UNDER THE DESK

Mandy

There is a moment, in every disaster, when your body decides before your brain does.

Mine decided on the study.

I grabbed Dami’s wrist and pulled him backwards through the door we had just closed. Two steps. Three. The desk was enormous, dark wood, with a solid panel down the front, the kind of desk a man buys to look important in video calls.

I went under it. Dami came after me.

He is not a small man. It was not a large space.

We ended up folded together in the dark, my back against the panel, his shoulder against my shoulder, his knees somewhere I decided not to think about. My bare feet were tucked under his leg. His aftershave was in my nose. My heart was in my throat.

In the living room, the man laughed.

“Wine again?” he said. “Soma, you can’t hold your drink. You never could.”

Soma.

I looked at Dami. In the dark, I could only see the shine of his eyes. He shook his head once. Not now.

……………….

Footsteps. Unhurried. A man who knew the house.

He walked past the sofa and down the corridor and stopped outside the study door.

I stopped breathing.

Beside me, Dami put his hand flat over mine on the floor. Not holding it. Just there. Warm. Heavy. Like a paperweight on a page that might blow away.

The door opened. The light came on.

From under the desk, I could see a pair of trainers. Grey. Expensive. Clean, the way only men with drivers keep their trainers clean. Dark jeans. And, swinging from a belt loop on a cord, a plastic lanyard.

BAKARE SECURE SYSTEMS. KUNLE.

Next to me, Dami went absolutely still. Not frightened still. Recognising still.

I filed that away. I file everything away. It’s a sickness.

Later, I would ask him how he knew that name. Later, if there was a later.

The trainers crossed the room. Stopped at the bookshelf.

The bookshelf where Dami had just put a camera in the spine of a book.

I felt Dami’s hand tighten on mine.

The trainers turned. Came back toward the desk. Stopped close enough that I could see a tiny chip in the rubber of the left sole.

The chair rolled back. Toward us.

I pressed myself into the panel. Dami pressed himself into me. There was nowhere else to go. The castor of the chair stopped two inches from his knee.

Above us, a drawer opened.

Not the drawer with the passports. The other side. Something heavy was lifted out. A zip. A laptop being slid into a bag.

“Ah, Soma,” Kunle muttered, to nobody. “You leave everything everywhere.”

He didn’t sit. Thank God, he didn’t sit.

I made God a promise, there and then. If He got me out of this study, I would go back to church. Properly. Not just for weddings, where I mostly check the flowers. Dad would be thrilled.

The chair was pushed back in. Gently. It stopped against Dami’s shoulder and stayed there, pinning him closer to me.

The footsteps went to the door. The light went off.

The door did not close.

……………….

He was in the corridor. We could hear him moving about. The fridge opening in the kitchen. A can. The sound of him drinking.

We stayed where we were.

My left foot had gone to sleep. Something on the floor was digging into my hip, a pen or a coin. The chair was pressing Dami against me so firmly that I could feel his heart going, fast and hard, against my arm. It was going as fast as mine. I found that more comforting than I should have.

Soma, I thought. Not Daniel. Not Marcus. Not Theo.

How many names does one man need? And which one had he been wearing when he asked my father how much crayfish goes in ofe onugbu?

My eyes adjusted. Slowly, the dark turned into shapes. The edge of the desk. The chair. Dami’s face.

Very close.

Closer than it had ever been. Closer than his mother’s dinner table, when he leaned in to whisper something sweet for an audience. Closer than the car. Close enough that I could see the small scar on his eyebrow that I’d never noticed. Close enough that when he breathed out, I breathed it in.

He was looking at me.

Not at my lipstick. Not at the dress. At me. The way he’d looked at me on the office stairs the day I told him about the spare key. Like I was a problem he had decided not to solve, because he liked it too much.

“Amanda,” he breathed. Barely a sound.

I should have said something sensible. I should have said ‘jollof’, actually. That was what it was for. Get me out of here.

I didn’t.

His hand came off the floor and touched my face. Just his thumb, along my jaw. Slowly, like he was asking permission and expecting to be refused.

I didn’t refuse.

Rule one of our contract. The very first line, in my own handwriting, initialled twice. No kissing. In private, ever.

Under a desk, in the dark, in my ex-fiancé’s study, was about as private as it gets.

I didn’t care. For once in my life, I did not care about the fine print.

He leaned in. Or I did. I genuinely don’t know who moved first. I have thought about it a lot since and I still don’t know.

His mouth was a breath away from mine. I could feel the warmth of it. My eyes closed by themselves.

In the corridor, a phone rang.

We both flinched. My head knocked the underside of the desk, very softly. Dami’s hand dropped. We stared at each other in the dark, horrified, like two teenagers caught by an auntie.

Dami’s eyes said, very clearly, Don’t move.

My eyes said, very clearly, Where exactly would I go?

“Hello,” Kunle said, just outside the door. “Yes. I’ve got it. No, he’s asleep. He drank again.” A pause. A laugh. “I know. I know. I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

His footsteps moved toward the front of the house. His voice dropped, but sound carries on tiles.

“No, it’s all on the laptop. Every account. Every name. He’s very organised, our Soma. More organised than he looks.”

Beside me, Dami’s jaw had gone tight.

“Everything’s on schedule,” Kunle said. “Don’t worry. Yes. I’ll call her myself.”

The front door opened. Night air. Crickets. A generator somewhere down the close.

“Tell her the package goes out the night before the wedding.”