₦airaland Forum

Ishilove:
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He knew he wanted her, even before he knew her name. And so when he approached her that Sunday after church service, he wasn’t playing around. He wanted to marry her, and he said so. She’d recoiled, her frown doing nothing to age her child-like face, and for five seconds – he’d counted – she looked at him like he was the strangest thing she’d seen all year. Then she laughed and said, don’t you even want to know me first, mister man.

When he asked, she gave him her number, typing the digits into his phone with fingertips that had swollen around her nails from relentless gnawing.

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He liked her short, well-chewed nails, liked that her face – with lips the colour of an overripe udara – was always without makeup, liked that the yellow skin of her legs was always covered in pants or long skirts. He liked that she never wore weaves or braids in scandalous colours, and never past her shoulders. He liked that she didn’t have her own car, and that she let him drive her around Owerri on weekends. It made him feel good that she’d attended a polytechnic and not a university like him, and that she’d been unable to find work since she finished school three years ago. And even though he worried about being able to provide for a family on his own with his modest income, he knew it would take something from him when she began to work. If she began to work.

She was a virgin. He was sure of this until he asked. She’d looked away and right then he had his answer. When he asked how many men she had slept with, it was hard to keep the judgement from his tone, to keep his throat from tightening with resentment. One. Just one, she’d said, looking at the hands clasped on her thighs. He spelled it out in his head: O-N-E. His hands clenched into fists, but they slowly loosened as he watched her. He was taken by the way she wouldn’t, couldn’t, meet his eyes, like a child caught with her fingers in her mother’s pot. This let him know that she knew she was not worthy of him; he who had kept himself pure all thirty-five years of his life. Aside from those times when the devil sneaked up on him at night and pulled the semen from him while he slept, he had never poured his seed. Well, except for those three other times in the shower. Or was it five? But even those times, he’d only been trying for a vigorous wash and had ended up pleasuring himself by accident. God knew.

He would forgive her, because even though he was good, he was not perfect. O-N-E was forgivable. O-N-E was manageable. Besides, she was a new creation and all her old things had passed away.