LOVE BEYOND BORDERS

I remember when his hair caught fire. We were playing a game of chess at the dining table, with a candle since the rechargeable lamp was low on battery. He had begun to doze off, a sleepiness he was clearly fighting because he didn’t want to leave the game. He knew he’d gotten me into a tough corner, exactly where he wanted. To him, the chess game was one of wins and losses, no draws.

With each sleepy nod of his head, his afro strayed dangerously close to the flame of the candle. And then, the orange flame lit up his afro like a burning bush, and for a second, I watched with horror, immobile, before snatching up the chess tray to beat the fire out of his head, toppling the chess pieces to the table in the process.

His name is Chidiebere, but I liked to call him Ebie. I told him it was “Ebie” with a ‘Y’, but in my phone, I saved his number with an ‘IE’ just because I fancied it. And that night, he let me shave off bits of his hair in our room with a pair of scissors, after which I kissed his forehead, caressed his scalp and got drawn into an embrace, my lean chest against the sinewy V of his torso.

Until he came to live with us about a year ago, I only knew him distantly as one of my numerous cousins who lived in Plateau State. His family rarely came home for Christmas. But he had been posted for NYSC to Port Harcourt city, and fortunately for him, his place of Primary Assignment was situated along Daddy’s commute. Mom instructed him to share my bedroom with me, for bonding purposes, as she was not one to accommodate family in the guestroom, except they are very adult relatives. The young man who came to my room was not the skinny, tall boy I used to know who was about five years older than me. His muscles looked firm, his stomach toned, biceps well-defined, body leanly-built, and even his dick-print was very obvious. It is no secret that the men in Daddy’s side of the family are blessed with large eggplants, the kind that made wearing certain types of boxers an act of indecency. My own dick turns me on whenever I look at it, so I avoid staring at it in the mirror whenever I am naked so I don’t wank myself to my own death.

Bonding was much easier than I expected. My best friend, Gabriel, who I told about my cousin had one word of advice for me.

“Be very careful around him,” he said. “People raised in the North are no better than livestock. They have no mind of their own. Don’t be too free with him about who you, because he could wake up one morning and out you to your family.”

But Ebie was not cow-brained. In fact, he was very intelligent and free-spirited. Either I didn’t try very hard to hide my homosexuality around him or he was smart enough to pick up on the cues. Either way, he learned about my sexuality, and he digested it like it was no news. If anything, the knowledge drew us closer. He would encourage me to tell him about my sexcapades, and guffaw at the raunchy details or feign anger at the boys with whom I described as my worst sexual experience. He allowed me take some liberties with him too. The few times we showered together, I would touch him and he wouldn’t recoil. I would embrace him in the shower, our erections touching, but I never dared touch his penis. I thought that would weird him out and he might hit me.

Ebie got home one evening, a drink concealed in his backpack. It looked like yoghurt in a bottle, but he said it was alcoholic and a lady at his PPA gave it to him. She had a crush on him. A sudden coldness frissoned through my body at the detail “crush”; the chill must have revealed itself in my eyes because he quickly added that he did not like her that way. I helped him hide the bottle until Friday night, when my parents went out on a trip and my sister went over to my aunt’s for the weekend. We drank the entire bottle over a box of pizza. Before then, I’d never taken alcohol because I’d come to believe alcoholic drinks were bitter. But this one had a sweet tang to its taste that caused me to throw back two glasses of the drink.

That night, as we vegged out on the living room floor, Ebie ran his fingers up my thighs, to my crutch. He was fondling my penis, and the betrayer was fast rising to an erect position. I wanted to stop him, but my body craved him, and the craving raged stronger with each caress of his fingers over my erection. He pulled me close to him, buried his face in my neck, breathing hard, his alcoholic breath warming up the coldness that was beginning to form inside me from lying on the bare floor. I knew he too was fighting the urge.

“Do you want it?” he asked.

I nodded.

He seemed slightly more inebriated than me. But there was nothing drunken about the way he slowly claimed my lips in a kiss. A kiss that set of fireworks in my head, filling the darkness in the room with a gazillion shades of falling, shimmery rainbow glitters. As our passions built, our clothes fell away and I had slithered down to his crotch, to behold the humongous dick that was the birthright of the men in my father’s family. I tried to expertly consume his steely rod in my mouth. As his balls draw up tight and his dick reaches its zenith of hardness, I suck him like his dick was my last meal on earth. I eventually turned my derriere to him, ready to be taken. In the urgency of our passion, there was no thought spared to going to the bedroom to fetch condoms and lube. He simply spat saliva over his dick and forced his fat cock inside my hole. I winced and he immediately understood that I couldn’t take it all in.

But the sex was good nonetheless, as he plunged into me repeatedly. I stroked my unyielding cock while his dick continued to invade my behind, pleasuring us both. The sheer girth and length of his monster cock had touched nearly every pleasure point of my body and triggered my explosive orgasm of thick, creamy cum. No sooner had I begun to shoot my load that Ebie pulled out from my hole with a frantic grunt and showered my back with his hot load.

I woke up on Saturday morning with a throbbing in my ass. I smiled. It was one of those feelings you get after your man has done right by your body. It was raining outside and the shut glass windows were misty. I could hear Ebie’s player drumming out music from somewhere in the house. He had picked me up from the living room floor last night and tucked me in our bed. I put on my night robe and slowly made it to the living room, my head pounding back at the roaring thunder.

“Good morning, Ebie,” I greeted him in the kitchen.

He was almost done making breakfast of tea, omelettes and toast bread.

Although he was apologetic after that first time, saying he was sorry and that he hadn’t meant to seduce me, we proceeded to have more sex in the coming days. It became one of our favourite things. Sometimes, it was the slow, romantic lovemaking in the night, and at other times, it was the sneaky quickies in the bathroom; and when we had the house to ourselves, it was the frantic heat-of-the-moment sex, where we fucked all over the house. And his cum game was good; sometimes he wouldn’t cum until I’d cum without touching my dick, or until I was near passing out. He was a sex god and he kept me very occupied in the worship of our sex. Tunde and Gerald, boys who would always almost make me beg for hookups with them, were now often sending me chats, asking “What’s good”. But I was too busy receiving good dick to bother with them.

But all good things eventually come to an end. I’d always wondered about that saying; always thought it was a sadistic member of the Universe who made it so that good things never last. I saw my good thing getting to its stop when Sophia, my favourite female cousin, upon her suspicion of our moves, confronted us. I saw the terror that eclipsed Ebie’s face; it was an unpleasant look that almost turned his face skeletal. I wished Sophia hadn’t said anything to him, preferring her to come to me with her suspicions instead. She knew about my sexuality. She was very accepting. But she hadn’t known about Ebie. In fact, when Ebie’s reaction confirmed what she suspected, she was shocked. She hadn’t expected it to be true. Then she became incensed, threatening us with exposure if we continued fucking. To her, it was bad enough to be gay in a homophobic family, but two cousins fucking was something she couldn’t condone.

After that, it was as though the light of my sexual relationship with Ebie was switched off. I’d notice him get a hard-on in our bed, but he wouldn’t turn to me. From my side of the bed, I would listen to him grunt as he masturbated either right there on the bed or from the bathroom. He never touched me again. Our chemistry died and we grew distant, not talking much to each other. He soon started fucking the girl at work, the one who bought him that Friday night drink. And then, I learnt that he met my Gabriel on Grindr and they fucked in his house. The night Gabriel told me this, I cried myself to sleep in the living room.

Ebie passed out from NYSC. I was relieved that he would soon leave. His presence had started to hurt me. The night before he travelled to Plateau, he tapped me to wake up. I didn’t want to. I had nothing to say to him. He wrapped his muscular arms around me and gathered me to him.

“Listen to me, Obiajulu,” he said with a tone of seriousness I hadn’t heard from him in a while. He almost never called my name in full, preferring to call me Obii.

“Sophia didn’t wreck us,” he continued. “She saved us. I love you, by God I do. But it is selfish of me to keep you when there is no future for us, especially in this country. To be queer and related would never work for us. I don’t want you to be mine or anybody else’s just for sex. You deserve to be in a fulfilling relationship with someone you love and who loves you back, and with who you can have a long-term plan. I can’t have that with you, but I can be your friend. Your soulmate even. Please, stop hating me. Don’t hate me, because I love you. I always will.”

That night, I cried like I never had, my body shaking in his embrace as I felt my heart simultaneously break and heal. We shared a kiss, not the long, passionate kind that precluded sex. It was the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss of soulmates, the kiss of love that would never be as it should be.

I joined him and Daddy in the drive to the airport. I stole one last look into the black of his eyes; it held a little tear at the edge, a tear that he would never let fall. I hugged him, trying not to let my heartache show in that embrace, as Daddy was right there, looking on. Then I watched him make the journey toward the Departure, before turning and heading to the car outside, at the same time wiping the tear that had tried to betray me by running down my cheek.

Written by Peaches