05/16/2022
💮THE SCREAMING😱 AND TJE DARKNESS🌑💮
💎EPISODE 3💎
© Gabriel.
Akin answers my knock from deep inside, the kitchen perhaps, and I bend to unlace and remove my sneakers, open the screen. I step into the room and my feet sink into the rich, red pile rug. I often joke that when Akin leaves after his service year, returns to Lagos, I would keep the rug.
He would retort with a pretend hurt expression “you are more interested in keeping the rug than me abi?” To which I would say “you will stay if you want to. You need to be kept?”, bracketing the word kept in quote by holding my hands up, bending them at the elbows and cocking my index fingers in a gesture that mimicked the quotation mark.
Akin meets me halfway into the room and hugs me.
He smells fresh, I catch a whiff of Irish spring, icy blast bathing soap and although he is wearing blue jeans, it is obvious he has just emerged from the shower. He is shirtless.
His skin is damp and whitish and water droplets chase each other down his back.
I hug him back, my arms tighten involuntarily around his shoulders and when I release him, he has a puzzled frown on his face. “Is everything okay?” he asks me and looks so boyish, so innocent and free that I decide to postpone the inevitable a little longer.
The bed is unmade, this narrow queen-sized bed on which we conceived this baby I now carry.
Everything takes on a surreal quality. I stare at the bed, the wardrobe spilling over with his clothes, tennis shoes and Timberland boots flung into a corner, by the laundry basket. It all seems so unfamiliar. I feel out of place here, detached.
I think that the spider crawling on the wall by the pillow belongs here more than me. Even the memory of our bodies, Akin’s and mine, sweaty, entwined on the bed fails to evoke any recollection.
Akin is expansive, offering me juice, shortbread and ending with “haba, you are not a guest here now? Help yourself.” I think I have made him uncomfortable with my silence, my strained smiles, my furtiveness.
He would never offer me a drink otherwise. He would yank me to the bed and tickle me.
We would play-fight, we would kiss, our clothes would fall off our bodies of their own volition, we would f**k, a frenzied coupling, sweaty bodies making 'slapslap' sounds, nails raking each other’s backs, choking sobs that started in one mouth and ended in the other, and finally we would calm. A hazy languor.
We would pick a movie to watch or a topic to fight over.
TBC…