Blind folly

“You’ve used too much Dettol again.”

Araba paused and stared at Eric suspiciously. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to her, just as she had left him before she’d entered the shower.

“Did you come into the bathroom and measure it while I wasn’t looking?”

Eric softly laughed at the absurdity of her question. “No, my love. I can SMELL it. I’ve told you before you don’t need that much.”

Araba ran a towel over the ends of her hair and grunted, retorting that she’d told him many times before that she didn’t trust the water in his area. She parted her legs and did a half-squat, preparing to dry her inner thighs off. Eric was by her side in one fluid move.

“Please don’t. Allow me,” he murmured into her ear.

“Eric…”

He grunted impatiently, swatting her disyllabic protestation away with a short tirade of his own. “Yes, yes. I know. You have to go. Just not yet.”

There were five steps between the bathroom door and Eric’s bed. Araba had counted it many times. No matter how often she tried to wash the aroma of their lovemaking from her body before her departure, Eric demanded a once more. “Demanded” was too strong of a word. He wanted her, and that heightened her desire for him all the more.

Araba’s lithe body sank into the foam mattress covered in floral sheets. Its soft fibers contoured her body like a second skin. She exhaled her bliss as Eric set off on an odyssey, rediscovering her body with a torrent of kisses, starting from her earlobes, to the nape of her neck, down to the stiff peaks of her firm nipples. He grazed her thigh with the tip of his ample erection. When he got to her belly button, the kisses stopped – as if something had occurred to him.

“Your complexion has improved,” he said matter-of-factly. “Your skin is much smoother.”

“Yes…you noticed? Wow,” she stuttered. “I’ve started using a new soap.”

“You seem surprised that I would pick up on that.”

Araba didn’t answer immediately. She was still unsure about how to take Eric’s compliments about her physicality. If he saw what she saw when she looked in the mirror, perhaps he might be so liberal with his praise. There was a brief awkward silence between them. Eric filled it with the sudden plunging of his 8 inch erection into her warm, dewy core.

God, could he ever know just how beautiful he was? His skin was lambent in the light of the setting sun; his slender, muscled body a payload of visual pleasure. Eric swung in and out of her like a pendulum, each swift and forceful grind of his pelvis eliciting a gasp and plea for more as it flirted with hers. When he felt her delicate flesh constrict and cling tighter around him, he expertly extracted himself and lifted Araba’s legs and crossed them into a pair of vertical scissors. Tracing his finger from her interlocked ankles, down past her calves and finally to her asshole, he cupped her buttocks and puckered…tonguing and kissing the star shaped portal and waited for the inevitable. Seconds later his face was inundated with Araba’s torrential climax.

Eric circled his arms around her as she descended from the rollicking waves of what seemed to be a never ending orgasm. Her pulse was finally steady enough to speak cogently.

“What about you?”

Araba always felt guilty when Eric didn’t nut.

“Me? I’m good,” he chuckled. “Call it a returned favor for that thing you did last time.”

“That thing” he was referring to involved an electric eggbeater and a grapefruit three nights before. Araba chuckled at the memory. Eric wanted to know what was so funny.

“I’m just remembering the look on your face,” she snickered. “You should have seen…”

She let her voice trail off, vexed by her insensitivity. What a poor, stupid choice in words!

Eric reached for her hand and kissed it. The mood between them had turned pensive.

“Babe. You have to stop doing this,” he said soberly. “We’ve been together three months. I know everything about you…how you like to wear your hair in pin curls when you’ve accomplished something you didn’t think you could, or in a ponytail when you’re stressed. I even your pussy smells before you ovulate. Aren’t you comfortable with the way I am yet? When are we going to get past this?”

She wanted to say she was comfortable. She wanted to say he was reading too much into her distemper. She wanted to say he was being silly, that he didn’t know as much as he did. Instead she slipped her feet into her heels and said it was time for her to be going.

“Can I get you anything before I leave, can I get you anything?”

The room was dark, but Araba could make out the movement of his head shaking “no” in the gloom.

“I love you, Araba.”

Her heart skipped a beat. What?

“I…I’ll see you tomorrow, Eric. Good night!”

Araba slammed the door and fled into the street. He loved her? How could he love her? She had always been told it was impossible for any man to find her to desirable or lovable. And here Eric was: a kind man. A self-made man. A man who grieved her temporary departures like the loss of his most precious thing. Of course it didn’t hurt that he had a body to die for and brought her to the type of climaxes that rock ballads were written about. And she was…well. There was never any shortage of people to remind her of what she was.

Ei! Ofrijato!

Are you out now because it is night?

Hahahaa! Michael Jackson girl…Where to this evening. Come here!

None of the taunts of the area boys could harm her tonight. Her senses were heightened, but not to their mockery. The wicks of the kerosene lamps seemed to glow brighter, the incessant honking of agitated taxi drivers was louder, the smell of kenkey being sold in the evening more pungent. For the first time, she was experiencing the world through the prism of love.

Araba tried to push the rusty gate to her house open quietly and in vain. Maureen was waiting for her on the veranda with a perplexed look on her face.

“Mummy is furious with you,” her sister whispered. “I tried to cover for you, but by the time 8 o’clock came, I had run out of excuses! You know how she gets when you go out in the dark!”

The sound of their mother’s heavy footfall was fast approaching, a flurry of curses in Ga accompanying each step.

“It’s okay, Maureen. Everything is going to be just fine,” Araba grinned. “Let Mummy have her tirade. She can shout to the world, for all I care!”

“Oh shit, Araps. You’re in love! How the hell did you let yourself fall in love with this man? What can the two of you do for each other?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Same way he allowed himself to fall in love with me, I guess. And as for what we can do to each other dierrr…”

Maureen made a face as though to vomit.

“Chale, I don’t need to know the coital practices of my albino sister and her blind boyfriend. If Mummy doesn’t kill you, I’ll see you inside later.”

Heavy footfall accompanied by a torrent of curses and warnings in Ga were fast approaching the veranda. Araba smiled to herself. When this was all done, she’d spend the evening pin curling her hair.