I decided to try my hand on a narrative this time. It was the way i started as a teenager and after a few days of "uneventfulness" in my life, my creative juices started working like they used to...
Best compliments of the season!
Chioma
Tunde loved his wife very much.
He pushed the car gear into park and let the engine run. The address wasn’t very hard to find and this was also the area in which he grew up. He exhaled deeply as he thought of his wife; Ann. She was so beautiful and so smart. So what on earth was he doing here?
He remembered when they met ten years ago. She was working as a teller in one of the popular banks where he had an account. She had greeted him politely and smiled a smile that he would never forget for the rest of his life. He knew at that moment that she was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Six months after their meeting, he had asked her to marry him and she had screamed “Yes!” at the top of her voice. On their wedding day, all he could think about was how beautiful she was. He had stared into her big brown eyes and known that she was the only woman right for him.
As he sat down in his car and looked into the darkness of this cool November night, he wondered how it was possible for someone so right to become so wrong.
It wasn’t that things were so bad between them, it was just that Ann was so angry all the time. The first two years had started off fine. They both had their relatively good jobs, then the twins were born and they were all happy. But then it became increasingly hard for Ann to cater to two little children and manage a ten- hour job. When the twins were eight months old, Ann found out she was pregnant again and said it was his fault. He recalled coming home late that night after a stressful day spent in long meetings to find Ann sitting in the kitchen fuming. She had called him all the names from Bastard to Retard before he even got to know what the problem was. She blamed his incessant whining for sex especially when she claimed she was not safe. She swore on her father’s grave that she wouldn’t let him touch her in another one year and threatened she was going to see the doctor to have it removed. He had mustered all the strength he had left to calm her and make her see some sense in children being a gift from God. Shortly after the baby was born, he got a promotion at work and they didn’t have enough time to celebrate when Ann had gotten a letter from her office terminating her appointment.
That was when the real trouble started.
The fights became more and every time there was one, she used it as an opportunity to blame him for the loss of her career and too many babies to take care of. One time, she called him a fool whose master plan was to turn her into a housewife. Tunde tried not to get mad at all her spiteful comments. He had always known she had a bad temper and could say the worst things in rage. But he also knew that her anger was fleeting. She would apologize after a few hours and make up for it with a lovely meal or some good love-making. But over the years, the fits got more, the apologies got less and the sex went to zero.
He smirked sarcastically in the car as he thought of the sex.
He recalled their honeymoon which they spent on the beautiful island of Crete. He knew the things that Ann could do with her body and just how far she was willing to go to please her man. Unfortunately, with each year spent together, that willingness seemed to disappear. After the twins were born, he had noticed she became uncomfortable with her body. She had an episiotomy and she was afraid she was not as tight as she was before. It had taken weeks of convincing for her to make love to him after which he assured her that there wasn’t any difference. After that hurdle came the baby excuses. There was always one or two babies with them who always managed to wake up whenever he made a move. And when they weren’t there in person, Ann had a notion that they were not asleep yet and thus could wake up and walk in on them.
Tunde was never comfortable talking about their sex life but when he realized that they hadn’t done it in almost a month, he had to speak to a psychologist friend. Dr. Tony had helpfully suggested romance, date nights and role playing to him. In his opinion, Ann was made up of two personalities now; the wife and the mother and spending too much time wearing her “mother” hat was adversely affecting her “wife” hat. According to him, making gestures that would awaken her mind towards her “wife” nature would help their sexual life.
It worked for only a few months.
Even now, sitting outside an unfamiliar house, he tried hard to remember when last he had made love to his wife. It was about a month ago, when he came back from a friend’s bachelor’s eve party. After a few glasses of champagne he had come home almost begging her to do it with him. She had considered he hadn’t been in any fights with him for the past few weeks and he had bought her a pair of gold-plated earrings recently, so she agreed. Halfway through, she heard one of the twins screaming “mommy” and urged him to ejaculate quickly so she could go see. He had told her that the live-in nanny would get her but then the girl started crying so Ann hissed and pushed him off her, mumbling something about how she had already told him to “cum” and he was wasting time. He could have angrily gone to bed that night but the alcohol in his system wasn’t helping so he had to help himself in the shower.
He turned off the ignition and got out of the car. The gate of the house was open so he walked right in. The house was recently painted in pale yellow and had a red roof with deep red mahogany doors. He walked up to one of the doors and knocked gently. He could hear SADE’s ‘Your love is King’ playing from inside. He smiled to himself as the door opened and an attractive young lady popped her head out. “Good evening, please I’m looking for Ada, is she in?” he asked politely and somewhat shyly.
“She’s inside, come in, I’ll take you to her apartment” the lady said almost sounding like a robot.
Two months ago, he had met Ada at the nearby gym.
The first time he saw her, she was working out on the treadmill one hot Saturday morning. She was very beautiful and had a body that Beyonce would die for. He was never attracted to full bodied women but Ada was exceptional. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one attracted to her. A few single guys who had been pretending to be lifting weights were the ones who made him notice her when she walked in. They had been talking about the new James Bond movie when one had stopped the conversation with a hushed “See her! See her!” He had involuntarily turned to ‘see her’ as well and was completely enchanted by her beauty. For two weeks, he kept coming to the gym at the same time to see if he would run into her again but she didn’t show up.
However, luck was on his side on lazy Saturday afternoon when he had agreed to bring his family to the club. The kids were off playing soccer with Ann when he decided to do a few laps in the pool. He had gotten through one lap when he noticed her beautiful bikini-clad body get out of the pool. He immediately felt the beginning of an erection and was so glad he was far away in the deep end. She suddenly turned around and locked eyes with him, then smiled. He felt like an awkward teenager as he tried to smile, wave and control the growing bulge in his Speedos. He became distracted when his last child had surprisingly freed himself from his mother and was running towards the pool area screaming “Daddy!” He had to get out of the pool and attend to his family as Ann and the other two came up right behind him. But from the corner of his eye, he saw Ada get into the changing room, dress up and leave.
The next weekend, he showed at the gym with the hopes of running into her. He had been there for about an hour when she walked up to him on the treadmill.
“Now what sort of gym plays SADE as work-out music?” she said to him with a laugh. He was supposed to say something, but he opened his mouth and nothing came out. He was stunned by how beautiful she was up close even with a sweaty brow and no makeup on.
“Oh! I’m sorry, I’m Ada,” she said with a smile and stretched out her hand for a shake. He took it and politely introduced himself. She looked around suddenly and said “I don’t see your family around, is today Let Daddy Off day?” He laughed at her sense of humor and replied “Oh! Haven’t you heard about it?” They had exchanged numbers that day and started chatting every day from then on.
He later found out that Ada was a Marketing Executive with a renowned insurance company. She lived with her sister her in Lagos since her parents were settled in the east. One evening, he had taken her out to dinner after which he dropped her off where she could take a cab home. He thanked her for coming out and she surprised him by leaning over to kiss him very deeply. He had just sat there, shocked and unresponsive. She made a little laugh and looked him seductively in the eye “Tunde…you know you deserve a treat… why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow evening and we’ll see about that”. She immediately got out of the car and walked away so conscious of the fact that his eyes were glued to her voluptuous backside.
Indeed, he deserved a treat, he thought to himself as he knocked on the door the lady had directed him to. It was a gift, a kind gesture to a man in need. If Ann didn’t have time or the thought to give this gift, why should he decline it from someone else? It wasn’t that he loved his wife any less, he was just thinking about himself; for once in ten years.
Ada opened the door and greeted him with a beautiful smile. She was wearing a purple negligee that left little to the imagination. As he entered her apartment, he pushed all his thoughts out and listened to the soothing sound of Sade Adu’s voice coming from the stereo “…your kisses ring…round and round and round my head, touching the very part of me…”
