IF THIS IS LOVE

His profile is blank, showing nothing but 39. I am having a bad Grindr day.

When I send him “Hi”, he takes ages before he responds, and then we start conversing. I am horny and my dick has been protesting all day, so I don’t ask him “how are you doing?” or “how is your day going?” Grindr is a hookup app not a virtual get-together.

“What’s up? Where are you chatting from?”

He replies, “Jakande.”

“Wow! I’m in Jakande, too. What’s your role and age?” I ask.

“Bottom, 39,” he replies, and I can swear I feel my dick leap in excitement.

“OK. Can I see your pic?” I ask.

He sends me his picture, and I’m taken aback at the portrait of a dark-skinned man with an oblong face and piercing eyes staring at me from the screen. He is simply gorgeous. Before I can properly take in his beauty though, the photo disappears. Ten seconds, just like that.

In a desperate hunger for more, I quickly type, “Can we exchange more pictures?”

But he doesn’t reply, and soon he goes offline.

The next day, I am glued to my phone, praying he comes online. When he finally does, I don’t bother to ask for his picture; I quickly ask for his number. He sends it and my heart gladdens at the sight of the digits.

I ask him, “Can we meet now?”

He says, “No. I’m currently busy. But maybe we could meet later in the evening.”

In the evening, I dial his number for the first time, and a sweet voice comes on. It sounds Igbo. I have a thing for Igbo men. After I identify myself, the voice says, “I went to the mainland. I am still on the road. We can’t meet today.”

I am disappointed, but longing for this man that sprouted inside me yesterday at the sight of his picture does not diminish. It grows even further.

It is in the evening of two days later that we finally meet, in an open field. He had told me to come to his street, and I’d boarded a bike immediately to him. He looks better in real life. His dark skin is of a rare shade of cocoa. He isn’t tall, just average like me. His hair is cut neatly, faded on the sides and he is shaved clean, save for a beautiful mustache sitting nicely atop his perfect lips and a goatee below. We sit facing each other on wooden benches in front of a closed shop, to talk. The first thing I notice is how he tries to avoid my eyes. He appears shy. It turns me on. Then I notice his lips ― light grey, flat, smooth and well chiseled, like the lips of Roman male statues in pictures.

He tries to be formal; we don’t talk about anything sexual at first. We talk about the neighborhood, how crazy Jakande is. We talk about his job. He tells me he works as a driver in Warri and is on sick-leave and using the opportunity to be with his wife here in Lagos. My heart sinks a little; so he is married. He complains to me about his job. He wants to leave it and find a better one here in Lagos. This makes me happy, but the happiness dries up as I remember that I will be traveling to Uyo soon. We had just met, and I already can’t imagine being far away from him.

He eventually gets around to talking about his life as a homosexual in Lagos many years ago, even though he doesn’t use the word “homosexual” or “gay” or “queer”. Instead he uses the word “teebee”, and I am surprised that I don’t feel the least bit irritated by that. He tells me about how the open bar at Costain Flyover used to be inside the National Theater those days and how he used to go there often to see guys express their queerness. He tells me many things: the kind of parties he used to attend, the first time he had sex and the kito situations he has escaped. And even though I find his stories quite interesting, I am more bothered about what his lips tastes like as I watch them move around the words he speaks.

He brings up his age. “I will be forty, tomorrow,” he tells me, and I just can’t believe it. There is nothing forty about him; instead he has the glow of someone in his mid-twenties. When I ask him about his current sex life, he says, “I don hang boot.” I laugh at that. I tell him, “You will have to come back from retirement the way Paul Scholes did.” He laughs at that, and I see his teeth for the first time. They are beautiful, like those of models smiling in toothpaste adverts.

We talk about me, and I tell him I’m a student. He tells me he didn’t go to school. I tell him I hate school and he laughs, and again, I notice his teeth and the urge to kiss him grows. Soon, it starts to get dark, and I am starting to wonder if we’ll ever talk about us having sex when he says, “I don’t meet people in their homes on the first date. And you can’t come to mine.” I almost roll my eyes at this. However, as I walk home later, there is a smile on my face as I think about him.

At home later that night, we text each other. He tells me I am so cute and he really likes me. I tell him that that’s funny because I feel the same way about him. He says, “I am a shy person, that’s why I couldn’t tell you.” And I reply the comment with a puppy-dog emoji. Later, I struggle to sleep as the thought of this man refuses to go away.

We don’t meet the next day ― he is busy ― or the day after that, or even the day after that. He is always going to the mainland and returning late to the island. This inflames my hunger for him and makes me worried because I’ll be traveling in days, and I can’t imagine returning to Uyo without being naked with this man on the same bed, and knowing what his lips taste like or how his hole feels like. It could kill me.

We finally meet again in the morning five days later close to the same place we met earlier. He said it would be brief because he needs to go to the mainland in an hour.  This time, we sit in front of another shop to talk. I quickly tell him I’ll be travelling the day after tomorrow, and I notice how sadness instantly materializes on his cute face.

“You are travelling?” He is surprised and sad at the same time, as I nod. “Wow!” he exclaims and goes quiet for a moment.

So this man really likes me, I think to myself.

“I am going to miss you,” he says.

“I’ll miss you too.” The words taste bitter on my tongue, and I am certain I would really miss him ― this man I have just met; this man who has constantly been in my thoughts since the first day he sent me his picture; this man with a beautiful mustache, who smiles in a way that disorients me; this gorgeous dark-skinned man.

“Can we go to your place?” he asks, checking his wristwatch at the same time. “I still have some time before I leave for the mainland.”

My heart starts to race. “Yes! My place is free.”

At my place, he collapses on my bed and casually takes off his shirt like it’s nothing; like he isn’t aware he has the body of a sex god. My gaze is still. My heart thumps. And I can feel my blood racing down to my dick. When I take off my shirt and my shorts, his jaw drops.

“My God, you’re so hot,” he says, and I smile a little.

“I know. But the hotter person here is you.”

I join him on the bed and the first thing I do is go for his lips. My heart melts away the instant our mouths connect. Vanilla and something else – that is what his lips taste like. Soon, we are kissing passionately, like we were afflicted with some terrible disease and kissing is the only cure. Like we are lovers who have not seen each other in years.

I take off his trousers and briefs and take a moment to run my eyes over his body as I see him stark naked for the first time. It is a work of art ― his body― perfection. I waste no time; I go for his right nipple and start sucking. He lets out a husky moan; a moan that encourages me to keep sucking.

“Fuck me!” he suddenly says, and minutes later, I am pounding this forty-year-old man who looks nothing like forty, in missionary. He didn’t want a collapsed doggy when I tried to flip him over.

“I want to look you in the eye as you fuck me,” he’d said.

He is tight. I can feel the walls of his rectum gripping my dick with every thrust. We fuck and fuck and fuck, until he tells me he is tired and we should take a break, and I wonder for a moment if it is the age after all. I lie beside him, panting.

“You are sweet,” he tells me, and I tell him the same.

“Do you vers?” he asks, and I nod.

When he goes over me, he looks into my eyes and says, “Your body is the sexiest I have ever seen.”

I feel my face heat up. Then I say to him, “Hold me like I am really the sexiest person you have ever met. Touch me everywhere. I want to know where my body ends and where it begins.”

Then I watch him as he proceeds to do as I have asked. I lose my senses the moment his lips touch my nipples and suck them one after the other; I don’t know when I start moaning his name. His lips aren’t just good for kissing, they are perfect for sucking. Later, when his dick enters my hole, I feel complete. And each time he withdraws, I am in despair, like I have lost an important piece of me. He fucks me hard and yet in an intimate way. In a way nobody has before. In a way that proves he is meant for me.

Minutes later, he withdraws and tells me to fuck him again. This time, I fuck like a wild sex-starved horse as he encourages me with his moans, spreading his legs further apart with every stroke I hit him with, offering up his hole to me in a gesture of total submission. When I finally spill inside him, I feel fulfilled, assured, like my semen being inside him has made us one, and we would always be together.

After the sex, we lie spent on the bed and cuddle each other.

“I am sad that you’re leaving,” he says, running his palm back and forth on my chest. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I am sad, too,” I tell him and mean it. I am truly sad. I want to be with this man forever.

He looks me in the eye and says, “I love you” with a tone that carries honesty and eyes that hold nothing but truth. I believe him, and so I tell him, “I love you too.”

We would go on to tell each other “I love you” a thousand times on that bed. And each time he tries to leave, he would fall back on me and say, “I can’t believe you are leaving. I don’t want you to go.” And his words would make me hate school.

Finally, we hug each other endlessly and he leaves.

Some hours later, I am stuck in a crazy traffic. I have always hated Lagos ― the crowd, the noise, the traffic. I hate it all. But this evening, everything around me is a blur, and I feel mostly at peace as the thought of this man dances around inside my head. A message pops up on my phone. It is from him: “Hey, Dear. Where are you now? I’m missing you already.”

***

I am in Uyo, thousands of miles away Lagos, lying alone on my bed. It has been a week since Lagos, and yet, I miss him like it’s just yesterday. It is raining heavily this morning. I am horny. And even though I would rather be with my Lagos lover, my dick is indifferent. I open Grindr, searching for someone to fuck, but the guys seem worse in Uyo. And I end up not meeting anyone.

Two days later I meet a hot guy, a 20-year-old model with an unbridled sex drive. This time, I do the collapsed doggy and he arches his back like a porn star who has practised doggy for years. His body is like that of a porn star, limber and lithe. He is sexy, with the smell of youth and skin smooth like leather, and a firm ass the way I like asses. We fuck endlessly like sex-starved dogs. However, when he leaves, I feel empty and weird and I go back to missing my forty-year-old lover, reminiscing on our time together. It bothers me how attached I have become to this man; how he lives inside my head. It bothers me that I can’t stop wanting him. This isn’t lust, I’m sure. This is something else. I bring out my phone and start to text him. I tell him, “I am missing you.” He replies, “Me too.” And our chat ends with “I love you” and “I love you too.”

Later, I am inside a mini bus, tapping away at my phone as we speed past old houses lining the narrow road. I open WhatsApp and start to go through our conversations. It is littered with the word “love” and love emojis. I stare at the “I love you too” text I sent him and start to wonder if it is actually love. I pull up his face in my mind’s eye and focus on it, on the mustachioed, dark-skinned beauty of it.

And I wonder: if this is love ― the love people talk about ―, then love is a restless thing, like a bird that cannot stop flying. It is a persistent longing gliding on the walls of your heart. Love is not a falling, it is a knotting: a mystic intertwining of two souls to become one. And I can’t stop loving this man.

Written by Alté Jay