JAMIL KHALIL RESIDENCE,
JABI, ABUJA.
JANUARY, 2022.
On a normal day, Jamilah would be shaken awake by Jamil.
But not today.
Sometime at midnight, she'd felt the familiar gut-wrenching pain of her period starting.
Her first thought when she'd seen the tissue spotted red was, 'great! Like I don't have enough nerves to deal with'.
She'd have kept ranting on if her period didn't bite back immediately, hitting her in the gut with the force of a sledgehammer breaking ice.
Sometime later, she'd managed to sleep after trying out a million different poses on the bed.
By the time her alarm blared her awake, her legs were propped up on the headboard, head twisted in a very unnatural position.
The things women had to deal with!
Jamilah crawled out of bed, her brain still in a haze but when clarity started to set in, so did her reality.
The image of Jamil on the stairs flickered through her head, fear immediately seizing her.
Her motions were suddenly slower, less alert......heavy.
She glanced at the paper on the bedside table, the speech she'd have to give.
'You can do this!', she recited mentally, forcing herself to go through her routine.
An hour later she was scrubbed, clean and prepped ......but not quite ready.
Three hours later, she still wasn't. Nor five hours later.
And now, there was barely three hours left.
****
The sound of Jamil's car pulling up into the driveway scared and comforted Jamilah at the same time.
Her legs remained glued to the living room, eyes trained on the door.
And when Jamil entered, all the tension that had been building up over the course of the day fell off.
He was in a suit. An actual suit!.....and it wasn't black!
"Hey", Jamil said slowly, shyly.
His gaze couldn't quite meet hers all of a sudden. She unnerved him with the way she was staring at him.
"You're in a suit", she said after a solid moment of silence.
Jamil would've laughed on a normal day, teased her for stating the obvious, even flirted but for some reason, his shyness wouldn't budge.
And when Jamilah stepped so close that he could hear her breathing, he felt himself freeze.
What in the world was wrong with him?
What in the world was wrong with her?!
"It's maroon", she whispered in the same way she had before, awe-struck and unbelieving.
She circled him slowly, from front to back and then stopped before him again.
"Jamilah", he managed to say after a while, in a voice that couldn't have been his.
But his wife payed him no heed, her hands suddenly on him.
Her hands caressed his shoulders, forearms and then his hands, stopping only to link her hands through his.
He watched her carefully, as she smiled up at him, her eyes holding an intensity that was almost too much for him to handle..........almost.
"You look breathtaking", Jamilah said in a tone he could only describe as genuine.
YOU ARE READING
𝓜𝔂 𝓫𝓪𝓫𝔂, 𝓶𝔂 𝔀𝓲𝓯𝓮
RomanceWhen news of Jamilah Abubakr's death reached the world, it shook. How couldn't it? It'd lost one of the gems it had left....A young, cultured philanthropist with as much beauty within, as she had without. The Khalil household was one of the most af...
