BENJY
Benjy glanced at his phone as it began to ring. He knew, without looking, who was on the other end of the line. He tapped the side button, silencing the phone, and turned his face back to his computer.
Optitex stared at him. It wasn’t a blank page, but it could as well have been because he didn’t like what he saw and anyway, what he saw was a confused mass of figures and shapes that didn’t look like they were coming together just yet.
This was the tough part about being a creative – you were in charge of your productivity. There was no one else you could blame your lack of productivity on. It didn’t matter if you lived in Nigeria where constant power was a myth, you were expected to deliver when it was time. Add to that, running your own business presented a whole new set of challenges. His fashion design baby Bennow Fashion was almost four years and he didn’t feel like he had broken water just yet. Some days were good days when someone somewhere recommended his company and got him contracts that kept him and his team of three designers busy for four to six months, and then there were the not-so-good days when business was slow and it looked like they had crawled under a rock and no one could see them. No one had told him entrepreneurship was a series of highs and lows – physically, emotionally, and mentally. He had to pay salaries whether or not he made any significant sales that month. He was the fashion designer, literally. He birthed the concepts for every outfit they produced and handed it over to his team of tailors who made the clothes.
Today was not one of his good days. In fact, he hadn’t been having many good days in the past few weeks. He glanced at his phone as it began to ring again.
He felt the palpitations in his heart from seeing her name on the screen. He didn’t know why he had a bad feeling about this. It wasn’t the first time a girl tried to reach him after he ghosted her after they had a nice time. However, this was the first time the girl had called consistently for a week after he went silent on her.
To be honest, he didn’t feel bad about his ghosting ways. His dating life had rules – he didn’t treat the girls badly. He made sure to be kind and gentlemanly whenever they spent time together. He made them laugh (women liked men who made them laugh), he took them out on dates and paid. He made conversation, listening to them carefully as they shared details of their life with him. He listened so he could ask questions, the kind that made him seem interested. What they didn’t know was that he hardly stored this information. He had trained his mind in such a way that it filtered out information about anyone that he didn’t really care about. He liked the connection, but not too much. And he liked sex. God, he did like sex. And perhaps that was his downfall. He should have stayed away from women especially since marriage was not his priority but he enjoyed a good ol’ romp in the hay with an attractive woman.
Ore, his sister, thought he was crazy. She said it all the time whenever they chatted on Whatsapp:
“Who’s your latest?” she would ask.
He would respond with a smiley covering his face because these women were not statistics to him. They represented something more – a connection, no matter how fleeting.
“Are you sure you don’t have an addiction or something?” she would say.
This time it was a ‘rolling eyes’ emoji and then: “I’m just a boy who likes sex.”
It should have felt weird talking to his baby sister (she hated it when he called her that) about his sex life, but he and Ore had always been close. Sometimes it made him sad that he didn’t have that shared openness with their older brother – Deji. Sometimes he wished he could talk to the men in his life – his father or brother – but connection with them had always been fleeting and elusive. He wasn’t sure whose fault it was. He knew that he didn’t quite like his father, hadn’t liked him for a long time, and perhaps had distanced himself from him the older he got. But Deji? Why weren’t they closer? Why didn’t they swap stories and talk about how hard being a man was? Why did they both pretend with hearty back-slaps and shallow conversations that life was perfect?
He picked his now-silent phone up and the screen lit up to show six missed calls from Elizabeth China.
That was her name. The girl he had been with three months ago. He had met her through a mutual friend on Instagram who said she was into bulk shipping of fabric from China. It was supposed to simply be a business meeting and so he had saved her details that way. When they met in person, he found her attractive, even a little flirty and she agreed to go out on a proper date with him a week later. They were together for nearly eight weeks, eight weeks that Benjy thoroughly enjoyed because Lizzy was adventurous in life and bed. She was energetic and malleable like a cat, making sounds that Benjy swore he had never heard in his life.
He had started ghosting her when she began to do weird things like checking up on him every morning, asking him his plans for the day, and asking if they could meet up just to talk because she missed him. He met up with her when she said she missed him, thinking that what she really missed was what they did together, but she had shunned his attempts at sex instead perching herself on the other end of the couch in her apartment, crossing her legs in the mini-skirt she wore, nearly driving him crazy.
“Talk, Benjy. I said let’s talk,” she said.
He took a spot on the couch, leaving space between them because he was a man who respected women and their wishes.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
“You don’t talk much about yourself,” she said. “I want to know you.”
He laughed, a nervous sound. “You know me in all the ways that matter, Liz.”
She rolled her eyes, playing with her fingers which he noticed were manicured and coated in pale-pink.
“Is that all that matters?” she said. “Tell me about…your family. Are you the first born? An only child? An only son?”
The questions were innocent but they made Benjy nervous. Sharing details about his family meant opening up more than he was used to, more than he wanted to.
“Come on, Benjy. We’ve been together two months and I know nothing serious about you,” she said.
“You know I run a business. You know I’m a fashion designer. You know I’m fantastic in bed.”
She laughed despite herself, “stop jor.”
“Okay, I’m not an only child or an only son. I have a brother and a sister.”
“Oh, older or younger?”
“Both. Brother’s older, sister’s younger.”
“Are you guys close?”
“Liz, come on. Is this why you called me here? To talk about my family? Because it’s boring. My family is boring. We are just normal people, nothing special about us.”
“I just want to know you,” she said again and this time there was something in her voice that signaled to Benjy that it was time to end this.
And so he had managed to get through that evening knowing that he was done and he would walk away.
That had been over three weeks ago and he thought Lizzy had given up and gotten the message when he ignored her Whatsapp check-in messages, didn’t call or text her for a week. She had gone silent too and he even though he had been relieved it was over, there was a part of him that hated himself for his cowardice.
He swiped, dismissing the notifications of her calls. Then he opened his Whatsapp and there at the top, was a message from her. Out of habit, he tapped the message and opened it.
It was a photo.
At first, he didn’t understand it, nor did he understand the accompanying message: we need to talk ASAP.
He clicked open the photo and his eyes widened, he felt bile rise in his throat as his brain began to compute what he was seeing.
No. God, no.
No.
