High School Sweethearts from Lagos, Nigeria, Ifemelu and Obinze reunite after years apart. Obinze has since married another woman since their youthful courtship, but the connection between them is long-lasting and the two can’t resist falling back into their comfortable, electric attraction.
“There was, between them, a weightless, seamless desire. She leaned in and kissed him, and at first he was slow in his response, and then he was pulling up her blouse, pushing down her bra cups to free her bre*sts.
She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and yet there was, also, a newness to their union; their bodies remembered and did not remember.
She touched the scar on his chest, remembering it again. She had always thought the expression ‘making love’ a little maudlin; ‘having s*x’ felt truer and ‘fu*king’ was more arousing, but lying next to him afterwards, both of them smiling, sometimes laughing, her body suffused with peace, she thought how apt it was, that expression ‘making love.’ There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb.
She wanted to tell him, ‘There is no week that passed that I did not think of you.’ But was that true? Of course there were weeks during which he was folded under layers of her life, but it felt true.”
