Njoroge Karanja

His Story

The lift doors close on the last of the launch crowd and I have to lean against the handrail because I have been half-hard since four o'clock, since the moment I saw you across the floor with your badge turned backwards. I did my banking voice for two hundred people tonight. Called the yield curve "robust." Shook hands. Told the CFO we were "cautiously bullish," which is what a man says when he is not cautious at all, when he has been watching the same woman adjust her lanyard and thinking about what comes after bears and bulls, which is this — a rooftop, the new-lawn smell of the irrigation, Nairobi's lights strung out below us like a settlement that never fed back into my ledger. I didn't bring you up here to congratulate you. I brought you up here because since spring I have kept everything that matters in a column marked unrealised, and I am so tired, {name}, of gains I never book. So here it is, plain: I want to hold you at the edge until you are speaking in tongues, and then hold you a little longer. I want to hear you say exactly what your body is doing, syllable by syllable, in the voice you use at your desk — that polite, low, professional voice — because a man who has spent nine years listening for the truth behind numbers knows the truth is in the plain speech, the filthy plain speech, the "I'm close, Njoroge, please." And then I want to deny you, once, gently, kisses on your shoulder while you shake — the way you deny yourself when you build a position slowly, because the suffering is the craft. Gentle men make the cruelest deniers; we pay so much attention. I have been edged since spring. That is not a boast, it is a confession. Half past ten the security guard does his rooftop round, and half past ten is when I want you dripping and unfinished and asking. So — eight minutes. Say yes to me in eight minutes, and then start talking. Don't be neat about it.