Six Weeks Later – Birmingham

Three weeks into living in this house, and she had still not gotten used to the idea that all of it was hers now too. The kitchen was her best place here. The proper island in the middle of the room instead of a table balanced on two stools. The window over the sink instead of a curtain. Rain falling soft and steady against the glass window, nothing like the way it drummed on zinc back at her former home. She still moved around carefully most evenings, especially when Jide was not home, the way you move around a house that isn’t fully yours yet, even when everyone keeps telling you it is, to avoid breaking anything expensive.

There was still stew in the fridge from two days ago, and rice from yesterday that neither of them had finished, but she was cooking again anyway, because her hands needed something to hold onto before her mind wandered off to where it always wandered these days. Will the marriage last? Despite Jide’s endless confessions of love, she still couldn’t stop wondering whether it could still come undone somehow, regardless of uprooting her entire life to start over here. What if the version of her he had fallen for on a plane full of strangers wasn’t sturdy enough to survive an actual house, an actual routine. Cooking kept her mind in the room. The moment her hands went still, she was back to turning the fear over and over like a stone in her pocket.

There was also an elephant in the room. What if Jide got tired of waiting before she was ready? Their wedding night and the days after in Nigeria had been easy enough to get through without him noticing. Exhaustion was a believable enough excuse for a woman who had packed up her life and spoken her vows the same week. Jide had believed it completely. He had kissed her, held her until she slept, and told her there was no hurry in the world. She had promised herself, lying there on those nights, that it would be different once they got properly home, once the travel and the strangeness had worn off.

Three weeks had passed since. And every time his kiss lingered a little longer than a greeting needed to, every time his hand rested somewhere that wasn’t entirely innocent, every time she felt the evening beginning to lean toward something, she found the door out of it. I’m tired. My stomach is not right. Tomorrow.

Always tomorrow.

He had laughed about it at first. “Mrs. Jide Olaoye,” he had teased one night, pulling her close, “are you planning to postpone this indefinitely?” She had laughed too, back then. He didn’t joke about it anymore, but he never pressured her, never once made her feel small for it, and somehow that made her feel worse.

Lord, she thought, standing there with the spoon still in her hand, help me carry this properly. I don’t know how to be his wife in the one place a wife is supposed to give something back for free.

Tyres on gravel pulled her out of her thoughts. Her heart picked up before she had decided to let it. She turned the heat down under the stew and wiped her hands on the cloth at her waist, twice, though they were already dry.

“Babe?” His voice called from the hallway.

“In here.”

He came in with his laptop bag still on one shoulder, tie loosened, coat over his arm, and the moment he breathed the air of the kitchen his whole face opened up. “Something smells like heaven.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m really not.” He looked into each pot like a boy at Christmas. “Jollof. Peppered chicken. You’ve been busy here.”

“I wanted to make something nice.”

He looked at her a second longer than the moment needed. “You didn’t have to. You cook every day.”

“I know. I wanted to.”

“Thank you.” He stepped closer, easy, unthinking, the way a husband steps toward his wife, and bent to kiss her lips.

She went still. 

He felt it. She knew he felt it, because his mouth left her skin a half second earlier than it usually would have, and he straightened up and said, lightly, too lightly, “Let me wash up,” and she said, “I’ll set the table,” and neither of them said anything else about it, because there was nothing left to say that hadn’t already been said in that one small flinch.

Dinner was quieter than usual, the two of them moving around a silence neither wanted to be the one to break first. He ate with the appetite of a man who had worked a long day, and she was grateful she could at least give him an enjoyable meal if nothing else. She mostly moved rice from one side of her plate to the other.

“You’ve barely touched it.”

“Not very hungry tonight.”

“You cooked a whole feast.”

“For you.”

He studied her for a moment and let it go, or she thought he had, until she stood to clear her plate and he didn’t move to clear his.

She packed the leftovers into the fridge, then ran the tap longer than the one plate needed. She washed it once, then again, before she heard his chair scrape back behind her.

“Yetunde. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You keep saying that.”

She kept her eyes on the plate, on the water running over it, on anything that wasn’t his face. “I am.”

“No,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I don’t think you are.”

The tap kept running. Neither of them moved to turn it off.

“Can we talk?” he said. “Properly.”

“Not tonight.”

“We’ve been saying not tonight for three weeks. Everytime I touch you, you freeze.”

She gripped the edge of the sink and said nothing, and behind her she heard him exhale, long and unsteady, then he dropped his plate in the sink and washed his plate.

“I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he said. “Every time I reach for you, I wonder if I’m hurting you somehow, without knowing how. And every time I stop reaching, I worry you will think I have stopped wanting you.” He laughed once, with no humour in it at all. “Honestly, I don’t even know which mistake hurts you less. Reaching, or not reaching.”

He turned around then. He wasn’t looking at her with the frustration in his voice, the thing she had braced herself for. Instead, he looked lost, because she had not given him the one piece of information that would make sense of the situation. “Do you not want me?”

“I do want you,” she said quickly. “I need you to hear that part first, before anything else, because I don’t think I have said it plainly enough these past weeks. Whatever you’ve been telling yourself, that isn’t it.”

“Then what is it?”

She reached for the dishcloth instead of answering right away, folded it in half, then in half again, her fingers needing the motion the way they’d needed the fabric under a needle her whole working life. “Can I ask you something first? Before I say the rest.”

“Anything.”

“Do you think we rushed this? The wedding, coming here so fast. Sometimes I lie awake and wonder if I should have waited. If I came into your life, into this house, before either of us had actually finished becoming ready for it. Do you regret it? Bringing me here quickly?”

“No.” He didn’t take even a second to think about it, his voice raised, which surprised her more than the answer itself. “Not for one day, not for one hour. Whatever this is, it isn’t regret, Yetunde. Don’t put that word anywhere near what’s happening to us.”

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“Babe, what is it,” he asked again, gently this time.

She looked down at the folded cloth in her hands, small and tight now, and made herself keep going. “When I was eight, there was a man. Somebody my family trusted. Not a stranger off the street, somebody who was allowed in our house, who ate at our table, visited us. I was alone, and he….” Her voice had dropped to a whisper, unable to finish the narration. “Only my mum and I are aware. We buried it, prayed over it, and she trained me to move on. I honestly thought I had moved past it completely, and I believed that, mostly, until I married you and started being touched the way a husband touches his wife, and found out the fear had never actually left. It had only gone quiet for a long time.”

He didn’t say anything immediately. His hand, resting flat on the kitchen table, curled slowly into a fist and then let go again, and when he finally looked up his eyes were wet in a way she had never once seen from him.

“I am so sorry. I thought I did something wrong,” he said. “All these weeks. I kept turning it over, wondering what it was, whether you regretted marrying me, whether you changed your mind about coming here and just hadn’t found the words for it yet.”

“Never that. Not once.”

“I didn’t know you were carrying something this heavy.” He stood, came around the table, and stopped an arm’s length from her instead of closing the distance the way he usually would have. “What do you need from me to make this easier? How can I help?”

No speech attached to the questions. No proffering of solutions. It was when he asked, that she realized how badly she had needed someone to tell, someone who wouldn’t diagnose.

“I know what I need. I didn’t even know I needed anything, and once I did, I just wanted to keep carrying it alone in the dark and hoping it heals itself before you notice.”

He nodded, once, no drama in it. “We’ll find someone to talk to, someone qualified to help.”

“We?”

“If you want me there. Yes. But if you’d rather go alone first and bring me in later, that’s fine too. Whatever shape this needs to take, we’ll give it that shape.”

He didn’t reach for her. He stood there, waiting, letting her be the one to close whatever distance still sat between them, and for the first time in three weeks she took the first step, rested her forehead against his chest, and only once she’d done that did his arms come around her properly, slow and careful, like a man still asking permission even with his hands already moving.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Jide lay long awake, staring at a ceiling long after his wife had slept. He had prayed fervently about this situation for the past one week, that God should reveal the problem to him.

There was a thing he had learned about prayer over the years, something nobody had ever properly warned him about before he started praying seriously for himself. You could ask God for something and get an answer, a real one, and the answer could arrive wearing a face you never expected. He had prayed to God to show him what was wrong with his wife.

This lack of intimacy had been weighing on him for a while, and when things weighed on him, he shared it with a friend. He believed in the multitude of counsel, and in not carrying a heavy thing alone in his head until it grew teeth.

But how do you say this to a friend? How do you explain that the girl you loved so much and married as fast as you could, still hadn’t let you close, a month into marriage. His friends already thought marriage had changed him for the better, somebody had actually said his skin was glowing, as if there was a literal glow only available to married men.

He had wanted a wife, yes, a companion and partner for life. But part of wanting a wife, if he was fully honest with himself in the dark where honesty cost nothing, was that he had been tired, plainly tired, of the waiting season, and he had looked forward to finally putting that waiting down, praying for a wife, getting the wife, and then now praying to God for help to get through to her.

Instead God had answered a different prayer entirely, the one he hadn’t known to pray. He had not known that his Yetunde was carrying this kind of burden and trauma. 

Teach me what to do with a woman who is hurting in a way I can’t see.

He turned it over slowly. Someone close to her family, she had said. Someone trusted enough to be let into the house. He found himself running through the wedding day without meaning to, the small gathering, the ten or so relatives who had shown up mostly out of obligation, none of them looking at her the way people look at someone they actually love. Could it have been one of them? He didn’t know. He might never know, but some part of him wanted to know anyway, wanted a face to be angry at, wanted the simple justice of finding the man who hurt his bride and making him answer for it.

But that wasn’t the thing in front of him tonight. The thing in front of him was a person. His person, breathing softly beside him, her chest rising and falling under a nightie whose flap had come loose in her sleep, just enough to show a slice of skin he had every legal and married right to look at yet still felt strange looking at, given everything he now knew. He wanted to touch it. He wanted, badly, simply, to run one finger along that collarbone and go all the way down, the way he had scolded himself from imagining on the phone all those months ago, back when wanting her was still uncomplicated. 

Jide simply watched Yetunde. He didn’t move. He was afraid, if she woke up and found his hand there, she might not see her husband at all for half a second before recognition caught up. She might see a monster instead.

He laughed once more, soundless, at himself. Jokes on me. Looks like I’m still waiting.

God, he thought, not quite a prayer and entirely one at the same time, please help us. Please help her. Please help me want the right things in the right order.

Tomorrow his mother and his sister were coming to meet her and to plan the proper reception, the big one, the one where Yetunde would finally wear her white dress in front of all the family and friends who missed the actual wedding. The marriage itself was already done in every way that mattered, but his mother had insisted people would want to see it, would want their own version of witnessing it.

Jide. 

He heard his name, murmured, half asleep, from somewhere close to his shoulder. Jide. He wanted to kiss the sound of it right off her mouth.

“Why are you awake?” Her voice, thick with sleep, one eye barely open.

“Nothing. Just can’t sleep.”

“Why? What happened?” She was already halfway back toward sleep, the question more instinct than real alertness.

“Nothing.” He caught himself, changed direction fast, before starting to dig into a story he didn’t know how to help her process. “You remember mummy and my sister are coming tomorrow.”

“How can I forget? I am going to prepare a feast.”

“That’s what I am thinking about too. We have to host them well.” He said it lightly, easily, and felt the small guilt of the half truth settle somewhere under his ribs.

She caught him anyway, “Is it because of what I told you? You are worried about me?” she asked, quieter now, more awake than she had let on a second ago.

“I just want you to be okay,” he said. “Go back to sleep. Everything is fine.”

“Come here,” she said instead, and lifted the edge of the blanket without fully opening her eyes, an invitation more than a command. He moved closer and gathered her against him, her head to his chest, his arm settling over her the way it did most nights now, and he smiled into the dark because he genuinely loved this part, the plain warmth of holding her, regardless of whatever else his body was asking for underneath it.

He didn’t let himself think too hard about what these small, safe hugs were doing to him. 

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Jide woke to two pings, then three more in quick succession, his phone doing the thing it usually never got to do on a Saturday, because he had left the sound on the night before. Fiyin and his mother had never once been to this house, and even with the address already sent, he had half expected a string of “which turning is it” texts later in the morning, but not this early, he thought.

He opened his eyes and the room was already fully bright, which meant it was fully morning and not the wee hours. He sat up, blinking at the screen. A message from Chloe. One from James. One from his mother. One from Fiyin. And one from Yetunde, which he opened first, out of habit more than anything.

I am making akara. You know I like you to eat it fresh, so I have only blended it, not fried yet. Text me the moment you’re up so I can start while you’re brushing.

He smiled at that, at the plain fact that his wife liked feeding him more than she liked almost anything else, and made a private note to himself, to renew his gym membership. He used to skip breakfast most Saturdays until nearly six in the evening. These days there was food waiting before he even opened both eyes.

He scrolled to his sister’s message next.

Meet us at the mall in an hour. We’ll be there.

He frowned and typed back, Why the mall? You’re supposed to be coming here, I sent you the address.

Then he opened his mother’s message, which was longer.

Don’t question your sister. I know you will be surprised we’re not coming to the house, but it isn’t done for us to come and greet your wife first. You’re the one who is supposed to bring her to us properly. The only reason we’re coming at all today is to see with our own eyes that you’re still alive.

Jide let out a breath. When he told them about the marriage, walked them through the whole reasoning, why formalizing it then had saved everyone the trouble of flying back to Nigeria for bride price and registry separately, they had seemed to take it well enough. They were surprised that Elizabeth was gone from his life, his mother had actually said, more than once, “Elizabeth was such a nice girl, how did you just suddenly break up like that?” and he had to remind her the breakup had happened nearly a year before any of this, and in the end they had said “fine, no problem, we’ll come and see you.” He had assumed that meant they were coming to the house. Apparently it meant a food court instead.

Mummy, no, he typed. Let me come and pick you both.

Just come to the mall, she replied, immovable.

He sighed. His mother and sister were closer than most mothers and daughters he knew, closer to friends than a mother-daughter relationship. Neither of them could be talked out of anything by the other, which meant there was no side door into changing either of their minds.

Mummy, please, he tried again.

To Fiyin separately, he sent, Please help me beg Mummy. Nobody should make my wife feel some type of way over this.

His mother’s reply came back instead. Your wife? Jide. Your father would be turning in his grave, hearing that word used before we’d even approved the girl.

Jide typed back: You like her, Mummy. You spoke to her on the phone twice. Don’t make it sound like I didn’t tell you about the decision at all. And we are still going to have our event here. I thought that’s exactly why you’re coming, so we can plan the proper thing.

Plan the reception, you mean, she wrote back, correcting him plainly, the way she corrected everything.

He got out of bed, sent Yetunde a quick, “Awake now, love, you can start frying” and padded toward the bathroom, phone still in hand.

He opened Chloe’s message while he ran the tap.

He hadn’t gotten another message from her in months, not since that one voice note she’d sent, the one he had answered honestly, telling her he was in something serious now and she should stop reaching out that way. She had gone quiet after that, stopped even the ordinary greetings people exchange out of habit. So the message sitting there now, two lines, a single heart at the end, landed strangely.

I’m thinking about you. Can’t seem to stop.

He stood there with the toothbrush halfway to his mouth. God, he thought, what kind of morning is this? He started typing a reply, something firm, when James’ message caught his eye further down the thread.

Jide, I don’t think your mum is happy with you. She called me last night saying you’ve hurt the whole family, and she’s not stepping foot in your house.

He frowned at that as he typed his response. 

Why is she telling you that? She didn’t give me that impression until just now, when she talked about meeting at the mall instead of the house. Do they want to embarrass my wife or something?

James’ answer came fast. Tread carefully. Don’t get too righteous about protecting Yetunde and forget you’ve hurt them too, in your own way. We Africans treat a wedding like it belongs to the whole family, more than almost any other culture I know. Of course, this stings for them.

I felt like it was right, Jide wrote back. I didn’t rush anything on my own account. It was easier.

Then you have to convince them on that, James wrote. Sorry, mate.

Jide exhaled, sent back a single tired emoji, and turned to Chloe’s message again, finishing the reply he had started. Chloe, I’m married now. Please don’t send messages like that again.

He was still holding the phone, thumb hovering over send, when Yetunde appeared behind him in the mirror, close enough that he jumped, startled, the phone nearly slipping from his hand.

“You okay?” she said, laughing a little at his reaction.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve just appeared in this bathroom, Jide.” She was still smiling, teasing him gently. “You jumped like I was a ghost.”

He set the phone face down on the sink and pulled her into him instead, toothpaste still on the brush in his other hand, forgotten. “We’ll be fine,” he said, into her hair. “Whatever happens today, we’ll be okay.”

“I’m not worried.” She said it plainly, without needing convincing. “I already know we’ll be fine. Thank you for being so understanding, by the way. About last night.”

“Don’t thank me for that.” He pulled back enough to look at her properly. “Everything is going to be okay. Just trust me on that part.”

“Okay.” She stepped back, glancing at the clock on the wall behind him. “I’ll go and finish up in the kitchen. Your mum and sister will be here in an hour, yes?”

He hesitated a fraction too long before answering, and she caught it immediately, the way she caught most things.

“Yes,” he said finally. “About that.”

“I scrubbed the whole house yesterday,” she said, not yet hearing what was coming, already moving on to the next thing in her mind. “I even bought new dishes, proper ones, so they will see that this place has a woman’s hand in it now.”

Jide looked at her, at the small, proud brightness in her face, and felt something in his chest sink at what he was about to have to say to her.

“They’re not coming to the house,” he said gently, “They want to meet us at the mall instead.”