by Vina Fenty
"I'm sorry for making you lead this double life, Amy. I want to leave you alone but I can't, I know it is wrong, but I can't bring myself to let you go."
I shut her up with a kiss, and in typical Tejiri hungry style, the kiss quickly escalated. She ravaged me and brought me to climax in record time. I was still breathing hard and climbing down my climax when she pulled my fingers down to her wet lower lips, I started to circle her clit as we kissed again.
"Amara, I want you to take me completely."
I knew what she was asking, and I wasted no time in taking the last piece of her that remained. It was the most glorious and beautiful thing I ever did, and I made sure to tell her how much I loved her and how I would never leave her.
*******
When I got home the next day, Sam was sitting there like a statue waiting for me. Once I saw his countenance, a wave of fear so deep I couldn't explain it crept into my spine. Our eyes met, and all of my instincts led me to bolt. He was watching me keenly, and at that moment, I finally obeyed my instincts and made for the door. He was faster than I ever could be, and once he caught me, he flung me to the floor as I tumbled in a heap on my stomach. I moaned in pain as I started to cry, not because of the pain but because it was Sam who was doing this to me.
“My friends always told me that I was too soft with you. I argued that you needed time and more love, but you proved them right. I have been too soft, it is time for me to man up. You leave my house, go gallivanting around town with your old lesbian friend, and then you have the guts to serve me with divorce papers? Do you think you can leave this marriage?" he said, screaming and shouting and kicking things.
He pulled off his belt and came to me, I was whimpering and begging him not to hurt me, but he pulled me by my hair and dragged me on the floor to his room. He threw me on the bed and started to take off his pants.
"I am your husband, Amara, and your body is mine. You don't get to chose when we have sex or have children or anything. You are mine, and I will start to treat you the way you deserve."
"Sam, please, don't do this, let's talk about this like adults," I said, but he didn't listen. He'd started to take off his clothes and intermittently he would grab my breasts roughly.
I watched almost helplessly as my husband started to molest me. My mind flashed to all the times that Tejiri and I had made love recently, and I shuddered to think that this man was going to ruin it all. I wasn't going to let him and I would die fighting.
Once I decided to fight, strength came, and I started to fight. I wasn't strong enough, but I attacked him like a dog, biting and scratching him, drawing blood in the process. He held me down as he tried unsuccessfully to pull up my clothes. I pushed him hard with legs and hands as he lost balance and fell off the bed to the ground. I didn't stop to check, I just ran with my phone in hand. I didn't look back, I ran to my safe place, Tejiri.
I ran out of the house without my car, and luckily for me, I saw a cab driver riding by. I flagged him and got in visibly shaken and scared. I called out Tejiri's hotel to him, and he drove off towards it. I caught him severally looking at me through the rear-view mirror, but I ignored the look of concern that often passed his face.
"Madam, are you okay?" he finally asked, and I nodded without thought, silently begging him not to pry.
He got the memo, and he faced the road and dropped me where I asked him to.
I realized I didn't even have any cash, and I immediately called Tejiri. She was downstairs as fast as possible as she counted the wad of bills, obviously more than needed, and handed it to the cab driver.
"Baby! Did he put his hands on you?" she asked, coming to me to check me out and I couldn't help it, I ran into her soft arms and burst in a painful sob.
I held her tight and breathed her scent, my Tejiri, my baby, I would kill for her, I had tried it before, and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again. My innocent, kind-hearted baby, so pure yet so strong. Nothing was going to get in my way again, not even my parents and surely not Sam.
She held me back, damning all consequences seeing as we were standing in the open, but finally, she got me upstairs to her suite, which I had come to consider as my space too. It had my effects scattered around, and it made me smile to see my hairbrush sitting there on the table where I had left it.
"Sam tried to rape me, he said he owned me, and I had no right to starve him of sex. He threw me on the floor and beat me. Sam! He did all that."
Tejiri bolted up and started to pace the room. She stopped abruptly and pulled out her phone, took off my clothes, and took pictures of the angry red and purple marks on my stomach and sides and put her phone back on the bed.
"Amy, what I am going to say might sound selfish, but you need to get a divorce from Sam. You do not love him, and he has no right to hit you. I am not saying this because I want you to myself even if I do want you badly," she said, looking at me before getting up to search her drawers.
She came up with a salve, and she applied it to the marks.
"I wanted to surprise you, my wolf, but since we are talking about it, I might as well tell you that part of the reasons he got mad was because my lawyer served him with divorce papers. I wanted to surprise you."
Our eyes met and caught as she smiled brightly.
"Really? You would leave him for me?" she asked in a small voice.
I sat up and pulled her soft lips into a kiss that was so deep, it felt like I was sucking her soul.
"I would do anything for you. It’s always been you, no other person."
I wanted to show her how I felt, what I meant. I knew that it would make me feel better if I pleasured her. After I begged her, with my lips, my hands, I finally convinced her. Minutes later, she opened herself to me, understanding that I needed her to feel sane in that minute, she was my drug. I was so shaken up that I required to overdose.
She drove me mad, with her moans, with the way she held my head in place and rode on my face, leaving all her wet shiny on my face. I loved how she would shake and cry out my name, saying all manner of incoherent stuff while I rammed my fingers into her. Tejiri was my drug, and I was so addicted to her that it almost hurt sometimes.
She didn't try to touch me, and I liked how she knew me so well and understood that I needed the control. She came hard in my mouth, and by the time the night was over, I had thoroughly had my fill of her in a way that left her crying.
As she slept, I stayed up thinking about my next step. It was evident that I didn't know Sam and what he was capable of. Still, Sam didn't know me either, he had no idea of what I was capable of when it came to Tejiri, and I planned to show him the very reasons why he should be scared of me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I sat there in shock as I dropped the phone from my ear and stared into space. Sam had just called me crying, no crying was too small compared to that horrible wail he'd just enacted. He wanted to see me one last time and talk things through. He also emphasized apologizing, and I saw it fit to speak with him one last time. I would explain things to him and make him understand why signing the divorce papers were for our good in the long run.
I closed from work early as I texted Sam to meet me at the hotel's restaurant. Then I texted Tejiri to let her know I had closed from work and was leaving without her.
Once at the restaurant, it didn't take long before I saw Sam walking towards my table. He looked... well... he looked like Sam but just very dejected. I had never taken out time to study his features. He was just someone that I always looked past, but for the first time since I met him, I looked at him, and I found that he was a very handsome man by the standard of those who considered tall, dark, and broad as attractive.
He was always so impeccably dressed, and it was the only thing that I liked about him, and that was because it was the only thing that he and Tejiri had in common.
He sat opposite me and proceeded to take off his sunglasses.
"Amara, you look well considering what I did to you... see... I am so..."
"Sam, please let's order something first. I can tell that you haven't eaten in a while."
He obliged, and soon he was picking sadly at his plate of basmati rice and shrimp stew.
As I watched him eat, It reminded me of exactly how we had met.
******
Federal University of Technology, Owerri. 2011
I was at the school cafeteria that hot afternoon as I tried to eat and read at the same time. I wasn't so good at multitasking, but I figured that there was no better time to learn than when I had a test to ace.
Just then, I heard a loud parade of students walking past the cafeteria. As usual, it was a congregation of Christian students advertising an upcoming church program, which made me mad with rage. They never let the rest of us study. They were at night classes, in the hostels, everywhere, with handbills and annoying sermons on how God was kind and merciful and what not. I just couldn't reconcile God and what had happened to me or what I was, so I never did bother.
I decided to hurry up with my food and find a quieter place just as I saw the churchgoers coming towards us with handbills. Once I was done, I hurriedly tried to leave, but my haste led me into stepping on a pair of legs, and before I knew it, I was tripping. Thanks to the universe or whatever, I didn't fall, but the legs on which I had stepped had to bear the brunt of my anger.
I didn't understand why people lacked simple etiquette. Why couldn't they just sit correctly with their legs under the table as it should be instead of sprawling all over the place like ferns?
I was angry, and I made it clear to the young man on whom I had stepped. He was calm as he listened to me rant about how upset I was, and it made me even angrier. Then out of the blue, he simply said, "Sorry," and continued with his meal. Infuriated, I stormed out of the cafeteria, all the while cursing under my breath.
In the manner that these things happen, I met him again, this young man who had annoyed me to the letter T the last time. It was on a weekday, and I had a lecture which I was late for, and meeting him again made me automatically angry. At this point in my life, there was only one word to describe me, bitter.
I was angry at myself, at Tejiri, at my parents, at Tejiri's parents, at the world. I was just a ball of negative energy walking, and the only ray of sunshine in my life was the pictures of Tejiri and I that I had from way back.
"If it isn't the girl who stepped on me, broke my ankle and then rained insults on me," he said, walking slightly funny. I wondered if he was serious that I had sprained his ankle. At the thought that maybe I had, I immediately lost all of my anger.
"Did I hurt your ankle?" I asked, finally stopping and looking down at his leg, which was still swollen a bit.
"It's nothing, I can handle it. So, where are you headed? I could drop you off. I just have to go get my car from the car park, "he said, pointing towards a black Toyota at the car park.
I looked him up like he was mad. Couldn't he see that I was headed in the other direction? I didn't respond to him after that, I just waved at him and hurried off to my class. At the entrance to my faculty, I turned around to find him leaning on his car and watching me for some weird reason. I knew I wasn't crazy. I had felt eyes boring holes into my back. He waved at me with a smile, but I scoffed and finally went off his view. That one was creepy, and I knew that I had to avoid him at all costs.
Deciding to avoid Sam was one thing, but Sam avoiding me became impossible. It was like he knew my time table, he started to appear everywhere. He was in the canteen if I went to eat and he always insisted on paying for my food. He was at my faculty whenever I came out of a class, and he sometimes had the guts to come look for me at the hostels. He became a threat to me, to my existence, and the more he tried, the more I ran away from him.
He finally finished his post-graduate, and that reduced the frequency at which I saw him, and to say I was relieved was stating it mildly. I hadn't even taken a breather when he started with the calls and text messages. To be sincere, he had never said anything sexual or about a relationship. According to him, he wanted to just be friends. That was the problem, I didn't want friends. I wanted to either be with Tejiri or be alone.
Sam was adamant, and he became the friend that I didn't want. In all sincerity, he had done his part. He had been there, guiding me through all the hurdles that presented itself. He had helped with my National Youth Service Corps posting and made sure I was posted to Lagos. He had got me a Place of Primary Assignment at a start-up tech company. When I finished serving, he already had a job waiting for me at Destiny Technologies. He put in a word or two for me with the Human Resource person and then crafted my resume so that I got the call to resume work.
I was grateful to Sam and less rude to him, he had proven instrumental to my success. He had never acted lewdly with me. I half expected him to come on to me sexually, but he never did, and it made me relaxed. I finally started to believe him. Maybe the poor boy just wanted to be friends.
I had been working with Destiny Technologies for about two years, and Sam and I fell into a routine. He would go off for weeks for his job, and then he would appear at my house. I would cook, we would eat, or sometimes he would take me out for dinner. We would talk if we had something to say, which was rare. I never really had anything to talk about with Sam except for my job. I didn't know how to speak to him. There was so much that he didn't know, so much that he couldn't understand. He wanted to be a friend, but that was something that would never happen in the way that he wanted. I could never open up to him, but he was so content with me, with our friendship. I made him happy even without trying, I could just be in my sitting room with Sam, and he would be grinning like an idiot from ear to ear.
No matter how angry, sad, or depressed, Sam was, all he had to do was hear my voice or see me, and he would be elated. I had the power to switch his mood from zero to a hundred real quick, and he said that was one of the reasons he kept me around.
It would be on my annual leave of my second year working in Destiny Technologies when I traveled to Asaba to see my parents. It was the year that everything would change.
I had gone to mass on the third day of arriving at my parent's house, and it had been one of those days when I missed Tejiri. I had dreamt about her and woke up crying. God and I weren't really in good terms, but I figured that He might want to reconcile, so when I woke that morning, I had given Him a chance to make things right. I went to the altar and knelt before it, begging for Him to bring Tejiri back to me. I even promised to stop thinking about her touching me or also trying it with her. I just wanted to see her, hold her and tell her everything she had missed, and listen to her tell me everything that has happened to her since we last saw. I knelt there before God, crying and begging, and when I was done, I felt a certain peace radiate from inside of me. It felt like He had heard me and that he was working on my request.
I walked home slowly, all the while calculating how fast God could answer prayers if He wanted to. I opened the gate to my house and noticed that two cars were parked in front. None of the vehicles belonged to my parents as theirs were stationed farther away at the other end of the large compound. Tejiri! It had to be Tejiri, the cars looked like something that her father could afford, they had finally brought her to look for me, my Tejiri. God had answered me, and I was overwhelmed, I didn't know how to thank Him. I rushed into the house with excitement, but what I met in the sitting room instantly sent me into depression.
The cloak of darkness immediately took hold of me as it enveloped me completely. I comprehended what the circus in the sitting room meant. God hadn't answered, what was I thinking to have imagined that God would heed my prayers. Yet again, He had failed me.
I greeted everyone sitting, looking up at me hopefully, and my mother rushed to me for a hug. She was dressed in one of her favorite lace dresses, and her face was made up
. My father beckoned on me to come to sit with him proudly, and as I went, my eyes fell on Sam and held while he smiled happily at me.
I had seen this in movies numerous times, a young man with his kinsmen sitting with his bride's family. Crates of drinks by the side, some money on the table, kola nuts, and the customary wine schnapps on a stool. I knew what it meant, and it was the worst thing that could ever have happened to me.
They talked, they laughed, they haggled and bantered back and forth, and I wasn't even there. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me. When I couldn't stomach any more of it, I stood up, took permission, and ran off to my room.
In my room, I finally let loose. The tears streamed down my face. Where was Tejiri? Didn't I matter to her? It was years now, wasn't it time that she came to look for me? I went to my bedside mirror and pulled out the single photograph that I had pasted to it. It was of Tejiri in her sportswear clutching a gold cup that she had won for the short race. Her eyes looked straight at me with that lopsided smile of hers, and I wanted to tear the picture into pieces, but I couldn't bring myself to. Instead, I crumpled on the floor and wept because Tejiri wasn't here. I wished that my door would open and she would come in to fetch me, I would leave everything and run into the sunset with her and I wouldn't even look back.
I didn't know when, but suddenly, my mother was in the room, and she was bent over me, stroking my hair as I cried.
"Mommy, please, I don't want to get married to Sam, please," I said weakly, looking up at her knowing that it was futile.
She collected the picture from my limp hands, watching in horror as she started to tear it.
"Mommy, No!" I screamed, standing up to wrest the picture from her hand, but she turned away from me, and before my very eyes, the picture was in shreds.
"Amara, this is Nigeria, I don't know what you're thinking but this thing that you are, it's not allowed here, it's not accepted. I know in the western world they do these things, but this is Africa, and there's a law making this illegal. We are not influenced by them, we have cultures and beautiful girls like you marry fine young men like Sam. Do not let them influence you. Please," she said, reaching for me, but I avoided her like the plague. What did she know about cultures, about me, or what I felt for Tejiri?