Chapter 20 – New Lines

Another three years slipped past quiet ones, the kind that don’t announce themselves.

Adeyemi was forty now, silver more visible in her hair, laugh lines deeper around her eyes. She’d started teaching again not in a school, but online workshops for adults who wanted to read literature the way they once read love letters. Small groups, Zoom screens, late evenings when Lagos was already half-asleep. She liked it. No uniforms. No bells. No locked doors. Just words and people who showed up because they wanted to.

One of her regular students was a twenty four year old named Leke.

He joined the workshop six months earlier quiet in the chat, always typing thoughtful comments in the private messages instead of speaking on camera. He worked night shifts at a tech startup in Yaba, read everything she assigned twice, and asked questions that made her pause mid sentence.

Why does Achebe make silence feel louder than shouting?

Do you think Okonkwo ever forgave himself before he died?

Ms. Adeyemi, when did you first realize literature could hurt as much as it heals?

She answered carefully at first professional, distant. But Leke kept coming back, kept asking, kept listening like every word she said mattered. Eventually she started staying on after the others logged off, just the two of them on screen, talking about books that weren’t on the syllabus.

One night rain tapping the window like impatient fingers he turned his camera on properly for the first time.

Dark skin, close cropped hair, tired but bright eyes. A small silver stud in one ear. He smiled shyly.

“You always talk about how stories leave marks,” he said. “I think yours left one on me.”

She felt the old heat bloom behind her knees the same place it used to start years ago. She didn’t look away.

“What kind of mark?” she asked, voice low.

He hesitated, then leaned closer to the camera.

“The kind that doesn’t show… but you feel it every time you move.”

Silence stretched between them comfortable, charged.

She broke it first.

“Turn off your camera, Leke.”

He did.

She turned hers off too.

Then she spoke into the dark.

“Tell me what you want.”

His voice came back softer, rougher.

“I want to know what it feels like… to be seen the way you see the characters in those books. Not just read. Seen.”

She exhaled slowly.

“Then come over tomorrow night. Bring nothing but yourself. Door code is still 1994.”

A long pause.

“Green?” he asked half joke, half prayer.

She smiled into the dark.

“Green.”

The next evening he stood at her door jeans, plain black T-shirt, nervous hands in his pockets. Younger than the others had been. Hungrier in a different way. No classroom history between them. No rules already broken. Just two people who had found each other across screens and pages.

She opened the door barefoot, in a loose linen dress, hair down.

He stepped inside.

No words at first.

She closed the door, locked it, turned to him.

“Hands behind your back,” she said quietly.

He obeyed eyes wide, breath already uneven.

She stepped close, brushed her fingertips down his chest, felt him shiver.

“Lesson one,” she whispered. “Delayed gratification.”

Then she sank to her knees slow, deliberate and took him in her mouth the way she used to take Khalid, Chidi, Tobi, Yusuf.

But this time it was new.

This time there was no past hanging over them.

Just now.

Just want.

Just the slow, building rhythm of someone younger learning how deep hunger could go and someone older remembering how sweet it still tasted.

Later, much later when they lay tangled in her bed, rain drumming soft against the window, he traced lazy circles on her thigh.

“You still think about them?” he asked quietly.

She didn’t pretend not to understand.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Not with regret. Just… memory. Like old books you reread every few years.”

He nodded against her shoulder.

“And me?”

She turned her face to his, kissed him slow.

“You’re a new chapter,” she said. “One I didn’t expect to write.”

He smiled small, crooked, young.

“Good,” he murmured. “Because I’m not finished reading you yet.”

She laughed low, warm, alive.

Outside, Lagos kept breathing.

Inside, two people started something new.

No locked classroom doors.

No safe words needed.

Just want, freely given.

And this time, no one was keeping score.