She stood there, watching me.
I turned and walked toward the staircase. My legs felt heavy, as if they did not want to leave. But I forced myself to climb.
One step.
Two steps.
Then I paused.
I turned around.
She was still standing there, still watching me. Her arms had dropped to her sides. Her smirk was gone. In its place was something I could not name — something raw, something vulnerable, something that made my chest ache.
I walked back down.
I leaned close to her — close enough to see the small mole above her left eyebrow, close enough to count her lashes if I wanted to — and I pressed a gentle kiss to her cheek.
Then another to her forehead.
I did not look at her face. I was afraid of what I might see.
I turned and hurried back upstairs without looking back.
I wanted the gesture to settle in. I wanted her to feel it — the tenderness, the care, the quiet promise of something more than just bodies colliding in the dark.
And I dreaded what I would see on her face next.
Later that night, I sat at my desk, staring at my laptop screen.
There were deadlines. Work that needed to be delivered. Spreadsheets that needed to be reviewed. Emails that needed to be answered.
But my mind was elsewhere.
Behind me, my wife lay in bed. She had done her usual ritual — a quick peck on my cheek, a mumbled “Goodnight, babe” — and within minutes, she was snoring softly, her back turned to me, the distance between us wider than the entire bed.
I turned and studied her for a long time.
She looked peaceful. Untroubled. As if the conversation we had — the one where I had laid out my frustrations, my fears, my suspicions — had never happened.
Does she even care? I wondered. Or have I become invisible?
I turned back to my desk. Picked up my phone. Opened WhatsApp.
My thumb hovered over Inemesit’s name.
Then I typed.
“Hi.”
The reply came within seconds.
“Good evening, sir.”
I stared at the screen.
Good evening, sir.
Not Oga. Not Emmanuel.
Sir.
The most formal, the most distant, the most safe greeting she could have chosen.
Something had shifted.
“How are you doing?” I typed.
“I am fine, sir. Thank you for today. I really appreciate it.”
Short. Formal. Correct.
I felt a knot form in my stomach.
“Inemesit, are you okay? You seem… different.”
A pause. Then:
“I am okay, sir. Just thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“About earlier. When you stopped me. I thought… I thought you would be happy. I thought the only way to pay you back was to give you what you have always yearned for. But I thought wrong.”
I read the message twice.
“Inemesit, you don’t have to pay me back for anything. I did what I did today because I wanted to. Not because I expected something in return.”
“I know that now,” she replied. “But all my adult life, I have been configured to show appreciation with my body. It is all I know. When someone is kind to me, I think… this is what they want. This is the only currency I have.”
My throat tightened.
“That is not true,” I typed. “You have so much more to offer than your body. You are intelligent. You are kind. You are a good mother. You are a survivor. Those things have value. Real value.”
“I need to unlearn a lot of things,” she said. “Things that are currently occupying my head. Things that men have put there.”
“Then unlearn them,” I said. “One day at a time.”
“Thank you,” she wrote. “For seeing me. For today. For everything.”
I stared at the screen.
Then she wrote something that made my heart stop.
“I am scared, Emmanuel.”
“Scared of what?”
🔥💖OGA I WAN KNACK💖 – EPISODE TEN – A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE 💖🔥
