaeze did not have a name for did the small repeating two-note song it did every dawn in Lagos. Segun's hand stayed at the back of her head. Her own hand was flat against his chest, over the place where she had pressed it at the door, and his heartbeat had slowed.

After a while, she said —

"I have to leave soon."

"I know."

"I have a board call at nine."

"I know."

"I am not leaving tonight."

"I know."

"I am leaving in forty minutes. I will come back tonight."

"Okay."

"Tonight I will bring my work bag and the toothbrush from my apartment. Tomorrow Bolu will bring the rest. I am — Segun, I am moving in for the rest of the contract. I am not signing anything. I am not changing the contract. We are just — we are going to live like this. For the seven weeks. And then we will see."

"Okay."

"Is that — "

"Adaeze. Yes. That is what I want. That is exactly what I want. I would have asked you. I was going to ask you. I am glad you said it first."

"You were going to ask me?"

"Tonight. I had planned the sentence. I had rejected three versions of it. I had a fourth version I was going to use."

"Tell me the fourth version."

"It does not matter. You said it first."

"Tell me."

He was quiet for a second.

"I was going to say — Adaeze, the apartment was very quiet this week. I do not want it to be quiet again. Stay."

She closed her eyes.

She did not cry.

She did not, at any point in this morning, cry. She had been preparing herself, since she had stood in front of her wardrobe on Saturday afternoon, not to cry. She had prepared so thoroughly that the not-crying was now in her body the way a runner's pace is in a runner's body, automatic, unconscious, available without thought. She did not cry. But she lay against his chest with his thumb at the back of her ear and a Lagos bird singing its two notes outside the window and she felt something that had been knotted in her chest for fifteen years come quietly undone.

"Segun."

"Mm."

"Don't be quiet again."

"I won't."

She left at seven.

She showered in his shower, which was the second time she had done so, but the first time she had done so as a thing that was not happening inside a contract. She put on the cream slip dress because she had not packed anything else and because her board call was on video and the dress would read on camera as a blouse. She left her overnight bag in his closet. She left her toothbrush in the holder by the second sink.

He walked her to the door.

He did not kiss her at the door. He kissed her on the forehead, which was different. He said —

"Tonight."

"Tonight."

"What time."

"Eight. I have a thing at six. I will be done by eight."

"Okay."

"Segun."

"Yes."

"Don't cook tonight. I want to take you out."

"Okay."

"There is a new gallery opening on Akin Adesola. A friend of mine has a piece in it. I want to go. With you."

"Publicly."

"Publicly."

He looked at her.

"Adaeze. That is — "

"I know what it is, Segun. The contract has eight weeks left. I want to spend eight weeks being publicly with you. I want everyone to know. I want it to be — established. I want to walk into a room with you and have people say Adaeze Okonkwo and Segun Machi Johnson, and I want them to stop calling you the heir, and I want them to stop calling me the founder. I want to be us. For eight weeks. And then we will see what happens at the end of the contract. But for eight weeks, I want it loud."

"Loud."

"Loud, Segun."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay, Adaeze. Loud."

She kissed him at the door, one more time, briefly, and she left.

She rode the lift down to the lobby. She walked across the lobby. She got into Tunde's car he had been waiting since 6:00 AM, because she had texted him from the lift at 5:48 and he had been waiting, because he was Tunde, who knew things — and she sat in the back seat and pulled her seat belt across her chest and looked at her work phone.

It was 7:14 AM.

She had eleven new messages, three missed calls, and a calendar reminder for her 9 AM. She thumbed through them quickly — work, work, work, an investor in Singapore, work, Kemi, work and then she stopped.

A message from a number she had not seen on her phone in seven years.

Seven years and two months, specifically. She knew the exact span because she had once, in a moment of weakness, calculated it.

She did not open the message.

She put the phone face down on the seat beside her.

She did not pick it up again until she was in her own apartment, in her own shower, with the water turned up too hot, and even then she did not open it. She put it on the bathroom counter with the screen face-down and she stood in the shower for nine minutes and she did not cry, and when she got out she dried herself and dressed for the board call and only then did she pick up the phone and turn it over.

The notification was still there.

1 new message from K.

She did not open it.

She put the phone in her bag. She went to the board call. She did not think about it.

She was lying to herself when she did not think about it. She knew she was lying to herself. But she had eight weeks of loud to live, with Segun, in front of Lagos, and a single text from a single letter was not going to be the thing that put a small thread in the seam of those eight weeks.

Not today.

Maybe tomorrow…

That afternoon, three thousand kilometres away, in the central courtyard of a riad in the Marrakech medina, a man named Tariq Bello stood beside a Calder mobile in his own private collection and watched a woman he had never met before walk through the arched door from the street.

He had been told her name an hour ago. Imade Eweka. He had been told she was a painter. He had been told she was twenty-six. He had been told she was the daughter of a UI professor from Benin City, and that she had won a scholarship to the Slade in London, and that her one exhibition at Rele Gallery in Lagos last year had received a small mention in Frieze magazine which Tariq had, in fact, read, though he had not connected the mention to a face until now.

He had not been told that she would walk into his courtyard wearing a black jumpsuit that did not quite fit her properly, with her hair half-up in a way that suggested she had done it herself in the back of a taxi, with a small leather portfolio under her arm, and with the particular alert wariness of a young woman who had been brought to an older man's house in a foreign country and was deciding, in real time, whether or not she was in danger.

He liked that she was deciding in real time.

He did not move toward her. He did not call her over. He stood by the Calder and let her see him from a distance — a tall Nigerian man in a linen shirt, fifty-one years old, with hair going steel grey at the temples, with the kind of stillness that comes from having decided, at some point in your forties, that you no longer need to perform interest in any room you walk into.

She saw him.

She walked across the courtyard toward him. She did not hurry. She did not slow. She crossed the courtyard with the small portfolio under her arm and she stopped at a distance from him eight feet, ten — that was respectful but not close, and she did not extend her hand.

"Mr Bello."

"Tariq, please. You are Imade."

"I am."

"Your gallerist tells me you do not like men who buy art at openings."

"My gallerist talks too much."

"My gallerist talks the right amount. Yours could learn."

She did not smile. She looked at him with the steady careful gaze of a woman who had been told by other women, possibly by every woman in her family, that the wrong man at fifty-one is a fatal proposition.

"Why am I in Marrakech, Mr Bello."

"Tariq."

"Why am I in Marrakech, Tariq."

He turned slightly so that he was no longer between her and the door — a small piece of body language designed to let her see that she could leave, that she was not blocked in, that the courtyard had two exits and one of them was behind her — and he said, in the unhurried voice of a man who had said this same kind of opening sentence to fewer people in his life than anyone in Lagos would have guessed —

"You are in Marrakech because three weeks ago I saw your painting Mother Tongue in a private collector's living room in Ikoyi and I have not stopped thinking about it. I told my assistant on Tuesday to find you. He found you on Wednesday. I had him send you a ticket on Thursday. He told me you accepted on Friday. I did not believe him. I had him show me the email. Here you are. I am — I will be honest with you — slightly surprised that you came."

"I came because I have never been to Marrakech."

"That is one of the reasons people come to Marrakech."

"And I came because my gallerist said that you are a serious collector and that I would be a fool not to come."

"That is a more practical reason."

"And I came because my rent is due on the twenty-eighth and my last show paid me one point two million naira, which is not enough."

She said the last sentence without flinching. She said it the way a woman says a thing she has decided is going to be a fact, not a confession.

Tariq Bello looked at Imade Eweka for a long moment.

He had been a widower for three years and seven months. He had had two affairs in that time, both with women he had known professionally, both ended cleanly by him after no more than three months because he had not yet found a way to be in a room with a woman who was not his wife without feeling, all the time, like a man who was lying about something. He had not invited any woman to Marrakech since his wife had died. He had not, before this Tuesday, considered inviting any woman to Marrakech. He had not, before this Tuesday, looked at a painting in someone else's living room and thought about the woman who had made it for nineteen straight hours.

He said —

"Imade."

"Yes."

"I am going to tell you something now, and you are going to listen, and then we are going to walk through this house and look at the rest of the collection, and then we are going to have lunch on the roof, and after lunch you can decide what you want to do."

"Okay."

"I am not buying you, Imade. I am going to be very clear about this, because we are both adults and we are both Nigerian and we both know what some men do with some women in Marrakech, and I want you to know I am not one of them. What I am going to do is this. I am going to buy Mother Tongue. At gallery price plus thirty percent, which will be paid into your account before you leave Morocco. I am going to commission three more paintings from you in a series, to be delivered on a timeline of your choosing, and the commission will be paid in three installments, the first today, the second on delivery of the first piece, the third on completion. The total commission will cover your studio, your materials, your sister's school fees for two years, and your mother's medical bills for the same period. I have already had the numbers calculated. They are reasonable. They are not a gift."

"They are a gift."

"They are at the higher end of fair. They are not a gift."

"Tariq."

"Yes."

"What are you not telling me."

He looked at her. He took a breath.

"I am going to ask you, Imade, separately and in addition to the commission, whether you would like to come to Marrakech four times a year for the next two years and stay in the small guest house at the back of this property and paint. The guest house is yours. I will not enter it. I will not, in those four trips, ask you for anything. I will see you at meals if you choose to come. I will see you at parties at this house if you choose to come. I will not see you otherwise. The arrangement is patronage. The thing it is not is a relationship. I want you to know what it is and what it is not, and I want you to decide, after lunch, whether you want it."

He paused.

"And the thing that I am not telling you, because I do not want to be a man who hides things from a younger woman in an unfamiliar country, is that I find you, on the basis of one painting and three minutes of conversation, more interesting than any woman I have met since my wife died. I am telling you this because I want you to be able to factor it into your decision. I am not telling you because I am asking for anything. I am asking for nothing. I want to be clear: I am asking for nothing. The arrangement is patronage and only patronage. But I will not stand in a courtyard with you and pretend I do not find you interesting, because you are an intelligent woman and you would know I was pretending, and I would rather you know what I am than not."

He was quiet.

She was quiet.

The riad did the small soft sounds a riad does at noon — a fountain in the next courtyard, a kettle being filled somewhere in the kitchens, the distant call of a muezzin from somewhere outside the walls. The sun moved through the lattice above them. A patch of light slid across the tiled floor.

After a long moment, Imade said —

"Show me the rest of the collection."

"Okay."

"And then I am going to eat lunch."

"Yes."

"And then I am going to think about it for two days, in your guest house, and I will tell you on Wednesday what I have decided."

"Okay."

"And one more thing, Tariq."

"Yes."

"If I say yes, you do not get to change the terms. The terms are the terms. You said them out loud. I heard them. If at any point in those two years you want to change the terms, the entire arrangement ends that day. Do you understand."

"I understand."

"Good."

She walked past him toward the next courtyard.

He stood by the Calder for one more second.

Then he followed her.

In Lagos, three thousand kilometres away, Adaeze Okonkwo was on a board call she was barely listening to, with a single unopened message glowing in her bag from a man whose name she had not said out loud in seven years, with the warmth of Segun's bed still in her shoulders, and she did not know yet — but she would know within a week — that a woman she had never met was about to enter the Lagos creative scene at the same level she occupied, with a man on her arm who was older and stranger than Segun.

But that was for later.

Today was Monday.

Today the contract still had eight weeks left.

Today, in a tower on Glover Road, Segun Machi Johnson stood at his kitchen counter, drinking the coffee Adaeze had not stayed for, looking at the place where she had set her bag at the door at six in the morning, and feeling for the first time in nine years, like a man whose apartment was about to be a home.

Module 06 drops next Friday.