“Hey, you want me to formally invite you first, right?

Nike turned her head away from my direction and continued walking towards the bathroom room……not like my eyes were focused on that part of her body anyway. Sure enough, she had nice eyes and her weave was properly fixed, but I was gazing at something else at that moment.

Nike’s butt cheeks bore that aura of perfection, and no, I wasn’t harbouring that opinion simply because I nibbled at it earlier on and watch the juices therefrom grace my jaws. There was that smoothness like none other, and now I was getting that full rear view, I could see how well formed it was. She had told me of her preference for walking around the house unclad, and I blessed the Lord for her fashion choices.

I looked to the table to the right side of this large bed where I was sprawled, totally unaware of where I had flung my briefs. On the table lay a copy of the book “Good Morning Holy Spirit”, but I loved to think that if those leaves had feelings, they would cringe upon feeling my touch, particularly considering where my fingers had been for the greater part of the past few hours. There was also a large frame on the wall containing a picture of Jesus and the twelve at the Last Supper, and while the photo didn’t bear the mystique of the Mona Lisa piece, I could feel Peter and John staring at me, frowning deeply. There would be no communion for me on the following Sunday for sure, unless her skin would serve as bread, and the liquid on my jaws be substituted for wine.

Her phone beeped. I checked out the Caller ID, which bore “Le Boo”. I knew better than to answer the call, so I let it ring and turned over the Infinix Hot Note. I was not about to reflect on the issue of fidelity in modern day (heterosexual) relationships. Then again, Nike had got the shower running, and as I slowly got up to join her at the other end of the door, I grinned as I recalled how different things were more than half a decade ago.

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“Oh God!! This flat sef? Who don use my water again?”

The year was 2010, I was chasing my university degree at the time, and I had rented an apartment away from the main campus, apparently being fed up of sharing hostel bathrooms with rats and having fellow occupants stealthily hijack pots from electric cookers midway through cooking half-decent cuisines. Each habitat had its own peculiarities though, and with this 50,000-a-year apartment, I was faced the burden of fetching water quickly before our landlord locked the tap and access to water would be denied until evening. The widow in the next compound would not hear of “strangers” coming to her water tank since we were not “paying rent to her”, so I was understandably livid at being deprived of a bath; there were mid-morning lectures to catch up on, never mind that a slumberfest was in store.

“It’s Charles. He and his girlfriend are bathing together, as usual”, my roommate said, in response to my inquiry.

I knew the girlfriend in question; Imade, a plus-sized lady who would get battered by Charles by 9am and still come over by 8pm to tickle his pubic hairs with her tongue. She cooked for him, did his laundry, helped him out when his bank account was malnourished, and on some occasions (as this one), scrubbed his body.

Beyond the fact that my hard-earned bucket of water had been the sacrificial lamb for their fantasies, I was a conservative student fellowship leader at the time, and I considered joint baths totally disgusting. I viewed it as a precourse to fornication, and I didn’t mince words in stating my opinion.

“Those ones will just be committing sin in there”, I said.

“Oh, Charles and his babe? That one is a regular thing now. Sorry about your water o, something had to give”, my roommate replied.

“But this neighbour really needs to give his life to Christ sha. I will talk to him one of these days”, I went on.
And in my righteous anger, I prayed for Charles’ conversion, while mulling over the length of time expended in that collaborative shower, and my impending lateness for lectures. I would go online and update my Facebook status thus, with the aid of my Nokia 2690:

“Ladies, just because you bathe with him is no guarantee that he’ll marry you. Please, repent!”

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All that felt like a lifetime ago. Nike was probably the eighth lady I would be taking a joint bath with, and there was nothing to indicate that she would be the last. I had long realized that people had various ways of expressing how they felt about one another, and that it was silly to judge others when one had not been faced with similar situations. My mind had become open to various perspectives over time, and I perfectly understood where Charles had been coming from years ago. I took one last look at the photo on the wall, and I turned the door knob so I could help Nike in her quest to conserve water.

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Jerry is a sports enthusiast and future art collector who lives in Lagos. Unofficial brand ambassador for small chops, he lives for some good literature with rock music seeping from the headphones. You can catch up on his thoughts at pensofchi.com

 
Hope was so tired she picked the phone as if in slow motion.
“What did you want?” she said into the mouthpiece of the phone to her twin sister in the other room.
“What did I want?”
“Yeah you just turned my door knob and I heard you go back when you found the door locked.”
“I haven’t stepped out of my room in the last one hour.”
“That’s odd; someone did come to my door” Hope said with a frown. She transferred the phone to her other hand as her eyes strayed to the door.
“Are you sure of that? You were sleeping, and I sure did not hear… someone is in the hallway, I just heard footsteps!” Charity’s voice had made a transition from tired and lazy to frantic.
“Is your door locked?” Hope screamed. She felt a shiver from the core of her being. Something was definitely wrong. If someone was in the house, he must have broken in. She and her twin lived alone in a two bedroom apartment with both rooms on both sides of the house, and she was sure she had locked the main door when came in hours earlier.
“Is your door locked?” She asked again.
“I’m not sure… oh my God the door knob just turned…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
“Charity, Charity is your door locked, charity is your door locked?!”
Even as she kept screaming the question to a now silent phone, she ran to the door, unlocked it in one beat and began a sprint to her twin sister’s room. She was just a little distance away from Charity’s door when she noticed it open, she stopped abruptly, her heart beating so furiously fast that it was the only sound she heard. She couldn’t have been more scared, and then as if being pushed, she moved like a zombie to Charity’s door. With few more steps to the door, she pulled to a stop again, rushing into her with great force was the feeling she gets when something goes wrong with her twin sister. This time, the feeling was a million times more intense than what she’d ever felt. She never could have believed that it was possible to feel so intensely. Feeling this way could only mean one thing, and in total denial, she started shaking her head vigorously.
“No! Oh God no. it can’t be true. No it can’t be true…”
By the time she got to Hope’s room, she was already sobbing profusely, and to confirm her fears was her sister in a pool of blood on the floor just by the foot of her bed. Still moving like a zombie, she went to the body and knelt beside it and gasped when she saw clearly the horror before her. Hope had been stabbed seven times in the stomach and once at the centre of her heart.
Who could be this vicious? Who could Hope have wronged to have been this angry? A sound from her back made her spring up and turn and then she saw him. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was strongly built. He had a murderous expression on his face and in his raised hand was the knife he had used on her sister still dripping blood.
Fear tore into her like the knife he was holding. The last thing that crossed her mind before the knife came down into her stomach was that her sister must have felt exactly the way she was feeling now before she had died. That thought made her feel happy in a painful sort of way.
Charity woke up with a start and a scream, her throat was so dry that the scream did not quite make it to her lips. Her body was covered in sweat, making her night gown stick to her like a second skin, the bed sheet and her duvet were both on the floor. She must have kicked them off the bed in the course of the dream.
She had never in her life had a nightmare that graphic, her heart was still beating fast, and in an inexplicable way, she still felt that painful happiness. Odd, so odd…
 
She was thinking of a cold drink of water when her door knob turned.
 
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Victoria is an editor and writer. She blogs at mytwocentsnmore.blogspot.com