THE MAN OF MY FUTURE PAST

I woke up that morning with a start. The dream I’d just risen from was a horrible one. I was drenched in cold sweat. I quickly located my phone and checked through the various applications for communication to make sure that he was still well and truly blocked. After that, I finally let out a sigh as I felt relief rush through me.

It was just a dream. A horrible dream, but a dream nonetheless.

But considering that the dream centred the man who’d once been my lover, I couldn’t help but take a trip down memory lane, as I found myself thinking about Tefa.

***

I met Tefa two years ago on Badoo. We got matched and after liking each other’s profiles, he sent me a message. From that first “Hello”, we were soon chatting and vibing so well, that we exchanged numbers and moved to WhatsApp and phone calls. He liked to call me, and we would talk for several minutes on the phone, just getting to know more about each other. He was twenty-five years old, which made him a few years younger than me. And he told me he worked as an investigator with the Nigerian Police Force.

He began pushing for us to meet and I acquiesced. He said he would come to see me, and we picked a Sunday morning. Since we both went to the same Pentecostal denomination, he decided to follow me to my church for the first service at 7 AM, after which we would return to my place.

On that morning, he called when I was almost done dressing; he was already at the landmark I directed him to stop and wait for me. I was out in a few minutes and as I approached the junction, I couldn’t see anyone that looked like the guy I’d been chatting with. I called him and we were talking as I looked around, until I caught sight of him standing several yards away from the junction. I disconnected the call as I waved him over, realizing that he’d had to move away in order to minimize whatever exposure to kito I might be.

As he walked up to me, I sized him up. There was nothing striking about him. But he was nice looking, smallish in stature, about 5 ft, dark-complexioned, and calm mannered. He was dressed in black long-sleeved shirt, black jeans and white canvas. He looked nice.

We went off to church, and when the service ended at 9 AM, we returned to my place, where we ate and gisted. He got to meet my mother and older brother. When it was time for him to leave, I walked out with him, and we carried on talking about a variety of topics as we walked. One of those topics was the unfortunate trend of internet fraud, something I expressed my contempt for. However, I noticed how defensive he got with the subject, so I let it go.

Generally, he wasn’t as chatty as I am, but he was a well mannered person, and generous too, as we stopped at the junction, where he bought some groundnuts and bananas for me to take back to my mother.

By the end of his visit, I was looking forward to seeing him again. This time, we planned for it to be at his place sometime within the week.

On that day, I got to the place he said I should stop at, only to call him and be told that he wasn’t home. He pleaded for me to find somewhere to sit and wait for him, that he was close by. His side was a developing area, quite separate from the main town with dispersed settlements and lots of bushes around. So, it was unnerving for me to just hang around and wait for him. I sat on the bench of a kindly mechanic and waited. He kept calling intermittently, while the time ticked by. The bushy environs heightened by anxiousness, and I kept imagining that this would turn out to be a kito situation. But then, I remembered that he had already been to my house and that he’d been so nice. So, in my indecision, I waited. By the time he eventually got to me, two hours had passed and I was very upset.

He was full of apologies. Dressed as he was in a navy green suit, it was apparent that he was coming back from a function and hadn’t in fact been anywhere close by, like he’d led me to believe. I was really angry, but I’m usually not good at staying mad, especially when the object of my displeasure has apologised profusely as Tefa did. I forgave him, but told him that I wouldn’t stand for this kind of mistreatment next time. He assured me that it wouldn’t happen again.

We were soon ensconced in his single room apartment. It was a lavishly furnished room, and he welcomed me with some gusto. It seemed as though he was out to impress me, because he was unstoppable. First were the snacks and the drinks, then he served us lunch. Then, he went out and got us bush meat and pepper soup, despite my objections that I was too full for that. Someone called me at some point during my visit and asked me to call him back. But then I checked and I didn’t have enough airtime. He noticed my dilemma and insisted on recharging my phone right away.

I was overwhelmed by his lavishness and I wondered how he could afford to be this generous and live in such well-appointed accommodations on a policeman’s salary. Plus, he was just twenty-five; this kind of extravagance didn’t seem like what someone his age and in his profession should have access to.

But before I could dwell too much on all this, he came close to me and planted his very soft lips on mine, putting a stop to my thoughts and focusing all my attention on the desires that were immediately unleashed inside me. I kissed him back, and before long, we were getting naked and caressing and groping and touching each other everywhere. He wasn’t endowed; his dick was in fact the smallest I’d ever seen, but he more than made up for that with his mouth and his tongue.

This guy was a very skillful oral lover. Jeez!

From my mouth to my ears, to my neck and down to my nipples and navel, and then to my very erect dick, down to my balls, slowly plotting a route from there to my ass. By the time he settled on my honey pot, I was delirious with pleasure. With each stroke of his tongue, each gentle bite of his teeth, I was convulsing and gasping as waves of pleasure crashed through me. Boy, his tongue though… That tongue paid attention to my body and knew the right places to explore, and every touch, every swipe, every lick, every nibble was magic.

That was where the magic ended though. The sex wasn’t so great. I am versatile, and wanted to fuck him, but he resisted, saying he was top. I usually don’t like hooking up with people who won’t let me fuck them in turn, but I grudgingly acquiesced here. And then, he wanted to fuck me raw. I refused. No matter how much he cajoled me, I wouldn’t budge. And he absolutely wouldn’t go with a condom. So, we ended up wanking each other while kissing and sucking each other’s nipples. It wasn’t that bad an experience for me in the end.

In the following weeks, we continued meeting and hooking up. It was during this time that I got to find out that he was into internet scams, an explanation for his lavish lifestyle. When we talked about it, he tried to play down his criminality by saying he wasn’t involved in the ritual aspect of the Yahoo scam.

He was really into me, and began asking for us to be boyfriends. He wanted a commitment, but I didn’t. I liked him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get that serious with him. He was very smitten with me and had an intensity about him that sometimes scared me; he would say things like how he would not take it lightly with me if I ever break his heart. Stuff like that.

He liked me so much, that he would tell me things, take me into his confidence about the kind of life he lived. He talked about his boss, a police DPO, offering protection for the Yahoo boys in their area; as long as they paid their dues to him, they were protected from any harassment from the law in that area. Tefa wasn’t a full-time policeman, but in addition to his dues, he had immunity from his police job.

He also told me about how he used to set gay guys up.

Yep. The man I was sleeping with admitted to having a kito past.

He said he used to really hate homosexuals back when he was in the university, and he and his cousin would lure the gays in their school in and then set them up. Then one night, he’d partied hard and gotten very drunk, so drunk that his friend, Lanre, was the one who brought him home. Lanre went on to strip him of his clothes, before taking him into his bathroom for a quick bath.

And while they were in there, Lanre slid down and began sucking his dick.

As inebriated as he was, he had tried to stop Lanre, but his attempts were feeble. Besides, his dick betrayed him by hardening to Lanre’s oral touch. His friend sucked him until he came; then he washed him, dried him and then tucked him in bed.

He slept well, but upon waking the next morning and remembering what happened the previous night, he got very mad. And he went and confronted his friend, warning him to stay away from him or else he would out him.

However, something had changed in him that night, and in the days that followed, he was horrified with the realisation that he wanted his dick to be sucked again by Lanre. He’d been drunk that night, but his body had been conscious enough to register that he’d gotten a great blowjob from Lanre. This alien desire drove him crazy and he began deliberately spending more and more time with his girlfriend, always wanting to be sexual with her and insisting on her giving him blowjobs – all of this a desperate attempt to rid his mind of this need to be sucked off by a guy.

But however many blowjobs he got from his girlfriend, none of them compared with the feel of Lanre’s mouth on his dick. So, he went and made up with his friend, a reconciliation that caused Lanre to confess that he’d been in love with him for the longest time.

And just like that, they began dating. Even after graduation from the university, they stayed together, only ending things when Lanre, who was under pressure as an only son to get married, began talking about how he needed to get serious with having a steady girlfriend. So, they called it off, Lanre got married and Tefa was back on the market, with random hookups from Badoo.

This story clarified some things about him to me; for instance, his insistence on us being in a committed relationship, and little expectations here and there that made it seem as though I was playing a role that belonged to someone else. It was soon clear that Tefa was grooming me to be another Lanre. He bought things he wanted me to wear, and took me to functions where he wanted us to pose for lots of pictures. He wanted us to have identical commitment bands. He wanted too much public involvements. He liked to show me off to his friends – of course, those who were gay as well. He wanted us to meet way too regularly than was permitted by my schedule. And then, he wanted Lanre to know that he had gotten a better boyfriend than he was, frequently sending him messages and pictures to show him that he had moved on to someone better.

It was all too much for me. I am a regular guy who likes to live a calm, uncomplicated, down-low life. And Tefa was none of these things. He had the kind of wildness that my conservative nature and background wouldn’t allow me to entertain. He was very into me, but I was increasingly realizing that I didn’t feel the same way for him.

Maybe, it was an age thing; he was in his mid twenties and I was in my early thirties. We were in very different life brackets. Or perhaps, it was our different temperaments; he was full of youthful exuberance, which was exacerbated by his extravagant lifestyle, while I was organized and serious and careful. I read a lot of books and he hadn’t read a book in his life. He was reckless and I was rational. He wanted a boy, and I wanted a man.

It just wasn’t going to work between us, but he didn’t seem to know this. He was always so determined for our relationship to work, and I didn’t have the heart to firmly break things off with him.

However, Providence came to my aid when he was transferred to Asaba. This news gladdened my heart more than it should, even though I was careful to show that I was sad over his departure. A few days after he got the news, he was off to the state capital to resume work at his new division, while I was back here, trying to refocus on life without Tefa.

But even with the distance, he fought valiantly for our “relationship”. He would call often and visit every other weekend. Whenever he called, he would ask with apparent suspicion what I was doing or where I was. I resented this.

Eventually, his efforts began to wane. The calls dwindled and he wasn’t able to come home as regularly anymore. I hoped he had finally been able to see how dead whatever we had was now.

For a long time, we didn’t communicate with each other. And then, out of the blue, he reemerged into my life, talking about how he was in some financial jam at work and needed my assistance in offsetting a debt that could implicate him in an office scam gone wrong. He asked for the money to be a loan, but I knew I would not get it back. However, I remembered how generous he’d been to me in the past, and I gave him the money.

That was just the beginning. He came back again, and then again, always with some sob story about something he desperately needed money to take care of. I didn’t want to think that I was being used – not until the final straw, when he called while I was at the hospital bedside of my mother, who had just undergone major surgery. We chitchatted and I began telling him about my mother pulling through surgery, but he cut in, more concerned with telling me how tough things were for him and how he was owing lots of people a lot of money and how he’d been feeding on soaked garri for days. I knew he was being melodramatic, but I wanted to help. So, I told him I would send him some money, after which he predictably promised that he would pay back as soon as he could.

When that call ended, I found myself resenting Tefa a little bit more for taking up space in my life in a different way from how he did before. He hadn’t even wanted to know anything about how I was doing, hadn’t wanted to hear about the fact that my mother was hospitalized. He’d been centred on one person, and that was Tefa.

I did send him the money, a little more than he asked for. And for the next few days, he did not call back to acknowledge the receipt of the money. That was when I started realizing that to Tefa, I only served a purpose: to fulfill him. That was all I’d ever been to him, and it hadn’t changed now that we were no longer dating. That was when I decided to cut him off. I blacklisted his number on my phone, blocked him on Truecaller and Facebook and WhatsApp. I wanted him to be well and truly out of my life.

***

And then happened my dream.

A nightmare that started with me being outed to my community. The word had spread everywhere that I was a homosexual who did deplorable things with little boys. I was scared. I was afraid.

Then my brother was at my side, glaring at me with such cold disappointment.

“Tariq, how could you?” he said icily, before raising his hand and striking me hard across the face.

I hunched forward, curling into myself, and suddenly I was being beaten by several hands, voices raised, shouting curses on me, fists and sticks lashing out, hitting me, battering me, hurting me. I was crying out for help, but I felt shamed by their sneers.

And then, through the mob, I looked and beheld Tefa. He stood apart from them, looking on at me with a cold gaze. A detached look that seemed to tell me that he was the reason for my pain – and suddenly I knew it was him. He was the one who outed me to the community.

When he saw comprehension dawn on me, his face cracked into an acidic smile, and then he turned and began walking away, leaving me to the bloodthirsty mob who were still beating away at me.

And that was when I woke up.

It had felt so real, the violence, the physical hurts, everything. I was very happy to realize that it had all been a dream. My heart was still racing and I felt achy all over. The memory of the nightmare gnawed at the edges of my mind so much, that I turned to my phone to ensure once again that Tefa was still blocked from contacting me.

Then I made a mental note to stay off hooking up for awhile – because the Tefa in my dream could be anybody.

Written by Tariq