Again Chapter 24(Final chapter)
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: This chapter contains mature and sexually explicit content. You must be 18 years or older to read beyond this point. If you are under 18, please exit immediately. Reader discretion.
Wale made us into a game.
Not a single light in the room except for Nneoma. She has always been my beam of light. The thing my eyes find without looking. The thing I orient around without deciding to.
She had left clothes behind and I had not washed them. Deliberately. Stubbornly. Because I was not ready to let even that small, textile trace of her disappear. She smelled like my favorite cupcake flavor sweet.
“The earth could stand still, because I had my forever in my arms.”
Nneoma’s POV
After roaming the warm, electric streets of Tokyo the kind of streets that hum with life even in their quiet corners, where the smell of street food and neon light exist in perfect contradiction Wale announced, with that calm, unbothered confidence of his, that he had an itinerary planned out for us.
I should have known. I should have expected it. And yet I was still reeling from the fact that earlier that day he had rented an entire museum not just any museum, but my favorite one and made it entirely, exclusively his. Made it ours. I raised an eyebrow at him when he said he had more planned. He caught the look and simply smiled, that quiet smile that meant just trust me. So I said nothing. With Wale, patience has never once failed to reward you.
We arrived at a sleek, modern building nestled into a quieter pocket of the city. The signage was in Japanese clean, minimal, understated. The moment I stepped through the doors and felt the particular energy of the space, something in me stirred. I was already screaming on the inside before I even fully understood why. I didn’t know yet what he had planned, but I knew what I felt, and what I felt was home.
Because I love games. Not just playing them that is the smallest part of it. I love making them. I love the ideation, the way a world begins as nothing more than a feeling someone is trying to translate into something a stranger can step inside of. I love the process the arguments in development rooms, the physics engines, the storytelling decisions that seem small but quietly determine whether a player feels anything at all. I love all of it. Every invisible, painstaking, unglamorous layer of it.
This place breathed all of that. I felt it in the air.
We took our seats and the instructors came in warm, professional, smiling in that sheepish, almost conspiratorial way that told me immediately they were in on something I hadn’t been told yet. I was still piecing it together, still turning the room over in my mind, when Wale produced a game console.
That’s when it landed.
We were at a Game Boy studio.
He handed me mine first. Baby pink, smooth and cool in my palms, pristine as something precious and I was told I could design and decorate it however I wanted. Wale’s was sky blue. Calm. Steady. Quietly handsome, just like him. We sat side by side with our little consoles, and even that small detail the pink and blue of it, the way they looked sitting next to each other looked like us. We followed the instructor’s guidance and carefully assembled each piece, the chip already loaded, already waiting inside.
When we powered the game on, I felt my breath leave my body completely.
Nothing and I mean nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
I have spent years studying And building games. I have pulled them apart at the seams, sat in rooms debating frame rates and render pipelines and what separates a world that breathes from one that merely exists on a screen. I know what good looks like. I know what great looks like. And what was on that screen was something beyond both — something that did not fit neatly into a professional category because it had been built with something most studios never account for in their budgets.
It had been built with love.
The background textures were extraordinary. Rich, layered, warm in a way that told me a skilled environmental artist had spent weeks — maybe more — making the world feel inhabited, not just rendered. Every surface had weight. Every colour had clearly been chosen deliberately, purposefully, by someone who understood that the wrong shade of anything can pull a player out of a moment entirely. The smoothness of the gameplay was seamless in a way that made me emotional specifically because I understood the labour behind it. That kind of effortlessness is never actually effortless. It is the product of hundreds of invisible hours.
And then I saw the characters.
Two tiny, beautifully modelled three-dimensional figures moving through this world he had built and they were us. Unmistakably, undeniably us. The particular curve of my face. The way he holds his shoulders. Details so precise and so specific that whoever sculpted these models must have been working from photographs, from careful and loving instruction, from someone who described us with enough tenderness that an artist could translate it into light and geometry and colour.
I felt every emotion at once. The kind that has no single clean name that lives somewhere in the space between overwhelming joy and the specific, quiet ache of being truly, completely seen.
I could not believe it.
Wale made us into a game.
His entire theme for the day had been making me gasp, and this — this was the moment I lost it. Not gradually. All at once. Completely, in the very best way. Because standing there, looking at those two tiny figures living inside a world he had quietly, patiently, painstakingly built for us, I knew something with a certainty that did not waver or second-guess or ask for more proof.
This was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Not because of the grandeur. Not because of the money. But because of what it required of him — the listening, the remembering, the relentless and unglamorous work of hearing me love something once and turning that love into something real, something tangible, something we could hold in our hands. His intentionality never fades. That is the thing that consistently undoes me. That is the thing that makes him different. Most people show up beautifully for the obvious moments. Wale shows up like a rock — immovable, steady, present — in every single moment in between.
And I need to be clear: I am not just emotionally overwhelmed right now. I am professionally staggered.
Because I know what this took.
To build a game like this, you need a full team. First, you need writers — people who sit down and flesh out the world, its internal logic, the arc that gives the characters somewhere meaningful to go. Then concept artists, to visualize the environment before a single 3D asset is even created. Then the 3D artists themselves — and that alone breaks down into modeling, rigging, texturing, and lighting, each one its own discipline, its own timeline, its own specific ways it can go wrong if the wrong person touches it. Then you need someone to make the characters look like specific real people — which means photo references, rounds of revisions, more references, more revisions, approvals, and then doing it all again until it’s right. Then there is the game design itself — the mechanics, the physics, the user interface, the audio, the feel of every single interaction. Then quality testing. Then platform formatting — getting it onto a Nintendo or Microsoft system is its own bureaucratic and technical process that has humbled studios far larger and better funded than most.
Under normal circumstances, a project like this takes six months. Minimum. That is six months with a full team, a clear brief, and no complications.
He compressed that. Somehow. For me.
I cannot imagine what he had to navigate. What he had to pay. How many conversations he had to have, how many people he had to coordinate, how many moving pieces he had to keep quiet so that I would walk in here today and be completely, genuinely blindsided by all of it.
And then and then there is the customized experience itself. The console in my hands. The pink and blue of us sitting side by side. The studio, the instructors, the careful assembly of something we built together before the game even began. Every layer of it designed. Every detail considered.
I could not speak. Words were simply not available to me.
So I reached over, gently tilted his face toward mine, and kissed him slowly, deeply, with every single thing I had. It was the only language I owned that was large enough to carry what I felt.
When I finally pulled back, I took a breath, turned to the staff, and murmured my thanks to each of them genuinely, fully, because they had been part of something I would carry for the rest of my life. Then I turned back to Wale and told him to take us back to Team Borderless.
Wale’s POV
We walked back into the museum room and it was still dark deep, velvet dark, the kind that swallows sound and slows the world down. Not a single light in the room except for Nneoma. She has always been my beam of light. The thing my eyes find without looking. The thing I orient around without deciding to.
The music found us before we found our footing.
One Love
One Love by Kaysha drifted through the darkness, soft and unhurried, as if the room itself had been waiting to exhale.
I turned to her and asked quietly, “May I have this dance?”
She tilted her head, her eyes catching the little light that existed in that room, and said with a slow smile, “My pleasure.”
She placed her hands gently on either side of my neck — her touch cool and familiar and entirely certain. The short red dress she had changed into earlier had been quietly testing my composure all evening, and standing this close to her it tested it further. We moved slowly together in the dark, swaying without urgency, and we looked at each other not at, but into. The kind of looking that has moved past needing words because it already knows everything.
I placed my hands on her waist and noticed immediately that she had filled out a little since I had last held her. My heart quietly said thank God. I asked softly, “Is this okay?” She nodded. And then my hand, as though it had always known exactly what it was doing, moved on its own tracing slow deliberate circles against her skin first, then moving lower, finding the edge of her crème pop socks. I pulled them off gently. Then I was lifting the hem of her dress and she stopped me a soft, unhurried pressure of her hand against mine and looked at me.
She whispered, “I have missed you.”
A beat of silence. Then she said, “Just watch.”
She stepped back and began to undress slowly, her eyes fixed entirely on mine — steady, certain, never once wavering. The room held its breath around us. I held mine. Every movement she made was deliberate, unhurried, as though she had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it. The moment the red dress touched the floor, a sound left my lips that belonged entirely to her. It had always belonged to her.
The way our lips came together afterward was the way I imagine certain melodies feel when they finally resolve two separate things finding the harmony they were always shaped for. Synchronized. Inevitable. Like a reunion rather than a meeting.
I left marks on her body that night. I always have. But these were different heavier with meaning, longer in their intention. These were the kind that linger for days, weeks, that surface when she least expects them and remind her quietly of this night, this room, this dark museum and the two of us shining inside it.
For two hundred and seventy-one days, I had yearned for her. I want you to understand what that means not as a number, but as a lived experience. Her scent had lived in my apartment long after she left. She had left clothes behind and I had not washed them. Deliberately. Stubbornly. Because I was not ready to let even that small, textile trace of her disappear. She smelled like my favorite cupcake flavor sweet and warm and specific in a way I had no adequate words for, the kind of thing you keep going back to not because you are hungry but because you simply cannot stop wanting it.
So that night, I went slowly.
I took my time the way a person takes their time with something they have been waiting for long enough to know exactly how much it means. I slowly removed her bra, then her underwear, unhurried and deliberate, folding the weight of all those days into every movement. I kissed every part of her. Every single part. I did not rush a single moment of it. Every kiss and every touch carried its own specific gravity — longing, reverence, the particular tenderness of someone who has rehearsed this reunion in his mind for nearly a year and is finally, finally living it.
It was a serenade. That’s the only word for it. A serenade meant to settle so deep in her soul that even when her eyes no longer recognize me — when time has done what time eventually does — something in her will still remember this. Will still know us. Will still feel, somewhere beneath memory and language, that she was loved like this once. Completely. Deliberately. By someone who meant every single word of it.
I gently cradled her and laid her down, filled her completely, and gave her a few quiet moments to simply be before anything else. When we moved together it felt like heaven reclaimed — like something that had been on hold for too long finally, fully, resuming. Our reflections were everywhere around us in the darkness, and together — in that dark, in that quiet — we shone.
I passed out with Nneoma tangled in my arms, her breath slow and even against my chest, and the last coherent thought I had before sleep took me was simple and complete:
Home at last.
The earth could stand still, because I had my forever in my arms.
Barbie, as Narrator:
Jesus.
Jesus.
When Michael Jackson recorded Speechless — when he sat down and poured that song out of himself — this is precisely, exactly, specifically what he was talking about. I am now certain of this. I will go to my grave certain of this.
I thought Nneoma was the writer in this relationship? I was under the clear impression that she was the one with the words? When and I mean when — did Wale quietly pick up a pen? When did he start writing sentences that belong in gilded frames on the walls of galleries? When did he become this?
And hold on. Hold on just one moment.
He made her a customized game. A full, rendered, platform-ready, us-in-it game. I have been grinning like an absolute fool since I read that sentence and I have not stopped and I do not intend to. I have run completely out of vocabulary. I have exhausted every superlative available to me in the English language and several others I was attempting to borrow.
The bar is not just raised. The bar has left the atmosphere. The bar is somewhere between this planet and Mars and still climbing.
But my single favorite line the one that stopped my heart mid-beat and has not given it back:
“The earth could stand still, because I had my forever in my arms.”
Frame it. Put it behind glass. Build a small dedicated room in a museum not just any museum, but Nneoma’s favorite one, obviously and put that sentence at the center of it where it belongs.
I have soaked through every tissue in this building. Wale, on behalf of everyone reading this: thank you for raising the standard. We love you. We are not worthy of you but we love you enormously.
A note from the Author: she sends her sincerest apologies life had her in a full chokehold recently and she barely had a moment to breathe, let alone check a mirror. But she is back, she has a little breathing room, and here is the news worth waiting for: there are only two pages left before we say goodbye to this series for now and the book is already being worked on as we speak. It is all coming together beautifully, and you will be the very first to know when it is ready.
Squeals. What do you think Barbie would look like in print?
I am a consistent character across all her novels so the question is: which story do we want next? Beneath? Valerie and Kamsi’s story? Chukwudera and Emerald’s story? The highest vote decides the next journey, and don’t worry our favorites will still be making their appearances.
Stay tuned, you guys.