The End of the Story
Orji Victor Ebubechukwu
It’s a Match!
Emily takes a second glance at his profile:
Rex, 31
“About me
I am a simple guy with a simple taste. Slide into my DM and let’s catch some fun. Allow me restart your heart.
Essentials
18 kilometres away
6 ft 2
University of Manchester
Interests
Tennis Gym Travel Arts Music
Nature
“Okay,” she says, an assurance for a prospect unhindered. She sits up on the bed, her back against the headboard slat. Her excited fingers move quickly across the screen: Hi Rex, Milly here. Ten minutes pass, and she begins to worry he won’t respond. When the message finally arrives – Hi Milly, what’s happening? How are you?– an innumerable assemblage of choristers raises an anthem in her belly. Her response is hurried: Nothin really. Just here…, and his follows almost immediately: Okay. She waits three minutes to see if he will send any more messages, but he doesn’t. So, she settles back into her reclined position, tucking the pillow under her chest with an easy sigh.
Milly: Hbu?
8:20
Rex: Nothing. Just here, bored.
8:24
Milly: Hmmmm… I can relate.
8:24
The screen shows that he is typing, and for some reason, she starts to type again: But I think we could keep each oda company. Hw about I come by at urs? Briefly, she contemplates sending the message and settles not to. She lays back, watching the unsent text disappear by every click of the delete button. She needn’t appear too desperate, too needy of a man, of sex. Her phone chimes shortly after, and it is a message from Rex: Yeah, it’s a sickening feeling. But I think we’ll be alright.
Milly: Yh, I tink so too.
8:32
Rex: But what if we’re not?
8:32
Milly: Hehehe… we shld jst leave dat to what-if. But
d chances are we’ll be. Yeah?
8:33
Rex: Yeah. Where are you btw?
8:40
The text adorns her face with a smile as sweet as sugar. In my room, she types. On my bed. It’s a lazy morning.
Rex: Hey! It’s almost ten am. Rise up and shine.😊
9:15
Amusement twinkles in her eyes all the more. She replies with four laughing emojis. Then a hahahahaha. Then a maybe I need sum1 to drag me outta bed.
Rex: Oh, I see.
9:18
Milly: Lol.
9:20
Rex: I’d love to try tho.😌
9:20
Milly: Awwwwwwn. I’d love to see you try.
9:21
Rex: How old are you?
9:25
Milly: Am 22 yrs.
9:26
She wonders briefly what he’s implying with his abrupt change of subject, unless he thinks her too young for him.
Rex: Okay.
9:27
Milly: Nd u are 31 right?
9:27
Rex: Of course. Quite too old for you, huh?😊
9:28
Milly: Oh, no no, not at all.
9:29
Rex: 🌝
9:31
Milly: U are a vry handsome man btw.
Hope itz u on ur DP
9:32
Rex: You flatter me. But thanks.🤗. Yes, that’s me.
I’m no catfish.
9:33
Milly: Hahaha… Okay na.
9:33
Rex: You don’t believe me?
9:34
Milly: Of course I do.
9:34
Rex: Okay, do you want to see me on a VC?
Just to confirm if my claim is true. 🤷♂️
9:35
Milly: Am not doubting dat u’re not the 1. But I would
love to still speak with u on a VC
9:36
Rex: Okay, send your call line for a video call.
9:36
In her chest, she feels her heart jump. A mixture of excitement and trepidation, and maybe of something else, but of course, she mustn’t show it.
Milly: 0712222555
9:35
As she washes her face in the bathroom, which adjoins the bedroom – first impressions matter, a girl mustn’t be caught unfresh – she hears her phone ringing just almost immediately. She quickly rinses off, dries with a towel, and rushes for the phone.
“Hey,” she waves as she waits for the revelation of his face. Instead, she is greeted by the helmet mask of Pipligbo standing on the wall, a little above the tall headboard slat. It startles her, this figure. She would find reasons why he decorates his space with such a figure when he would tell her much later that he is basically an art collector, occasionally landing gigs to supervise activities at art museums, both within and outside Nigeria. She would come to think about the intriguing notion of being so closely tied to one’s passion that one becomes that very passion (or maybe elements of it), whilst still not being exactly it.
Shortly, he appears on her screen, and her bothered thoughts at once disappear. Oh, sweet divinity! He is every bit as perfect as his photos suggest —
beard immaculately trimmed,
eyes captivating in their narrowness,
an enchanting presence that makes her shy.
Very much so.
But again, she knows better than to show this feeling that creeps through her veins like sugar ants gliding through a stream of sugar water.
“Hey,” he greets in return, his eyes deep and enigmatic. But his voice does it all – a deep baritone that draws her closer into her most foolish form.
“Hi,” she says. Her own voice catches her by surprise.
For a brief moment, they did nothing but stare at each other with a profound sense of admiration.
“You’re even more beautiful in person, Milly. Your profile picture doesn’t do you justice,” he says.
A blush creeps up Emily’s cheeks. She would save it for her makeup session.
“Thank you,” she manages to say. “But maybe you should hold on with the compliments until we meet physically. You might be disappointed.”
“I know something good when I see one. There’s no way on earth you’re less beautiful than I can see now.”
“No dey swear for me, abeg, before you jam what I ordered versus what I got.” They both laugh.
“Nah, I know what I’m talking about.”
“Tell that to Madam Natasha,” she says with a grin.
“Who’s that?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard?”
Clueless.
“The TikTok sensation.”
He picks the joke, and they both laugh over it, heart to heart. When they recover from the laughter, seconds after, they resume speaking. Their connection is swift, like two old friends reconnecting after so many years, as though each has previous knowledge of the other, as if, in some sort, they share the same memories. He tells her that what he loves most about her so far is her originality. She asks what he knows about her originality. He tells her that it is how she communicates; nothing like the other girls who only put up a show to give a likeable impression. She tells him that she cannot exactly explain why she likes him. Maybe it’s something about his rare handsomeness? Maybe it’s about the warmth of his presence? The innocence lingering around the edges of his face in those three unverified profile photos?
“I’m a mystery, I know,” Rex laughs.
“You certainly are. There are no words to describe this attraction.”
“I know,” he tells her. “Maybe a closer look in person could aid your comprehension?”
A little pause. Then a tilt of the head. “Hey, handsome, is this an invitation to your crib?”
He smiles. “Well, you ain’t gonna keep a gentleman waiting for too long, huh?”
She smiles.
*
She thinks she will need some condoms and some lube, just in case something might have to happen, and this beautiful stranger her soul is quickly embracing might not have any of those in store. No room for excuses. They hadn’t spoken about sex or talked in that way two people who knew they would at some point have sex spoke. But she is one to know that things are bound to happen. After all, she’d reinstalled Tinder that morning because she wanted to hook up with someone, and she was willing to meet up with just anyone who shared her interests.
It was logical that, having met Olusola through Tinder, she could find someone else, even better, even truer. The Tinder thing was Chizoba’s suggestion. Chizoba, who spent almost all of her holidays looking for men who could pay to sleep with her; Chizoba the bad bitch Emily admired and looked up to for street-wise advice, but who she still desperately never wanted to be like. This was the one way Zoba knew how to solve Emily’s unending relationship, sex, and family problems and help a friend who was on the verge of losing herself completely to a guy who didn’t give two shits about her. Just last week, behind the faculty of management science complex, James, the cute guy from Mechanical she desperately wanted to own, had bent her over and fucked the living hell out of her with his hands tightly capping her mouth so that her soft muffles are not discovered by the other students who sat studying under electric reading lamps in the classrooms before them.
“Why are you following me around?” he whispered to her in the morning, but his friends could hear him. She had no business with the department of Mechanical Engineering, the last time he checked, so only the heavens knew what had brought her here. She wanted him to fuck her, and he did. Now, why wouldn’t she just leave him be? He reminded her that they were not dating, and he wasn’t interested in dating her. After all, wasn’t she the one who told him two days ago that she had slept with too many men in her short life? “Come to think of it,” he said, “Which guy for Uniport never fuck you, huh? Isn’t that giving public property?”
It was his way of calling her a damaged girl without exactly calling her that. She was not stupid; she knew this.
She’d physically met Olusola some weeks after James had told her that shit, and she refused to go to class or watch the Kdrama that would normally occupy her free time. And that was when Chizoba suggested Tinder, just to help a friend. “These small university boys don’t have anything to offer sef. Stop wasting your time with them and find yourself a real man who can spend on you real good. There are many such men on the app. Just set your profile right, and voila…”
“Zoba, you don’t get it,” Emily said softly. “I don’t care about the money. I want love.”
“Eyah… And that’s why they will always serve you cold breakfast. Love is not real. Stop being delusional, babes. Fuck who you want, and make sure not to lose. Suck them clean of their pockets, and your mama is gonna be proud of you. C’mon!”
Weeks passed, and no boy would look in her direction – or she was too broken to take notice – and she began to feel a narrow ache inside, a longing for a man’s touch. While Chizoba was away at her aunty’s house in Trans Amadi for the weekend, she downloaded Tinder, set up her profile, and began chatting with different men. Until she matched with Olusola, who instantly charmed her with his handsomeness. She did not meet with him until after three days of intense conversations on the app, then on WhatsApp. This was not for love, she told herself. Fuck love, and fuck all the boys you can.
They first met at Asian Town, and that same night, they both ended up shagging in the toilet of the restaurant, and continued on the floor of his parlour. She would come to learn months later that the house she’d thought was his was but his friend’s, just as she would come to learn that every other thing that he’d told her about himself was a lie. Stupid and unnecessary lies. She was disappointed, but how was she to be? After all, they had nothing too serious together. It was just a fling, the regular sex. He hadn’t even asked her to be his girlfriend, and she wasn’t expecting that he would. Plus, she already knew by this time that men could not be trusted, even if she thought she couldn’t do without the feel of their touch. Her own mother’s struggles with them teach another lesson – having been married to an abusive man who hit her with his belt almost all night, and harbouring a series of boyfriends after their divorce who made the woman feel so small, even in her own house.
Emediong was much better. He was a simple, cool guy. Gentle in speech and mannerism. He didn’t need to lie that he had come from money, even if he’d lifted himself out of the poverty of his people. He didn’t need to lie that his pants cost 10,000 dollars when they didn’t cost up to 500. He didn’t need to squat with a friend and pose as if he owned the house when he hadn’t even contributed a dime to the rent. But he, too, was a prick, an unforgivable one. Or how else could you explain that you walked in on your man fucking two girls without a single iota of remorse or respect for you?
“Hello,” she says into the phone. “I’m around the Kilimanjaro junction now. Where do I find you? Are you inside the eatery?”
Over their chat, when they agreed to meet up, he’d been particular that he lived on the outskirts of town, and having to explain how she could get to his house would be a total waste of time. Best if she just waited for him at the Kilimanjaro restaurant around GRA Junction.
“Uh, I’m just there as well… No, I’m not inside the eatery… Uhm… what are you putting on?” He says between breaks, and she can tell that he is on his wheel.
“A purple dress…”
“Uh, just hold on… I think I have found you. You’re wearing gold hair, right?”
“Yes,” she says, turning around to see if she can spot him. But she can’t find any car pulling towards her.
“I’ll pull up in front of you now,” and just in a few seconds, a clean white Lexus 460 parks before her. She tries to look in through the tinted window as stylishly as she can so that it is not obvious that she is staring into a stranger’s car – and what if it isn’t Rex in there? As she strains her eyes more, the window begins to roll down. And there, on the wheel, sits a man who looks all trimmed, all kept, the kind of internet man you’d kill to see.
“Emily,” he says with a placid smile.
“Rex?” She says, trying to return the smile.
“Come in,” he tells her.
Getting back onto the expressway, he tells her that he is hungry. Isn’t she hungry, too? She says not really, and he says he knows some place where they sell good native and intercontinental meals.
*
Until now, Emily has been to high-profile restaurants, but nothing prepared her for the experience with Rex at Janeford 24. “You like the place, right?” he asks. Beside them, the transparent glass walls display the blue pool shaped like an octopus, complete with dolphins. The ceiling, as high as a cathedral, has crawling plants that seem to grow by the minute and sea animals defying gravity and science, although she isn’t sure they are real.
“Definitely,” she says. “Never knew some restaurant like this was in Port Harcourt.”
Rex smiles as he takes a forkful of his ukwa, the smile of a man who’s made his point. She isn’t so sure now if it is still his handsomeness or the fact that he is rich and effortlessly flaunting his wealth in her face that makes her like him even more. Was this what Chizoba meant by being cashsexual, because how on earth can she explain that she is craving him now, seated exactly opposite him across the table? Nothing about their conversation or the food should suggest an arousal, but here she is, helplessly growing wet. He is speaking to her, and she is responding, but even the speech and the food are not of her concern now. She wants to get down with him.
He’s done with his meal in a brief while, while hers stays almost untouched. He reminds her that she has a meal to finish, and she says that she’s just found out that she isn’t hungry at all.
“Okay,” he says.
It is time to leave, he tells her.
“To your house?” she asks. She can swear in the name of her ancestors that the question slipped out accidentally.
“Do you want to join me?” he asks.
She imagines her eyes widening to the elation she feels. The question she had been waiting for.
“I mean, it’s normal if you don’t want to, we just met. I’ll just drop you off at your…”
“It’s fine,” she interjects.
“Hmm?”
“I want to come to your house.”
*
The road to his house is on the outskirts of town, just as he’d warned. When he’d told her that over their long video call, she hadn’t expected it would seem like a distant travel into another state, roadsides shrouded with tall grasses, a body of water, like the colour of the Black Sea, coming in sight, as they approach the end of the line where the sky touches the coal-tarred road.
“So you say you’re from Imo, huh?” He asks, filling the silence that should’ve entirely been if Osadebe’s Onuigbo wasn’t playing on a volume range of 30/100.
“Oh, yeah. Ikeduru” she replies. “And I didn’t ask where you’re from.”
Before she finishes her question, his phone begins to ring on the tripod.
“Excuse me, please,” he says, picking up the phone with one hand while controlling the wheel with the other.
“Yeah, this is Priye, what’s up?” He says into the phone. “Oh, yeah, about that, please can I call you later in the evening? Or maybe 8pm tonight?” While the other speaker at the end of the call speaks, Rex beautifully regards Emily while still focusing on the road.
“Oh, sorry about that. That’s a work colleague,” he says after the call, returning his phone to where it was.
“Oh, that’s fine,” Emily says. “I hope I’m not encroaching on your work time?”
“No, no, come on, darling, I’m not a regular commuter, so…”
“Okay.”
“So, uhm… you were asking where I’m from, huh?’ He was looking in her eyes partly.
“Hmmm, yeah,” she says.
“I’m from here… Rivers State. Abalama, precisely.”
“Oga landlord, at least worse comes to worse, you won’t issue me a quick notice.”
“That’s funny,” he says, but he does not laugh.
“Yes na,” Emily says. She looks out through the window. The thought comes in again: shouldn’t she be worried following a total stranger to a house described as being out of town? Only last week, the buzz on Twitter was about the dismembered bodies of two female RSU students who had gone to see their Yahoo boyfriends in town in the boot of their flashy car. No, no, Rex doesn’t seem like the type, she calls her thoughts to order.
“This place is called Taori. There’s a small town inside the bush surrounded by water,” Rex says, distracting Emily from her line of thought.
“So it’s not like all isolated like it looks?” Emily asks.
“Well, that’s a good thing, I guess. So that if I pull the car by the road to offer you as a sacrifice to the gods who own the roads, you can scream for help and expect truly for someone to come save you,” Rex corks his lips to one direction.
“Sarcasm comes easily to you,” she tells him.
“Oh, well…”
They arrive at a turn when Emily asks, “But isn’t it surprising that you’re playing these old Igbo songs, considering that you’re not Igbo?” She’s moving her body to the sound of Eddie Okwedy’s Happy Survival, now playing.
“Well, I don’t really subscribe to the idea that you must understand every lyric of a song before you let yourself savour it. I love to believe that music doesn’t know language, you know. It is the language; it speaks for itself,” he says.
“Hmm,” Emily says.
“Well, for a more satisfying answer, which I think you seek, these were the kind of songs my father mostly played. He was in love with the Igbo culture, despite not being one, hence the reason he married my mother, who’s from Abia State.”
“Oh,” Emily says, but it is more a sigh than a word.
“So now that you know that I am a daddy’s boy, wetin you gain?”
She laughs, and he joins her. Then he asks if she knew what the song was about. She says a sharp “No.” A new line of conversation emerges.
*
About an hour later, Rex pulls into an ungated compound bordered by bushes, where a magnificent white building stands at its centre. As the car comes to a stop in the garage, so does Fela’s Gentleman.
“Oh, my goodness! How can you have this massive structure in the bush? I mean, it’s Nigeria, baby, not the UK. Our animals are less tolerant.”
Rex chuckles.
“I’m not here all by myself, you know. It’s a fucking woodland estate. It’s not a jungle or forest or whatever.” They both laugh.
“I like the view, though,” she says as they approach the front door.
“Everyone who’s been here does.”
“You live here, in this house, all by yourself?” she asks now that they’re both in the sitting room.
“Well, technically” he says, placing his key on the marble table. “If my furniture and games don’t count, that is.”
“Abeg,” Emily says dismissively.
Her eyes patrol the room. She expected him to live in a stately apartment, yeah, but she never thought of something so massive, something above stately. The opulence wowed her, especially because he is a single man. Her father’s own house in Cocaine Estate, where they all lived before the divorce, before he left for South Africa with his new family, lacked the opulent grace and grandeur of this one, belonging to a single and young person.
Expensive artworks decorate the space through and through. Green organic plants stand in ceramic vases, positioned at several spots. She has an idea what one of these plants costs. In her second year at the University of Port Harcourt, she’d gone with her best friend and roommate, Chizoba, to buy some plants to further ‘tush’ up their apartment. They planned on buying at least six collections of plants, but the cost of one happened to be their entire budget for the six they’d planned to buy. So, they had to squeeze their pockets to buy two. They named the two plants Dessy and Tessy, and they felt like proud plant parents for a while until Dessy died in two weeks, and Tessy three months after. They wept, not for the death of the plant, but for the amount of money they had spent on the plants. ‘Such a waste!’ Chizoba had lamented.
Now, in Rex’s opulent sitting room, Emily runs her finger through one of the big plants on the walkway and remembers Dessy and Tessy.
She is lost in awe, a little unbothered about the embarrassment reassessing herself will bring much later.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” he declares, arms spread open.
“Thank you,” she says, smiling. “So what else are you going to welcome me into?”
Rex doesn’t catch the joke immediately, but when he does, after a few seconds, he chuckles and says, “Oh, just wait and see. It could be my life next.”
“Well, you seem to have an interesting life here, so that ain’t gonna be bad.”
“Right?”
She takes another assessment of the apartment.
“Your abode is grande,” she says. “There’s nothing humble about it!”
Rex chuckles before he says, “Oh, yeah. An inheritance from my late father. I had to renovate it into something more modern when I recently moved from the UK.”
“Oh, you were in the UK? I think that does explain why the house looks oyiboish,” Emily chuckles.
“My accent should’ve given me away first, I suppose.”
“Yeah, but you know, I didn’t ask because these days every Nigerian has a foreign English accent, even without having left the borders of the country before. You understand me,” she says.
Rex smiles through the corners of his lips and says, “I think I do. Well, almost all my life growing up was in the UK. I returned to Nigeria permanently five years ago after the passing of my dad.”
“I’m so sorry… about your dad, I mean,” and she shows it, how sorry she is. Although she might not exactly know what it means to lose a dad whom you loved, and who loved you back, she understood the universal impact of loss, however differently. Her own relationship with her dad has never been one to be proud of – a transactional kind of relationship where she asked and he provided. Nothing less, nothing more. Since the divorce, they’d never had a call that inquired how they both were, what dreams they had. The many times they had tried this, it failed because he would always end up blaming her for never making the right decisions – like deciding to study Theatre Arts when she could do better as a Lawyer – and she would end up blaming him for being a failed parent – why was he never there from the beginning to hold her hand? And she would cut the call on him with a hiss.
“Yeah, it’s fine. He was my favourite person, but… I mean, life has a way of stealing our favourites, yeah?” Rex says.
He picks the remote control from the TV console and tunes the channel to MTVBase. Before the channel picks, he asks: “So, what can I offer you? I have red wine, sparkling water…”
“Red wine is just fine,” she says.
“I see a woman who knows her drink,” Rex teases.
She cackles, “Oh, please, it’s not even like I mentioned a brand.”
He approaches the cellar, and from where she sits, she watches him pick a bottle of wine and two wine glasses. On the counter, he uncorks the bottle and carefully turns some contents into the two glasses.
Once he approaches her with the glasses, each half-filled, the channel on the television picks up, playing Chris Brown’s Feel Something. It startles Emily, the abruptness with which the song starts. Rex notices this reaction and laughs. She joins him.
As he hands her the glass and sits with her on the long couch where they both face the television, he says: “I see… some people’s cool be uncooling.”
“Oh, please,” she says. “It just came unexpectedly, that’s it.”
“I see… ”
“And I thought you were a Cavemen kinda guy.” She says gently, as though the gentility is to calm his nerves, his supposed annoyance.
“You don see me finish be that,” he says with a grin. She joins him. “That’s how they say it, right?”
“Well, it was either Cavemen or Osadebe or Fela you played throughout the ride, so…”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he tells her. He stands, walks towards the edge of the glass walls, and pulls down the curtains. The whole room becomes dark, illumined now only by the light from the television screen. He picks up the TV remote and connects it to the WiFi. With this comes a different song, smooth and soothing.
“So, what am I now?”
She is lost for context and answers. However, an answer rushes into her mind, but she is grateful that the air in her lungs fails her this time. She’s not about to be some needy whore again.
“Huh?” She says instead, seeking clarity.
“It’s an entirely different genre of music,” he says.
“Oh, I think you’re an all-weather man then, which makes you a much cooler guy,” and with that comes a loud hearty laughter from them both.
“So you’re a student, huh?” Rex asks after a while, watching her sip from her glass.
“Uhm, I just graduated,” Emily replies. “I was in Uniport for five years studying for a program that should’ve lasted only four years.”
“The strikes and all, huh?”
“Yeah, those. The system here is just fucked, you know.”
“Yeah, I do… It’s such a pity,” he says. Then places his glass to his lips.
“And I don’t think we should talk about it, please,” she says sarcastically, sending a side glance to Rex, who seems to understand whatever message she was trying to pass. And they both laugh.
“Me neither,” Rex says.
They sit in the silence of the evening, the only sounds coming from the soft playing music from the sound system. Emily is still assessing the room, and for the first time, she registers the head of an antelope hanging above the entrance door. It startles her at first, but she looks carefully at it with a pretentious calmness.
“Is that real?” She asks, pointing.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I didn’t tell you that I’m first a hunter before anything else.”
This information startles her in every way possible. Nothing could’ve sponsored the thought that this modern man, in this modern age, could be a hunter. Could this be a viable reason why he lives alone in the middle of a forest? Could this also mean something else? Something to be worried about?
“A hunter?” She asks.
“Yes, a hunter,” he replies. “And the only things I hunt for out here are animals.” He chuckles.
“Hmm,” she says.
“You’re afraid?”
“No, not it. I’m just asking myself how you could be a hunter? What happened to tech jobs? Now, that’s funny, but even if there are still hunters, I wouldn’t have ever thought of you as one. I can’t even think of it.”
“Oh, well,” he says with a stern face, then a chuckle. “I guess it is what it is.” He speaks so casually, as though it isn’t supposed to bother her that he is a hunter. Or perhaps this also means there are no ulterior motives.
“Well, it was my father’s tradition back in the day. I would join him in the fields of Hambleden, looking quietly from the hilly parts for pangolins and the like. It’s so much fun, you know, lying on the grass with your dad, looking for animals you’d probably not eat and listening to him tell you stories that are not fictional, but damn scary,” he says and chuckles at the recollection of this memory. A painful chuckle, Emily figures.
“I miss him sometimes, you know.”
“I see,” Emily says softly. “And I think that’s normal,” and before she can say any more words, he says: “I think that’s enough of a sad story for the evening.”
“Uhm, I think I understand the language of loss,” Emily says. “And of hurt…”
But Rex doesn’t seem like he is interested in hearing her supposed story, so she holds herself back from saying more.
They both sit silent in the dark of the evening, doing nothing, until Rex pulls much closer to her so that he can clearly see a reflection of his face in her pupils. She begins to fidget. The floor has become a cold room. Her body is amassed with a new shiver.
“So, do you still think I’m weird?” He asks in a breath. Softly. He sure knows how to turn a lady on.
“I never said you were weird,” Emily says in a stutter.
“Well, you thought so, didn’t you?”
“What is an unvoiced thought?” She says, but the wetness between her legs says something different.
Rex smiles. Then he draws a breath and places his lips on Emily’s. At first, she doesn’t kiss him back, even though she’d been dying for this the entire time. She thinks that if she leaves herself the will to pursue her desires, then she might give the impression of one who is too thirsty, another desperate woman. Worst if he thought her a slut. And then maybe whatever there could be between them would be ruined. Or it would become like one of her numerous flings. Maybe like Olusola, he would scream into her ears when she confronted him with his lies, that she was a damn fucking desperate bitch, and there was no way his sane ass could think of really loving her in the way she craved. It didn’t mean so much to her then, Olusola’s words, until she returned to that small pink fancy room of hers – too fancy for a university student. Then they flooded in, and she was reminded again how worthless she was. No, she wouldn’t let Rex see her through this lens, too.
But Rex kisses on, and soon, she loses her composure and begins kissing even harder. A dance of tongues. A collision of lips. Then a tender nip. His hands cup her breasts and hers caresses his hair. There’s a prolonged moment of entwined exhale. Until Rex pulls back.
He takes a tiny sip from his glass and, saying “Excuse me, please,” stands and ascends the stairs behind her. Left alone, she resumes scanning the room with her eyes while The Cavemen’s Osondu plays on. She translates the meaning of the title in her head, “race of life” and chuckles.
*
She is dancing to Asa’s Show Me Off, hands flickering in the air above her head, singing along to Asa’s melody when Rex returns. She doesn’t see him until he stands in her face. He is smiling, and she, too, is. He is wearing a white robe, although in her eyes, it is the green of chartreuse.
Their bodies touch. Smiles plaster on their faces. But the unease spreading through Emily triggers laughter. He holds her waist as if to dance with her, and after a few moves, breathes on her neck.
“Calm, baby, calm. Let the waters irrigate you,” he whispers. At the instant, the hairs on her skin stand like maize plants.
“You’re quite a charm,” she whispers with a shaky voice. Rex smiles.
“Do you want to come upstairs to my room?” He asks.
“Sure,” she says, running her index finger across the bridge of his nose.
He smiles and guides her upstairs.
*
In his room, Sam Fischer’s This City plays softly. She reclines on the king-sized bed, naked, awaiting his approach like a princess would her knight in shiny armour. He stands before a desk with his back to her, whatever he is doing is obscured by a fog that clouds her vision – a fog seemingly has taken residence in the recesses of her mind now.
When he returns to the bed, it is with a graceful crawl. A strange excitement surges through her. She makes to drag him for a kiss, to place his hands all over her body, to make him bury his face between her and clear the waters with his tongue so that a haven is created for a pole ride, but she feels too feeble to even lift a finger. There are no words to tell what she’s experiencing. She, in fact, supposes words are unnecessary now.
Sam Fischer’s This City continues to play on repeat, as Rex kisses her lips, her eyes, rolls his tongue in her ears, as though searching for something. He trails his nose around her face until his mouth meets her neck. He sucks at her neck, then offers a gentle bite. Emily can’t help the sensation of it – sweet and satisfying. Exquisite.
Gradually, she is closing her eyes as one would when they’re hit by a slow, dragging sleep. Now is not the time to sleep, but her nerves are playing a trick on her. As she walks further into this sleepy consciousness, a sweet kind of pain emerges. It feels like the pain from a soft blade cut. And she loves this feeling. Goodness, she could spend the rest of her life in this room if he would promise a daily repeat. The feeling melts her, it freezes her still, it ignites a burning in the bowl of her tummy, and all she can do in this moment is to savour the pain, this sweetness.
A tingling numbness reaches her limbs. She can’t think of what this could possibly be, but death – warm, gentle, as if the air itself were stroking her into surrender. Sweetly exhausting as it feels. A delightful paradox.
And this is how she dies, bit by bit. Painlessly. Sweetly. In the brief moments before she crosses the bridge between life and death, her subconscious contemplates the sweetness of death, if this is surely a way to die. How relaxing. A desire to continue this perpetual cycle of dying without ever truly living sets her soul afloat in the space where thousands of ghosts converge. For, as she has come to learn, living proves to be a more arduous endeavour than the act of dying.
So, she gives herself away to death.
But the idea of this story is that it begins where it ends.
Orji Victor Ebubechukwu is Igbo. His works have appeared in Open Country Magazine, Isele Magazine, Iskanchi Magazine, Afritondo, Breakbread Literary Magazine and elsewhere. His personal essay was long listed for the 2025 Isele Prizes.
*Image by Good Faces Agency on Unsplash
