Chikamso POV
He almost didn’t call back.
Not because her text message had said date. Although it had, and he’d read it twice with the particular stillness of a man deciding whether to pretend he hadn’t noticed. He almost didn’t call back because he’d been in the middle of a difficult week: a supplier in Aba going quiet on a confirmed order, his brother Chibuzor asking too many questions about the warehouse expansion that Chikamso wasn’t ready to answer, and Mariam, in that bright, unhurried way of hers, slipping in a comment about her friend’s project the same week she’d asked him to handle the baby shower logistics. He had too many open tabs.
But he’d read the message again that evening, properly past the autocorrect betrayal and the stiffness of the phrasing. Someone composing carefully, he could tell, trying to sound professional at six in the morning, which was either dedication or insomnia or both. And the actual substance of it was clear enough. It was the kind of thing he could help with in his sleep. The kind of thing he kept meaning to do more of.
So he’d called. And she’d been mortified about the date in a way that was both funny and, he had to admit, slightly endearing…. the way a person is endearing when they’re too sharp to play it off and too proud to fully collapse. She’d recovered quickly. Got businesslike almost before the embarrassment had finished landing. That was interesting.
He signalled right and pulled off the expressway. The Surulere supplies errand was completed, and the warehouse manager had his delivery. The invoice was sent, and the route naturally curved toward Ogunlana. He’d planned it this way on purpose. One trip, two things settled. He was economical about his movements.
He told himself that was all this was. Economical.
He had not seen Mariam’s friend since the baby shower corridor, and he had not tried to. That evening, after the last guest left and Chibuzor finally got Mariam to sit down, Chikamso carried the remaining balloons to the storage room and thought about nothing in particular. He was good at that… the deliberate blank. It was a skill he’d developed early and refined over years of watching other people make decisions with their feelings that they later had to unmake with their logic.
What he remembered from the corridor was simple enough to catalogue. She’d nearly walked into him, and her first instinct had not been to apologize but to assess — a quick, evaluating look. Like she was taking stock. He’d introduced himself, and she’d treated his name like a variable she hadn’t been given enough data to solve for. The handshake was short and decisive, the handshake of someone who had decided something. And then the balloon joke had made her laugh before she could stop it, and she’d looked briefly annoyed at herself for laughing, and that, that small, honest flicker was the thing he’d found genuinely interesting.
Not her. He was not going to say her. The flicker. He was interested in the flicker.
