I didn’t plan for anything serious to happen during my stay at home for Christmas. I just wanted peace, sleep, and maybe small chops from my mum’s kitchen. But the moment I stepped into my street and saw Deji standing by his father’s old gate, everything I thought I came home for shifted.

I almost didn’t recognise him at first. But when he smiled, that same stubborn, playful smile from secondary school, my chest tightened. It felt like my teenage years rushed back and slapped me in the face.

“Ah-ah, look at you,” he said, opening his arms like he had been expecting me.

I laughed because, somehow, after all these years, he still made me shy. “You haven’t changed,” I said, and I meant it. He looked older, sure, but he still had that boyish charm that used to make me hide my face in class.

We talked for a bit, standing there, catching up as if we didn’t have ten years of silence between us. But of course, the past came up. It had to.

“Do you remember that day?” he asked, raising a brow.

I almost choked. “Deji, please,” I whispered, covering my face.

He laughed so loudly I had to hit him lightly. But even as we joked, the memory played clearly in my head; both of us half-naked, breathless, curious, stupidly young, about to do what we didn’t fully understand. Then his mum barged in like a hurricane and dragged him by the ear, screaming my name like I stole something.

My mother’s own reaction later? Let’s not even go there.

“That thing caused wahala o,” he said. “I thought you would never look at me again.”

“You disappeared afterwards,” I reminded him.

He sighed. “My dad got a new job in Kaduna. Everything changed fast.”

There was a moment of quiet between us. Not awkward, just heavy… familiar.

He looked at me slowly, in that way that makes your stomach feel warm. “You’ve changed, too,” he said. “In a good way.”

I felt that compliment everywhere.

He walked me home that day. We didn’t flirt, but we also didn’t pretend nothing was happening. Our hands kept brushing. The air between us was thick with something familiar… something old but not dead.

But nothing happened that day. Or the next. Or the day after. We kept seeing each other casually; short chats at the junction, small walks at night when the street was calm. Even the way he looked at me was different: patient, steady, as if he wasn’t in a hurry to ruin whatever was growing again.

One evening, he offered to walk me home. It was a short walk, but it felt like the longest, sweetest one we had ever shared. Our hands brushed a few times, and each time, something inside me jumped.

When we got to my gate, I should have said goodnight. I should have gone inside. But I didn’t.

Instead, I asked, “Are you in a hurry?”

He understood exactly what I meant.

We ended up in his family’s house, which was quiet, warm, and filled with memories. It didn’t feel strange. It felt like stepping into something I had been waiting for, without knowing it.

We talked for a long time. Real talk. Adult talk. Life, work, mistakes, relationships, all the things we never got to share. And the more we talked, the more something charged the air.

And then, at some point, he reached for my hand. Just simple, gentle contact. But it unlocked something. The kind of thing you can’t push away once it has been waiting for years.

When he leaned forward and kissed me, it didn’t feel sudden. It felt overdue.

Everything after that happened slowly at first, and then it grew into something deeper and much more intense.

There were no interruptions this time. No parents shouting. No panic. Just the two of us, grown and fully aware of what we wanted.

When it was over, we lay there quietly, breathing in the same rhythm, our fingers tangled.

He looked at me and smiled in that same way he used to when we were kids. “At least this time, we finished what we started.”

I couldn’t even pretend he was lying.

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