(cover photograph direction: Dagim Abebe)
You are at the age of performing desirability. But it is Nneka, your roommate who primes herself like a broiler pumped with feed, eager for harvest. Her outings are contingent on wigs bent to the iron will of hot combs. Prep time is awash with smells of singed animal hair, rosy setting spray, and metallic foundation. The floor is filled with discarded wipes stained brown from makeup applied repeatedly to get the perfect contour. Shoes are chosen with precision. Don’t wear that shirt nau, you already posted it on Instagram; that gown is too long, show some skin abeg.
She rehearses poses for pictures to be taken with her iPhone, as there is an unspoken understanding that your Tecno is too deficient to capture experiences. But even when you join her, your pictures turn out the ugliest. On birthdays, valentines, after exams, the start and end of lent, democracy day, Sallah, and Christmas, Nneka is enveloped in the Benevolence of men. She smells of sex and flowers. When she says you should not worry about getting a man, you lie that you do not care. You are too evolved to give into chemicals surging through your brain.
But, Yaefu trails your thoughts like a shadow. He is the new marketing recruit at NEXA, where you work part-time and remotely. The first time you meet Yaefu, he is a new participant at the bottom left of the screen. His name sticks out, foreign. Yaefu. When he introduces himself, a stream of light illuminates his eyes to a toffee brown.
Before you learn of the random allotment of genetics and melanin, your eyes and gums are your first insecurity as a child. You hate the stained yellow of your cornea, the ridges of your gum interspersed with black. You brush religiously to rid of the blackness that eventually takes you years to embrace. Yaefu has white corneas, white teeth, and pink gums. No scrubbing required. They strike you as an unblemished softness of someone who has never had a knife cut or got stung by smoke in the kitchen.
“Yaefu. Am I pronouncing it right?” Your boss says.
“Honestly? That’s the best attempt I’ve heard in a while.” He chuckles and you run your tongue over your teeth.
“That’s an interesting name. What does it mean?”
“A bold man.” He says, leaning back in his seat while your boss shakes his head and smiles. “Three stages of interviews and we never thought to ask that.”
You scan Yaefu’s background deeper as much as your expanded zoom window would allow. His books are stacked behind him on a furnished shelf. Some are horizontal, others vertical. Some have their spines facing inward. Others lean dangerously upon themselves like a stack of falling dominoes. A painting looks out of place on the white walls. It is a skull with the top half ripped off. Flowers bloom from the sockets, gnarly but colourful. The skull bleeds wavy colours from the open cranium. It seems the artist made a mistake but decided to leave it that in the last minute.
You stumble through social networks like a poltergeist, combing through a handful of Yaefu’s but find none that looks like him.
It takes three days for him to text you. He has been assigned to review the performance dashboard of a new marketing campaign launched by NEXA. He asks how you are, and you become giddy. You wonder if he can perceive the fetor of your desperation but it does not help that you are chronically online, and he does not use social media. You read his Masters thesis, and swoon at his astuteness, his attention to detail. You do not know much, but you know he is brilliant from how he texts. He punctuates every sentence and discusses art and red wine.
You learn that he hates corn, rain, the way a cold bottle of drink sweats, the texture of chia seeds. On the second week, he asks for your photos you drop the phone and ruminate how he must have more beautiful girls than you. But he calls you pretty after you send him the one in which you are under Awhum waterfall, wearing a white short and a white bralette, and you think about it for weeks.
Your chats run into a daily wont. The night before your MLS404 exam, a 6-unit load course, you do not read but spend it working on his campaign review. He sends two videos of himself which you watch till it sears into your memory. In the first, he is filming in front of a bathroom mirror. A Cuban necklace rests languidly on his neck. He looks like the world owes him obedience; haughty confidence trails his smile. His afro stands defiantly, defying gravity, begging you to reach through the phone and weave them into cornrows. You text him about this longing, but he ignores your message for days. You make a bitter resolve never to text him again.
On a Saturday morning while you read through his previous messages, Nneka snatches your phone and runs her eyes on you, up and down. You leap down from the bed.
“What’s your own nau?”
She backs away from you, away from the bed you both share, and towards the table in the middle of the room, heaped with books. She slips your phone into the pocket of her nightwear and sits on the table, arms on her waist.
“Kam, you are acting weird. I can’t give you this phone until you tell me what’s going on with you.”
Already, your palm itches. The familiar weight of your phone is gone. It feels like an appendage has been ripped off and the pain is spreading through your body in waves.
“Give me my phone.”
“I’ve been up since 3:00am. You know it’s unlike me. But you have been pressing your phone. We have a test on Monday, and you’re not jacking? Kamsiyochukwu Nchedo, what is going on with you?”
The first day you meet Nneka, it is your first year and you are both assigned to a wrong room in the school hostel. She is instantly charming. While you are wide eyed and confused, she writes to the student affairs, yells at the apathetic hostel porter, and secures a new, better room. It is only fitting that you become close and in year three, rent an apartment off campus together.
You stare at Nneka, her delicate wrists and the furrows on her forehead. The parting lines of her cornrows are filled with hair instead of the glistening scalp. You know this because you are the only one who weaves her hair. Yaefu, you think, would love someone like Nneka. You shudder and bury the thought. But it transforms into a rage which propels you to snatch the phone out of her pocket, ripping the seams and pushing her over the edge of the table. You have never seen fear like that before. Her eyes are flared, hair dishevelled, and the books are strewn around her. She flinches when you try to touch her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Nneka gathers herself up, and walks into the bathroom. You want to keep apologizing but the words are rotten in your throat. No, you are not sorry. For the first time, you feel alive.
Two weeks later, Yaefu text arrives. He says he wants you. He thinks of you all day and all the things he would do to you in the shower. It catches you off guard but you are grateful he texted. He says he has been busy. “Life has been tough.” You chastise yourself for ever thinking he is selfish. So you respond that you want him too.
Again, you brim with a primal longing that keeps you awake all night. He leaves you on read again for a week. Slowly, you convince yourself that you understand. What you both have is a volatile thing. What matters is that he has chosen you.
Yaefu pays for your flight ticket to Lagos. But you devise a means not to tell Nneka. She will not bother about you leaving to see a man but you dread her outbursts, the potential joy and worry about how you are inexperienced to handle a man.
A sore air sits between you and Nneka now. She stays away from you and your performative friendliness. Still, you inform her that your boss is hosting an in-person staff hangout in Lagos for all his remote workers. Nneka wishes you well in a way that rattles you. The stench of your pretense is obvious. She watches you frantically pack your skimpiest outfits, carve your brows, book a full body wax session. Her silence bellies a wisdom that makes you feel naked.
The night before you leave, Nneka suffers a pang of anxiety. Casting all hesitation aside, she begs you to feel her breasts for lumps. She has started clinical postings at the oncology unit of the university’s teaching hospital. Since she returned, she has been mortified.
“You should have seen them, Kam. Those poor women. Their skin was completely eaten away. The rot? One woman was wheeled away for a mastectomy and I couldn’t stop crying. The consultant told me to get out. It was awful, Kam. It was awful.”
“Just look at my right breast. It has that orange peel look. Doesn’t it?”
You are both standing in front of the mirror. She holds her shirt up and cocks her head.
You sigh. “Those are just little pores.”
“But the nipples?”
“It’s the same as the other side. You’re cold and I can’t feel any lump. You’re okay. There’s nothing wrong with your breasts.”
“Oh, thank God.” She hugs you but your arms lay limp on your sides.
“I can’t believe you’re going away for days. What about your class attendance?”
“I told HOD.”
“Okay.” She sniffles. “I think you’re very lucky to have things happen in your life outside of school.”
You shrug. “My grades are terrible. I need to make a way for myself.”
She giggles, and then stops. “Kam, you’re talking to a man.”
The firmness in her voice startles you.
“No, I’m not.”
“Kamsi, it’s not a terrible thing to like someone.” She sighs. “See, I have eyes. You’re always smiling into the phone or texting fast like you’re angry. I wasn’t going to bring this up but I really need to know.”
“Okay, I like someone but it’s not that serious.”
Her eyes light up. “Why isn’t it serious?”
“We don’t always talk and he seems scary.”
She says nothing, and it urges you to fill the silence.
“He has mentioned that he’s kinky. You know this dom-sub thing? He gets into it. Not in the sexual way.”
She shakes her head and makes her way to the bed. “Do you vibe with that kind of thing?”
“Jeez, Nneka. God forbid.” Your voice is high pitched and forced.
She smiles at you but it is vacant and cautious.
When you see Yaefu, you are overwhelmed by the feeling that God has taken leave. Yaefu is just as he appears on camera, only shorter. When he hugs you, it is bold and all encompassing, as though he has taken ownership of you. There are no butterflies, only a sinking feeling, a gradual rumble. But there is the mellow smell of his cologne and the promise of excitement.
Lagos is a sharp contrast to Enugu. Yaefu cuts through the crowd at the airport, one hand holding yours, the other rolling your overpacked echolacc. Even when he drives, he is focused on you. The crazy motorist blasting through the intersection does not matter. The hawker shoving gala through the window is inconsequential. Only questions about school and your personal life remains. He never talks about himself, not for the entire week you stay.
The decor in his house is sterile, except the study where you recognise the bizarre artwork and the books whose titles you can finally see: The Prince by Machiavelli, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, and an overwhelming number of self-help books. On the third day, he suggests you visit the John Randle Center for Yoruba culture, a museum on your bucket list. He insists the halter neck satin gown you have chosen is unflattering, and when you protest, he cancels the trip and you both stay home.
You do not know when he starts to call you baby. It flows so naturally that it passes for your first name. When you trade sex stories, you make up scenarios, but he can tell. He chuckles.
“What’s so funny?” you say.
“It’s so obvious that isn’t you. You aren’t overtly sexual unless stoked.”
“What does that mean?”
You are both sitting on a couch, watching TV, the volume turned low. He grunts and pulls you closer.
“How do I say this? You’re like Vanilla, baby. Even in your fantasies, you are accustomed to one thing. A boring way you think sex should be. Not only that, it’s the way you look at the world. You trust.” He pauses, and you catch a glint in his eye. “It’s refreshing, really.”
“And how do you look at the world?”
“Like it’s mine. It is what I want it to be.”
“Everything in it?”
“Everything.”
“And me?”
“Everything.”
Yaefu is rough with the sex, but you are curious at what it transforms him into. He is a different animal; aggressive, forceful, and eventually, tamed. You leave his house with bruises.
When you return to Enugu, harmattan has set in. The familiar red dust clings to your skin but you feel like a whole new person. Yaefu never asks if you have gotten home. But the flights to Lagos become consistent. The lies multiply, and there is less and less of you. Nneka says you should slow down but she is too far removed to save you.
Sometimes you hate Yaefu but he calls you a good girl and you fold. He calls you his charm, and you become pliant in his arms. His cunt, his slut, his servile little bitch. You are at once enraged and enthralled. There is a casual vileness with which those words escape his teeth. You stay, even when it unnerves you.
He starts to tell you what to wear, what to think, how to be. Your body revolts but you convince it to submit. When he asks if you want this total surrender to him, it is perfunctory and devoid of tenderness. But you say yes. Yes to this corruption, yes to the fingers trailing your bruised lips. Yes to the gag in your mouth, the whip on your back, the forceful penetration, the welts, the healing scars reopening. Yes to hurt, yes to pain, yes to him. Yes. Yes. Yes.
