DogsBy Augustine Okam
The first man you slept with the year you turned twenty-five was a married man. He had a too-round face and an even rounder belly, but still managed to look attractive, the way only a Consultant of Plastic Surgery could. You knew you were going to fuck him two weeks before you fucked him. You and six other students were assigned to him as part of your Surgical posting. He was playing Coldplay's greatest hits at low volume on his phone, as unconventional as that was, murmuring the lyrics and examining a patient with an exposed Achilles tendon from a puncture wound. While the other students were looking at what he was doing and taking notes, you were looking at his latex-gloved hands and imagining them running down your neck, down your back, flicking your lips gently, intently. His mouth was moving gently, saying something about Simon's test and gastrocnemius muscle, and you felt the urge to put something into his mouth, something wet and pink, something like your tongue. It happened in the one-room apartment you share with Ngozi. As he started kissing your hands and drawing you in to him, you asked him if he was married and knew before he answered that you didn't care. He said No, and you appreciated his dishonesty; that he had left his ring in his car even though the mark on his ring finger from years of commitment was obvious. Later, you would think it was a stupid question because obviously he was married, someone had to feed him well enough for his belly to be that rounded. The sex was blah, not that bad but not worth missing the shopping appointment with Ngozi. You wished he would shut up and lie back and do whatever you asked him to; rather, he tried shifting you into positions that made you fearful that you were a clench away from a loud fart. He kept saying Call me daddy, Tell me that I'm strong, Tell me you love me, and instead of saying any of that you wanted to hug him because he sounded depressed. He plunged into you like he was trying to prove he has been exercising a lot, that he was not a middle-aged man with a prominent abdomen, but only made you bored, bored enough that in the middle of sex after taking two breaks to pee, you went on your knees and sucked him till he came because you were feeling sleepy already and needed him to go.
The second man was Hausa and had the long dick to prove it. He told you he loved you five seconds after telling you about his wife, and as he pressed your breast, a week after you met him, you wondered if he pressed his wife's breast the same way or if he was less gentle. Less deliberate. He had a voice that reminded you of Okon, the Nollywood actor from Calabar, strengthening your biased belief that Hausa and Calabar men have the sexiest accent. It lasted for two weeks and an extra week to convince him you were not simply acting up, and once, after you finally convinced him that it was over, he saw you walking back from class, pulled his okada to a stop in front of you and spat on you, right on the new wig you were still paying off in installments.
You met him on your way to a lecture on antidiabetics that you almost missed because there hadn't been electricity for weeks and your plain, white uniform that resembled a nurse's gown wasn't ironed. When you waved his bike down and told him Federal Teaching Hospital, he said Enter without trying to negotiate a price. Actually, he said something that sounded like bacha but you interpreted it as Enter. He said nothing throughout the ride but kept pushing his upper body back, making shy contact with your breasts. When he dropped you in front of the faculty building he said "I like you, I wan marry you," in a stretchy Hausa and a negotiator's smile. You stood there staring at him for seconds, impressed by the sheer audacity and wanting to hear more, what other surprises he was capable of. He was waiting for you when you stepped out of class after the first, second, and third lectures which took about six hours - he was a patient man. You knew he had lasting potential. He had a penis that curved slightly and was darker than the rest of his body - which was something because he was already very dark, charcoal-like - with prominent veins that you ran your fingers through, excited by its course. When he came he squeezed your back in a way that made you hug him and come with him. In the space of two weeks, you'd fucked him twenty-four times and after the twenty-fifth time, he proposed. You were sitting on his bed that was too wide and took up most of the single-room apartment he lived in. He was kneeling, naked, and his semi-flaccid penis made you want him. Then you took your handbag and left. You never came back and you didn't give him any reason. When you reached your lodge that day, you slumped into your bed and laughed until you cried. The third was short. When naked he looked like an inflated octopus with his arms stretched in a hug and, wearing his classic, long sleeve shirt tucked into a plain, almost baggy trouser, he was three rough circles stacked on top of one another - his head, torso, and lower body. He looked like he was bloated in all parts; bloated face, bloated buttocks, bloated abdomen, bloated lips (he gave the best kisses with those). He had small eyes that escaped into his eye sockets each time he laughed, giving him an extraterrestrial look, and wide nostrils as if he needed them to breathe in solid air. He was your uncle by Nigerian standards. He was the elder brother of the cousin of your stepmother. Somewhere in your memory, you remember his visits when you were a child, he would throw you up into the air only to catch you before your feet touched the ground and throw you up again, then he would call you his wife, the way everyone else did.
Something the third taught you: Sex is more exciting when it's forbidden. At the end of the third, you wondered if the man banished from your ancestral hometown for sleeping with his step-daughter really, as he said, "did not know what came over me." You wondered if what he wanted to say was "It felt so good that lust clouded my understanding of my family tree," but of course, that would have just made the already angry crowd angrier. The third made you laugh in a way no man had before. He told you stories, of tortoise and antelope and birds making love, and when you argued that there was no way tortoise was that cunning he smiled and said nothing. He had a way with silence, he was capable of folding it into shapes, and colors. The third told you he liked fair women, he said it like this: I like fair fine women o, the ones with big nyash and skin like ripe pawpaw. He said it as if he had just let you in on some big secret, in an almost conspiratorial tone, the way you would admit to a close friend of having a secret disease that was also a secret superpower. He said it like you couldn't tell natural fair-skinned women (and men) from skin-toning and skin-lightening creams. You could always tell, even those that bleached with expensive organic creams that didn't leave dark knuckles and even darker elbows behind. The third lasted for the two months the ASUU strike lasted and you went back to school. After the third, you decided you would not date men that wove stories like baskets and made birds make love with their lips. But you did, the fourth one, and you told yourself it was because you loved him. He had two daughters, five and six, with a wife he said he married because she got pregnant and threatened to give the child to another man. "I don't even like dark-skinned women," he told you, and even though you wanted to ask him if he liked his dark daughters, not unlike him, or if he liked his mother who was so dark in the picture you saw in his house that her teeth appeared extra white. Instead, you swallowed everything he told you and pressed your lips shut so that you wouldn't vomit it. There was a picture of him and his wife on the wall of his sitting room, he was kissing his wife on the cheek and she had a smirk on her face like she knew he would rather be kissing a cheek so fair you could cut it out and eat it with jollof rice, the way people eat very ripe pawpaw. You wondered if she knew he was having sex with you on their bed that smelt like the citrus scent of her favorite perfume. You wondered if she knew he was going to leave her for you. On your first date with him, you walked along Ejike's road, late at night, streetlights sparkling on either side of you. People were watching - you assumed they were, secretly wanted them to see your trophy - and you wondered if they could tell he had a wife at home. You wondered if they could tell your heart was about to leap out from your chest into the night sky and form a canopy of confetti. There are other things you wondered about, worried about, like if they could tell you loved him so hard it hurt, not figuratively, literally your chest hurts thinking of him with her. You wondered if they could tell you loved him too much. As the both of you walked, your hands kept grazing each other, tiny contacts that sent sparks of something you couldn't describe through your entire body, especially the hairs at the back of your neck, and you realized this must be what heaven was; happiness that filled up your lungs and made your chest swell up. You stared at his face for an inappropriate time and concluded that Ed Sheeran must have been crazy calling anyone that wasn't him perfect. Then you got jealous of everything and everyone that witnessed him at the same time you did; the night breeze, his ugly wife, and even uglier children. Out of the blue, desperately, you wanted your lips to touch his. Shamelessly, like you had a blindfold over your eyes and mind. Crazily. Hopelessly, you wanted to bite his soft soft lips, to mark him, to piss around him the way dogs do, to claim him as your territory. You wanted to kiss him so much you thought you were going to die if you didn't kiss him, you wanted to kiss him so bad you believed you were running dangerously out of air and his lips held all the air you needed. You are no longer sure when the thought entered your head. Maybe it was before you got to the bridge or maybe the thought infiltrated your head, entered you the way only he could when you got to the bridge - Let's drown together. Something about the water that night felt delicious and you needed to explain it to him, to tell him that just the thought of it made you salivate. "Let's jump," you said and didn't regret saying it, did not want to take it back. You knew that he could tell from the way your voice was sharp and dull at the same time that you were serious, too serious. "You're crazy. I can't swim," he said even though he knew that wasn't what you meant. Even though you believed, hoped, were so sure from the way the muscles around his eyes gathered around his eyeballs, that he was considering it, too. For weeks after he left because his wife caught your tongue deep in her husband, you thought about that moment, bit off pieces of it, moved it around your mouth with your tongue, and placed it under your tongue, savoring it slowly, storing it in case he disappeared completely the way all perfect things do so that you could have something of him with you, to drown with him in your mouth. Sometime during the walk, he whispered something delicious (he said the most delicious things; toe-curling things; mind-blowing things; sexy things) and you were sure you had committed adultery by hearing. You wanted to rip his shirt off and run your tongue along his chest over and over again until you swallowed his taste and his chest hairs glistened. You were wet between your thighs and you were sure that if you spread your legs and the wind blew against the hollow between, you would come. You rubbed your hand against his crotch in one single motion and his eyes widened. You smiled. You were breathing hard and if lust had a color it would be the color of the hunger in your eyes. Hunger for him. You ran the rest of the way to his house. Somewhere in-between that moment, watching the lust in your eyes through his, you wanted to pull his trousers down in the middle of the street and take him inside your mouth and watch his face make weird faces until he came. You tore each other's clothes once you entered his house - or maybe your clothes disappeared on their own accord, knowing their usefulness was over. You kissed him, deep and hungry, and your tongue fought against his, and when you thought you could die from kissing him, he stopped, held your face in his beautiful hands, and kissed your forehead. And you started crying. You cried so much because you loved him so much, and you whispered, "I can kill for you. I will die for you." He told you you didn't have to and you cried harder. Augustine Okam is a Nigerian writer. His writing has appeared in Jellyfish Review and A Coup of Owls, among others. He is currently a student at Ebonyi State University where he is pursuing his MBBS degree.
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