The night was cold, the air thick with the wetness of the slashing rainfall. For hours the rain had been pelting down, hammering down on Ajegunle—AJ City—residents. It would make the bad roads impassable or nearly so by tomorrow, Daddy thought, as he took in another drag from his Cuban cigar; a gift from a friend who’d just returned from America.

But it sure would affect business tonight, ruin the bottom line, Daddy pondered.

The Happy Day club thronged with its usual customers: men from the Island and from outside Lagos, women accompanying their boyfriends and one-night stand lovers. Bottle caps popped and flew in every corner; glasses were filled up with the bitter brew of Guiness Stout and other alcoholic drinks; glasses clinked together as smoke curled up high into the ceiling that soared one storey above them. The girls worked the floor, both down here and upstairs, but Daddy noted that business was slow. From his vantage point, he had a good view of both the tables arranged on the upper floor of the club from which the patrons could look down into those below.

Daddy turned to Chico, the bartender attending to him at the bar. “Where is that new girl?” he asked. “The one that said she’s Adamma?”
Above the pounding beat of music Chico leaned forward. “Inside!” he yelled.

“Bring her out here now,” Daddy ordered, then twisted back round in his chair to scrutinize his customers.

Some of the girls were already working the floor. They clicked around in their long heels, thick long hair, long ring-like earrings, heavy makeup, and sparkling lingerie their major markers. They bounced their bar bottoms to the beat of the music, working on the patrons, their bodies undulating in the hard seductive dance routines that was all they knew to twist money out of the wallets of these men.

Daddy shook his head as outside, thunder boomed, followed by the flash of lightning. This night, of all nights, the Elements wanted to ruin business for him. God forbid! he swore.

“Daddy. Isn’t that girl too young?”

The whiskey-smelling breath that accompanied the voice whispering into his ear could only be Rosco. Daddy was right; it was indeed Rosco, the floor manager who managed the girls, collected the club’s share of their nightly earnings, and generally kept them in line.

“She does not look that young,” Daddy snapped. He downed his shot of Squadron gin and grimaced. He hated that darn drink, yet he kept drinking it. He enjoyed the burn, though, which slashed through his throat, burning holes through his windpipe, before settling, like molten magma, in his stomach.

True, she did look young. She’d not disclosed her age, neither had any of the other girls. But it was there in her; a sort of innocence, a lack of the hard, beguiling sensuality of the other girls—girls who had seen the world and become jaded by it. But true, for once he agreed that this girl could be too young, too young to be put out there for these lecherous men to feast their eyes upon, to catcall at and throw money at. She would become a sexualized object if he allowed her to come to the floor, but he had to. She’d asked for it by coming here, by coming to him.

“Bring her out. Now,” he ordered.

Then he waited.

*

The concealed speakers thumped with a preternatural beat that literally shook the walls. The brighter lights had gone down, to be replaced by the dancing lights of myriad colors: from blue, to purple, to orange and deep amber. The screens where the girls often did their silhouette dances burned purple, ready to be occupied. Three girls worked three of the dance poles: Crystal, Demi and Chinenye. They were the most limber, most flexible girls in the club.

From behind the stage another female figure appeared. The figure catwalked to the middle of the dancing platform and stopped. Unlike the other girls who were all half naked she wore a long robe that covered her from her neck down to her feet. It took a long moment for Daddy to recognize her as the new girl, Adamma; she didn’t look so young now.

“Let’s see what she’s made of,” Daddy murmured to Rosco, then the two men leaned back and watched her.

The song beat changed, the sounds morphing into a deeper beat. In a flash she pulled her robe off, revealing a red lingerie that left little to the imagination.

Many of the men and women who’d been drinking and tearing chicken parts focused their attention on her. Cold air blasted through the entire club with renewed vengeance.

She does look . . .young, Daddy pondered.

“Clear the stage of the other girls, Rosco. Give her some room to move.”

Rosco signalled and some of the other girls pulled back, fading into the din of bodies that thronged around the dancing platform.

The girl sifted her fingers through her long, thick mass of jet-black hair, her back pressed against one of the poles. In a flash she swirled round it, the lights dancing around on her near-naked form. In another flash, she’d entwined her long body on the pole and began to shimmy up it.

“Get the spotlights on her now,” Daddy ordered. “Signal them to turn the spotlights on her now!”

A lone spotlight suspended from the ceiling one storey above them focused on her lithe form that flowed around that pole with serpentlike grace. People were focusing their eyes on her, away from their glasses of beer, away from their chicken pepper soup and crisp chicken cuts.

Daddy noticed that she wore a mask; a golden ballroom mask that hid the topmost part of her face. Her movements on that pole—acrobatic, athletic moves no other girl had performed or achieved—had men dipping hands into their wallets and flinging money into the dancing platform.

She shimmied down, dropping to the floor in a perfect split, high heels and all.

Back on her feet, Daddy observed her rake her fingers through her river of hair; sift those long fingers of hers down the flowing mass of it, as though searching for something. Then the mask came off. In the semi-darkness, her figure was highlighted by the powerful beam of the stage lighting. Her eyes seemed to burn like golden orbs, flecks of bright yellow dancing around the deeper gold of her irises.
Daddy had never seen eyes like hers; cat eyes, they called them. Bright, luminous, sparkling eyes that seemed literally to glow with the burn of the lights on her face.

The crowd were now cheering, screaming their encouragement at her flowing, near-naked form. Money flowed onto the platform; it literally rained Naira notes. Even the young women were not left out, for money came from their bags, squeezed Naira notes that were flung towards her like little balls.

Daddy glanced over at the DJ.

“Say her name,” he ordered in a whisper.

“Adamma!” the DJ boomed, over and over, above the burst of the electric thump of the music, then in a longer, prolonged drag of her name, as if he wanted everyone to have that name etched on their minds.

She descended the platform, into the customer area. Some of the other girls had joined her, forming a band around her. Daddy admired the firmness and highness of her breasts. Her figure was trim and frighteningly taut, perhaps with the flush of sensual, envied youth, or with the rigours of exercise—Daddy didn’t know and did not care. All he knew was that this Adamma girl was pulling the attention of everyone there, both upstairs and downstairs. And they seemed to love her; they seemed transfixed by the sensuous flow of her form; they seemed taken by the way her body undulated in a sensuous rhythm and flow to the sound of the music, her eyes hooded, her lips pressed together, her long fingers running down her breasts, her flat, hard midriff, going to the waistband of her tulle panties, then back up over her body.

*

It was shocking.

She literally seemed oblivious of the crowd gawking at her, Daddy could swear it; as if she was all alone, performing to herself and for herself and by herself, without a care in the world.

Her fingers went behind her back and in one swift move she’d unhooked the strap of her bra. The bra hung loose on her now, and she moved, flowed towards a tall man, a lone, solitary figure seated at a table all by himself, with three bottles of Heineken to keep him company. She spun her back towards him, her waist gyrating to the faster rhythm and beat of the song belting out specially for her. The bra came off.

A collective scream went off. Daddy was scrutinizing her intently when her bra came off, and he could swear that in one body the entire crowd belted out a loud, deep scream. Even Daddy was shocked—never in the history of the Happy Day club had any girl pulled off her brassiere. They stripped down to their underwear and left it at that, but this girl—her sheer disregard for her audience, as if she disdained their attention and couldn’t care, her carelessness and carefree sensuality. . .he’d never seen anything like it.

“Adamma!”

They screamed her name; in one solid body, her name came off their lips, as though she’d raced to the finish line in a tight football match with monumental stakes and scored a goal. Again, slower, harder, harsher, the name rang through with electric clarity through the crowd: “Adamma!”

She ignored them.

Her fingers reached for the pole opposite the man’s table, and once again, she worked the pole routine. Her body flowed up it, then she went upside down, her river of hair swinging down, to a louder scream at her incredibly limber, acrobatic body. Daddy had a good view of her breasts then. Full rich breasts, firm with youth, they stood out on her chest, beckoning to the eyes. Her nipples were dark, erect; nearly a blemish in the spotless lightness of her creamy skin.

“God in heaven!” he breathed.

Men were shooting out of their chairs, wads of cash flowing in her general direction.

She swung off the pole in a perfect somersault, with a flip of that thick whip of hair. Her almond-shaped, kohl-darkened eyes swung over the crowd, then rested on Daddy.

He wanted to look away but couldn’t. Her eyes were unwavering orbs of golden light against his face. He wondered if she felt any sense of modesty at all; whether somewhere at the back of her mind she felt shame at being the object of such charged sexual attention. What was going through her mind?

She flowed towards him, the light trained on her.

Stopping before him, she dropped to her knees, then flipped her hair so that the long tresses curled down the right side of her face, tendrils brushing against her naked breasts.

He smelled her then. Hers was a mixture of alcohol, deodorant, and some kind of perfume that must have been loaded with aphrodisiac. At that moment he felt a hard-on coming on, and for the first time since working with the throng of nubile, sensuous female flesh that worked their sexual magic on the floors at the Happy Day club, he wanted to take one to bed. . .he wanted to take her to bed.

“Adamma,” he murmured.

She stretched to her full length, back to her feet. She moved with the flexibility power of her curved hips, then, with her eyes fixed unwaveringly to his face, her fingers went to the waistband of her panties once again.
Daddy’s throat went dry. She wouldn’t dare, he thought. Not here, not now, not with these hundreds of eyes trained on her like accusing beams of wanton sexual desire.

She slid the panties down slowly, shamelessly, teasingly. She stepped out of it, then picked it up and raised it to his face. As people roared with screams, he edged his face forward, his nose already sniffing at it. He caught the scent of her perfume once again, on the panties, then another smell; that heady, enticing smell that was all-woman.

Then she slapped him on the face. One moment her hand had reached out, as if offering the panties to his nose as some lewd, bizarre offering to his senses, the next moment her free hand flashed out and landed on his face.
Spittle flew from his mouth as his neck snapped to his left.

“Whooooooooooooooo!”

The collective scream was deafening.

She danced away from his reach, her eyes still fixed on his face.

Right now his cheek smarted like hell from the sting of her palm, but he liked the sting. He loved it, even. His breaths came in slower, deeper beats. His mouth remained open, partly in shock that she’d cracked a slap at him, partly because of what he wanted to do to her.
God! She had the kind of figure that would make a monk renounce his vows. She was . . .perfect. He couldn’t take his eyes off the small, flattened thatch of hair on her pubis, hiding her female wholesomeness from his view. Stark naked now, sensuously, shamelessly, she’d entangled all the men there in her web; Daddy could see raging, engorged erections, throbbing in trousers that literally couldn’t contain them.

The scream rose to a deafening crescendo; as if they literally wanted to thunder the entire club down with the burst of their collective lung power. . .all for her.

And, by jove, she deserved to have houses shouted down for her!
Secondly, he wanted her. He must have her. He wanted her in his arms, writhing in pleasure.
“Adamma, I go do you,” he murmured, then stood up and made his way out of the club, still stunned literally into shock by her performance.

He knew that, young as she was, she was a star. She would shine bright, brighter than the Happy Day club one day, if her control of the occupants of that club tonight was any indication.



This story is a shared excerpt from the novel Adamma written by Kingsley Adrian Banks.

The erotic sàga Adamma is available for immediate readership on Bambooks. https://bambooks.io/book/bookdetail/Adamma-/14309