The heavy, carved doors of the penthouse apartment swung shut, and the world—with all its noise, its expectations, its prying eyes—simply fell away. The silence that remained was not empty; it was profound, a sanctuary woven from their shared breath.
Mina leaned back against the door, her body thrumming with the residual energy of the wedding, her ears still ringing with music and laughter. Before her, the sprawling living room was illuminated by the lights of Lagos twinkling like a carpet of fallen stars thirty floors below. The opulence of it should have been intimidating. Instead, it felt like a canvas, blank and waiting for them.
Adams stood a few feet away, having shrugged off his embroidered agbada to reveal a simple white linen shirt beneath. He watched her, a soft, wondering smile on his face.
"Hello, Mrs. Dared," he said, his voice a quiet rumble in the spacious room.
The name, her new name, sent a delicious shiver through her. "Hello, husband," she replied, the word feeling both foreign and utterly right on her tongue.
He didn't move to sweep her into a dramatic embrace. He simply crossed the space between them, took her face in his hands, and kissed her. It was a kiss unlike any they had shared before. It was not a kiss of desperate passion or public performance. It was a kiss of arrival. A slow, deep, tasting kiss that spoke of a beginning, not an end. When he finally pulled away, they were both breathless.
"I've been wanting to do that all day," he murmured, resting his forehead against hers. "Without five hundred people watching."
She laughed, the sound light and free. "I think they were mostly watching you."
"Then they missed the main event," he said, his thumbs stroking her cheeks. "The look on your face when you walked down the aisle. Mina… I will remember that until the day I die."
The raw sincerity in his voice brought fresh tears to her eyes. They were happy tears. The first of what she knew would be many in this new life.
Their first days as husband and wife unfolded in a dreamlike sequence of stolen moments and gentle discoveries. The grand penthouse, with its art collection and panoramic views, ceased to be a showpiece and became their playground.
They spent lazy mornings tangled in the thousand-thread-count sheets of their bed, sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Adams would order a ridiculous spread of breakfast foods from the hotel downstairs—fluffy pancakes, fresh pastries, exotic fruits, and traditional akara and pap—just to see what she liked best.
"You don't have to buy out the entire kitchen," she laughed one morning, biting into a sweet, buttery croissant.
"I'm conducting market research," he argued, his eyes twinkling as he fed her a piece of mango. "I need to know how to keep my wife happy. The data suggests she has a weakness for French butter."
They talked for hours. Not about poetry or destiny, but about silly, mundane things. His disastrous first attempt at driving a stick shift. Her childhood fear of the neighborhood turkey. They filled the sterile, elegant space with their laughter, their stories, their shared silence.
He showed her his world, not as a spectator, but as his partner. He brought work home and asked her opinion on editorials, genuinely considering her insights. She, in turn, taught him the simple pleasure of curling up on the vast sofa with no other purpose than to be together, her head in his lap as he read, his fingers absently stroking her hair.
One afternoon, she ventured into his walk-in closet—a room larger than her old apartment—and found a simple grey cotton shirt of his hanging amidst the sea of tailored suits and designer labels. She slipped it on. It drowned her, smelling overwhelmingly of him—his sandalwood cologne, his clean, starched scent. She padded out into the living room, the hem brushing her knees.
Adams was on an international call, speaking fluent French into his headset, every inch the powerful CEO. He saw her, and his sentence faltered. His eyes darkened, tracking her movement as she curled up in an armchair with a book. He quickly, and rather abruptly, ended his call.
"Désolé, quelque chose de très important vient de se présenter," he said smoothly before taking off the headset and tossing it aside. He crossed the room in a few strides, looming over her.
"That," he said, his voice husky, "is a very dangerous look on you, Mrs. Dared."
She looked up from her book, feigning innocence. "Oh? It's just a shirt. I was cold."
"Liar," he whispered, bending down to kiss her, his hands sliding under the soft cotton to find the warm skin of her waist.
This was their bliss. It was in the grand gestures—the surprise tickets to Paris for a weekend "just because." But it was more potently in the tiny, intimate details. The way he always made sure her teacup was full. The way she instinctively straightened his tie before he left for a meeting. The way they found a rhythm together in the kitchen, him chopping vegetables while she stirred the pot, moving around each other in a silent, easy dance.
For those first few weeks, the outside world ceased to exist. The foreboding comment from the wedding aunt was forgotten. The tension with her family was a faint echo. The shadow of Tunde had dissolved in the radiant light of her present.
One evening, they stood on the massive terrace, the humid city air warm on their skin. He stood behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist, his chin resting on her head as they watched the endless flow of taillights on the expressway below.
"It feels like a dream," she whispered, leaning back into his solid strength. "I keep waiting to wake up."
His arms tightened around her. "This isn't the dream, my love," he said, his voice a soft vibration against her back. "The dream is what we build from here. The family we create. The future." He turned her in his arms to face him, his expression serious, full of a hope so fierce it stole her breath. "Our story is just on its first page."
He kissed her then, under the vast, star-dusted sky, with the city lights shimmering around them like a promise. In that moment, wrapped in his love and the boundless potential of tomorrow, Mina believed him with her whole heart.
The bliss was not ignorance. It was a foundation. A deep, unshakeable memory of perfection they would both cling to in the years to come, a north star to guide them through the storms that waited, patiently, on the horizon. For now, they had this. And it was everything.