Chapter 21 – The Quiet After

Leke became a regular visitor not every night, not even every week, but often enough that his knock at the door started to feel familiar, like the sound of rain you’ve learned to sleep through.

He was twenty-four going on twenty-five, still figuring out the shape of his own hunger. She was forty going on forty-one, remembering hers. The age gap hung between them sometimes quiet, unspoken but never heavy. He didn’t ask about the past. She didn’t offer details. They just met in the present: bodies, books, late night conversations that drifted from Achebe to Audre Lorde to the way Lagos felt different after midnight.

One humid evening in late 2033 he arrived with a small paper bag takeaway suya from the roadside vendor near his office. They ate on the balcony, legs tangled under the low table, the city lights smearing gold across the lagoon.

“You ever miss it?” he asked suddenly, licking spice from his thumb. “The classroom. The way it used to feel.”

She looked out at the water for a long moment.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Not the rules. Not the fear of getting caught. Just… the intensity. The way everything felt urgent. Like every word mattered more because it could be the last one.”

He nodded slowly.

“I get that. Work feels the same sometimes. Code all night, ship something, hope it doesn’t break tomorrow. But it’s never… alive the way this is.”

He reached across the table, brushed his knuckles along the inside of her wrist.

She turned her hand over, let him trace the faint lines on her palm.

“You still think about them?” he asked gentler this time.

She didn’t flinch.

“Yes. Not with longing. Not with regret. Just… acknowledgment. They were part of the story. A loud, bright, messy chapter. But chapters end.”

He smiled small, crooked, young.

“And this one?”

She leaned forward, kissed him slow, tasting suya and salt and the faint edge of youth.

“This one’s still being written,” she murmured against his mouth.

Later, much later when they were tangled in sheets that smelled of sweat and lemongrass, he propped himself on one elbow and looked down at her.

“I don’t want to be careful with you,” he said quietly. “I want to be reckless. The good kind.”

She reached up, traced the line of his jaw.

“Then be reckless,” she answered. “But be honest. That’s the only rule I have left.”

He nodded.

“Green?”

She laughed soft, warm, alive.

“Green.”

Outside, Lagos kept its endless rhythm horns, generators, distant music, the low hum of life that never quite stops.

Inside, two people kept learning each other slowly, fiercely, without apology.

No locked doors.

No safe words needed anymore.

Just want, freely given, freely taken.

And this time, no one was keeping score.

The story didn’t end with a bang or a ban or a goodbye.

It just kept going quietly, messily, beautifully

one new line at a time.