The Wrong Man

So this is Aisha from The Wrong Woman's tale... Mr Le_Maxx helped me out with this one. Y'all know I don't do sequels well. This is not Nollywood abeg and I am not Zeb Ejiro. Anyway, enjoy, and encourage Mr Maxx biko using the comment box. He really tried for me. :)

She did not know if there was a ‘right’ person for her. Truth be told, she did not care much.

It was not that the thought did not cross her mind occasionally. Every girl dreamed of the ‘right’ man after all, that knight in shining armor that would cross over seas and land on his white horse just for her. It was why Barbie came packaged with Ken; so little girls could dream of forever afters with blue-eyed boys with buff bodies.

Nefe had brown eyes that he covered up with his wire glasses and buff was not a word even a blind man would use to describe him. When he asked her to marry him, she was actually convinced that he was either drunk or ill. The voices within her conveniently grouped themselves into two camps: the “yes” camp and the “no” camp. She said yes but the "no" camp never disbanded.

She had considered the disparities between them long before the moment he got down on one knee - He was studious; preferring the company of his books and magazines to that of their friends. He loved numbers and figures. He worked like a clock, steadily and predictably drawing up charts and analysis that made him almost revered at his office.

He did not say ‘I love you’ often but when he did, it was with a finality, a confidence that dwarfed everything else, that buried all her fears and made it hard to remember why she had any doubts in the first place.

She was his opposite in almost every way – She loved the company of people and went out of her way to make friends. She found words much more easier to deal with than numbers and percentages. She said ‘I love you’ at the most inopportune moments and her favorite thing in the world was getting Nefe to blush. Just like that time at the Palms when he was being grumpy because he had to go all the way to the ground floor just to get her an ice cream. Aisha had waited till he was climbing back up the stairs before screaming at the top of her lungs ‘I love you Ufuomanefe.’ 

It was one of the best days of her life even though Nefe swore never to take her to see another movie.

But sometimes she worried. She worried that love would not be enough to cover their disparities. She worried that Nefe would leave her for someone more suited to his personality. He was the star after all. The man every girl would give an arm and a leg to be with –with his boyish good looks and his warmheartedness. She was just plain old Aisha who snored like a train that had run out of fuel.

'Did I keep you up?’ she asked him after their first night together and she had seen his puffy, sleep deprived eyes.

'No. I was trying to do some financial modeling for this new stock the company might be interested in.'

'On your honeymoon eh Nefe?' She responded. He smiled sheepishly and went to make them breakfast. She knew he was lying and she had kept him up so that afternoon she bought him some ear plugs. 

He had taken her hand as she offered the ear plugs to him, closed it and kissed her - 'I don't need them. I like watching you sleep anyhow.' 

There was no right woman or man; Aisha had learned that long ago. There was however faith, hope and love; and love covered all 'wrongs'; snoring wrongs, Wall Street journal wrongs, and every other wrong that needed covering. 

Nothing else mattered where love existed, nothing at all.

Song of the day: Keane - Somewhere Only we Know

Poses

This was written by one of my favorite writers and an amazing human being...He says I inspire him and he is only trying to be like me... i think he is flattering the crap out of me. He has his own style so jst in case you don't like my work, hopefully you will like his. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the one, the only, ooluwafunminiyi . 

He had been talking about it for a while, and when he was excited about something, he became a child again - sated only by the fulfillment of his fantasy. 

It was their son's first birthday. He said they could not make any noise about it, for obvious reasons. Instead, they'd have a sunny day out in the park, just the three of them, and cap it off with a photo shoot at the new and expensive studio where the creme de la creme took powerful photographs with state of the art cameras and printing machines. He talked animatedly of the poses he would strike with his son. She watched him handle the child like a pearl while he dreamed up pose after pose; she eagerly agreed with the poses he tagged 'fantastic', and laughed indulgently when he discarded others. And when their son began to cry from all the activity, she had stuck a nipple in his mouth before asking his father to show her the poses he and she would strike.

There had been a new light in his eyes when he described those, a light that held hope in its beams. Laughter rang out in her little apartment that night, the first time in a long while. Long after the baby had slept and she had placed him in his Graco playpen, they practiced their poses under the flickering lights of the muted television. It felt a little awkward at first, their bodies touching like that. He had not touched her since she had broken his commandment. The sun rose in her heart when they held hands and locked eyes across the miles that stretched out between them. Finally, they practiced 'the pose of the shoot' - as he called it, the one in which she laid on the rug, her head propped up by a palm, and he got in behind her.

'This is a risky one,' he laughed, his voice suddenly husky, his breath hot against the nape of her neck.

They knew they were going too far when they stayed like that a little longer than was necessary, 'refining the pose'. It wasn't long before she felt him hard against her back, before she felt her skirt lose its tightness against her stomach - before she helped take away what was left of his inhibitions.

The made love like a prayer, a word less plea for forgiveness - for her desperate attempt to trap him with a child, for her inability to bear the thought of losing another woman's husband, that he forgive himself also for cheating on his wife, and for the many other wrongs he had done to her and perhaps, countless others. Her passion implored him to stay with her and with their child. Yet when she had paused and held his face between her palms, earnestly searching for answers, any at all, he had kept his eyes shut, refusing to let anything through except a recalcitrant tear drop.

And for that rare moment, no matter how much she was hurt, she had been eternally 
grateful to him.

The following morning, they had gone back to yesterday. He was gone before she awoke. Her world was empty once more, the harsh silence of the apartment interrupted only by the cries of her baby and the ricochet of the curses and threats they had traded in that room.

It was also not surprising either when three days later, at the photo shoot, he had taken gleeful pictures with his son - and when they had gotten to the part where she was supposed to join in, he had refused, asking her to take her pictures alone with the baby.

She was stubborn too. 'Let us go then,' she said, and picked up her hand bag, her voice quivering, her eyes brimming with tears. The photographer had never met a stranger couple.

That evening, she left the apartment that he had rented for her and her baby in a part of town where he was sure his wife would never have found them. She had no clear idea where she was headed. She would let her destiny work that out.

'Where ever we go, your father will never find us,' she smiled sadly at her babbling baby as they melted into the night.


Song of the day: Ellie Goulding - Burn