Sally turned to meet the gaze of the woman she loved. Harriet’s bright blue eyes danced with amusement.
“Anyone would think you were nervous,” Harriet said, her eyes sparkling.
Sally swallowed past the lump in her throat.
“Please, please just tell me.”
Sally couldn’t help the desperation that snuck into her tone. Any amusement left Harriet’s eyes, and before Sally knew it, their lips were meeting in a tender kiss.
Harriet pulled back. “Does that answer your question?”
“I’m not sure…” Sally tried to mimic Harriet’s earlier jokey tone, but the relief that flooded her was so powerful it crashed into her.
They shared another long kiss in the rain.
When they finally broke apart, Sally said, “I missed you so much. All I want is for us to be together. To work this out.”
Harriet reached forward and brushed away a raindrop on Sally’s cheek. The cool brush of her fingers was akin to magic.
“Me too. And we will.” Harriet smiled and tipped herhead toward the sky. “The rain. Just like on our wedding day.”
Sally smiled as memories flooded her of their rainy wedding day and she couldn’t help but think that everything had come full circle.
“Come on, let’s go home.”
Hand in hand, they walked home together in the rain.
Next Best Thing by Ben Murigu
Marvin Gitau lay on his side with his back to me, his breathing careful, measured—too deliberate to be real. Suddenly our bed was thorny, cold. No longer the warm inviting hub that offered respite for two bodies finally spent.
I lay perfectly still, mortally afraid that even shifting the Vitafoam mattress slightly might break whatever fragile truce his body had long struck with itself. I counted the seconds between his breaths, aware that I was doing the kind of arithmetic that no university don ever teaches—calculating safety, gauging despair, weighing love against fear. Against caution.
And I wondered, not for the first time, which of us was truly holding the other together. Propping the other. Anchoring him.Shieldinghim.
* * * *
I knew that breathing—I’d learned it over eight years. Eight years is a long enough time to know a man. But not enough for a man of my intelligence to make the grievous mistake of confusing familiarity with permanence, of declaring our love indefatigable just because it has weathered a million hurricanes.
For the eight years that we had successfully pretended to be both amiable roomies and bosom buddies, we’d survived secrecy and endured Christmases coloured with polite smiles and evasive replies. We’d waded through casual cruelty of relatives who’d wished to know when he planned on finding himself a wife, settling down; and suffered the quieter cruelty of pretending that those questions—paused laughingly—were innocent. Harmless. Not at all intrusive.
What we had not survived, however—what we were discovering then—was coercion disguised as tradition, wieldedby people who loved him conditionally and unapologetically.
* * * *
The signs were there alright; I saw them three weeks before he spoke to me about his pain, a whole twenty days before he finally found the courage to open up about his dilemma.
It was all in the Falcon Bank diary he gifted me on New Year’s—the red one, that no-one ever saw: his inexplicable loss of appetite, the curious way he pushed food around his plate, apologized for not being hungry, blamed end-year work pressures for his stress; the way sleep escaped him, how he lay awake at night staring at our drab bedroom ceiling and slipped out of bed at two A.M. to sit on the sofa downstairs as though a vengeful ghost haunted him; the manner in which his sudden silence irked me.
See, my Marvin—an Econ major recently promoted to Branch Manager-Kitusuru Branch—was neither loud nor wordy. But, in his own quiet way, he kept me in the loop—office politics, client oddities, traffic absurdities. He did it for me, because of my need to feel connected to the world outside; the much more lively universe that my hectic online writing work so forcefully shielded me from.
Slowly, that narration that had kept me going for the longest time, stopped. He went mum, became a man living inward, completely sealed off, conserving energy like some seasoned astronaut keen on rationing oxygen. Preserving his life.
Sex disappeared last. Quietly. Gently. With apologies that seemed rehearsed, felt heavier than rejection.
“I’m just tired,” he quipped.
“I’m not in the right headspace, sweets.”
