Fiction: Souvenir (Part 2)

ICYMI: Read Souvenir (Part 1) here.

He was stunned. Women did not fall at his feet like a pack of cards after all. He laughed at himself and strolled into his own classroom next door with the feisty first year mystery girl he had just encountered, taking over his thoughts.

The lecturer’s words buzzed over his head like angry bees. He merely bided his time, waiting impatiently for the lecture to end. He ran out as fast as he could as soon as the class was over because it suddenly dawned on him that he didn’t even know her name.

“Excuse me, may I use your pen?” A high pitched female voice asked while tapping him gently from behind. He was angry at the unwelcome intrusion into his thoughts and the fake British accent of the woman’s voice, like his friend Chioma and her flat mates back in the UK. He turned to the voice with his pen in his right hand. She accepted the pen with a bright smile that added to his discomfort. The woman was literally throwing herself at him. Over the years , he had come to terms with the fact that women always found him attractive and he appreciated that, except that his thought were not about women today, but about the woman, his woman. He swore silently and watched the woman brush through a box in the bank withdrawal slip she held between delicate fingers. She was either a thirty-something year old socialite paranoid with anxiety to find a trophy husband to present to her rich father or a desperate divorcee on a mission to enact vengeance on mankind.

Nnanna almost laughed out loud on his theories and how swiftly he was getting to understand Lagos. He was impatiently waiting for his pen while the lady took something as mundane as scribbling on paper with pen and turned it into an erotic act with her measured delicate movements before his very eyes. He was in no mood for frivolities especially as it became clear to him that all that stood between him and Njideka was a huge elderly man with shiny black hair and snow-white moustache, so he turned his back to her once again, trembling slightly at the moment he had waited seven years for.

The pen lady chose that moment to tap him with the pen and he took it without turning around so she skipped the queue and stood behind the huge guy to face him with shiny eyes. “Thanks for the pen. She drawled, “I’m Wumi”

“My name is Nnanna. Please don’t take this the wrong way but I really can’t do this right now” he blurted out with mild exasperation”

She chuckled and handed him a business card. “Call me sometime, Nnanna. When you are not in such a bad mood” And just like that, she was gone, to his utter amazement. Nnanna made a mental note to remember this one to amuse his friends until he glanced at the pink gold embossed business card in his hand. Adewumi Williams actually owned a major clothing line that he had read about somewhere. No wonder she had expected him to swoon. He slipped the card into his back pocket.

“Next person” came that all-too-familiar voice and he moved close to the marble counter that was the only barrier between him and the long lost love of his life. When she looked up and their eyes met, all the agony of the years he had spent searching to no avail came rushing back like a flood, threatening to drown him.

When she gasped and said his name, the way that only she could, it was as though the sound came from a faraway place, because time disappeared in that Victoria Island bank…

(To be continued)