“Wow, you really are more gorgeous in real life, those your Instagram pictures don’t do you justice at all” Nnamdi gushed.
“Thank you”, she replied modestly, confirming that her online calm demeanor was not just a front. She oozed calmness, the kind of lady on whose account you wished Time could move speedily at work just so you could get back home to her, but as far as he was concerned, all he wanted was a taste of the lips between her hips, so all that vanilla-strawberry moist talk about commitment could sit on the sidewalk.
He ushered her into the tastefully furnished house.
“Nice place you got here”, she said.
“Well it’s the little I can do for now, I am actually planning on moving to Banana Island”, he replied.
The house that he begged Bayo, his friend, to let him use for a day! Nnamdi was the classic fine boy that you could almost call beautiful, but he couldn’t find a decent job to match, so to ‘set P’, he always asked Bayo who understood and let him use his apartment. He never arranged the house when he was done, but for old times’ sake, his friend always obliged him as he had helped Bayo out in so many situations.
After talking for a while, he turned his grey-brown eyes smiling charmingly at Megan.
“So sugar, what do I get you?” he drawled, and she in her quiet manner said, “I’m really hungry, so I could do good food and wine, please.”
He liked how she was direct, and it moved him to virtually jump to the kitchen; he could pride himself on the fact that he was a good cook. After finding nothing, he remembered that Bayo’s sister stacked the refrigerator with some of the food she prepared the previous day, so he walked with confidence and said to her: “Just give me a minute, let me get something out of the fridge and prepare for you”.
She reacted with a smile, her fingers clutching the remote control as she surfed the TV channels.
Nnamdi pulled the handle of the fridge but it did not budge. He tried again without any semblance of success. He then looked under the doormat where Bayo kept the key whenever any of his ratchet friends intended to visit, and found nothing. He knew then that he had been screwed, painfully and royally. He remembered promising a hundred times to replace some stuff and always falling short, preferring instead to spend the little cash he could manage on clothes and girls. He felt like a twelve-year-old whose pants were being pulled down by bullies in front of his crush. He couldn’t take her to any half-decent eatery either because all his lean wallet could boast of at the moment was about three thousand naira.
“#!$£*%!” he cursed under his breath.
Unbeknownst to him, Megan was watching him and shaking her head. He didn’t even want to guess the look on her face.
“ I don £#@!!*$ up,” he mused.
She stood up and came to him, the words “what happened?” finding a way to escape her eyes. But the words wouldn’t take leave of her lips, so she just gave a long derisive hiss, throwing him a dark look he couldn’t understand and walked straight to her bag, picked it up, ruffled inside and walked back to him. He had begun to curse Bayo and all his village enemies of progress, when he heard the lock turn, and the refrigerator open! Viola! Megan took two bottles of Heineken and a tall glass, using her teeth to open one bottle and empty its contents, while Nnamdi stood dumbfounded with his mouth hanging open like a pair of underpants stretched to its elastic limit.
The exclamation “Jesus” only stopped short of escaping his lips. Megan finally looked up and said to him, “which kind stingy friend you get sef? Him for kuku tell you no from d beginning na!”, completing her berating of Bayo with another hiss.
Raising the half-filled glass of beer, she smacked her lips and slowly said to Bayo, “guy, you nor wan drink?”
Nnamdi stared at her in shock. He didn’t remember seeing anything fly out of the window, so he wondered where her British accent had disappeared to.
“Ehen, abeg my name is Adaku, afa’m bu onwo, drop the ‘Megan’, biko”, she continued, interrupting his thoughts.
Nnamdi swallowed hard.