There was love in the air; the aura of Valentine’s Day was sweeping through the school harder than the harmattan, which continually harassed us with cracked lips and flaky skin. Never been my kind of holiday. People always teased me behind my back about how my butt jiggled in my brown khaki shorts, which were rather too tight. Sometimes they were bold enough to stop whispering behind my back and say it to my face. Even the senior students called me Sponge Bob and classmates thought it was cool so they condensed it to “SB.” Sure, I’d try to lose weight, from time to time, by jogging round the dilapidated school bus adjacent to the incinerator where hardly anyone would see me. But food always welcomed me home.
Love was definitely not in the air, for me. But my friend Evans had a girl who made his heart flutter with butterflies dancing Samba in his stomach. He was still at a loss on what to buy her as a Valentine’s gift. The question of what to buy was even tougher for both of us because Biola, the dodo to Evans’ Jollof rice, was in SS1 while we were just in JSS3.
Two days to February 14th and we’d yet to find any gift that would melt Evans’ way into her heart. Evans had been shrinking, saving the little pennies his mother gave him for lunch rather than eat. During break, while he shared my lunch with me, I asked him, “Why are you doing this for a girl who is, without doubt, out of your league and doesn’t even know you exist?”
Evans shook his head and smiled, “You cannot understand, Ekene; it’s called love.”
“What is love?”
“Love is when you meet somebody, you think about
Every second of the day and night
Somebody so beautiful, it takes your breath away
And words are just not enough to say.”
I was mesmerised. “Wow, that’s a lovely poem.” I never imagined Evans could write like that, because his grades in English language were pretty poor, despite being a mathematics genius.
“Thanks, I wrote it for Biola,” said Evans with a blush.
Evans’ poem helped me identify my feelings. That poem he wrote, I could never write anything like that about a girl. Nothing about them got me hard, even when hiding in my father’s toilet flipping through his GQ magazines filled with photoshopped naked women. But when I turned to a page with a man, dick curved like a fishhook inside his white briefs, my dick would stand like a flagpole.
It may not be love, but the man who took my breath away, who I thought about at night, was Idris Alba. He was my main crush, the sexist man alive with his chunky mounds of muscles. He was black testosterone personified, oozing and arousing through his dark narrowed eyes, razor-cut beard and warm smile. I couldn’t help salivating whenever I saw him draped in tuxedo suits, hungry to French kiss and fuck him, even if just as a one-night stand. But he’s not the only one who made my loins burn with an intense desire to offer myself to him, kneeling and sucking his balls, because whenever Cristiano Ronaldo scored, it triggered ripples of orgasms in me.
