Chapter 2
I’m overwhelmed. Great gusts of emotion howl and tumble inside me like tornadoes made of glass, shredding my guts to bits.
The front door is closed, but I’m pressed with my back against it, eyes clenched shut with strain, clawing at the wood and biting my lower lip to the point of pain, but not enough to break skin; I at least have enough control left for that.
Ha. Control. I’ve never once been in control, as I’d confirmed last night.
What I have is a semblance of restraint—all my mother’s lessons can’t have gone to waste, after all—and I’ve been operating on a hair trigger for days, my famously compact composure as fragile as a cobweb.
Seeing Rosemary again very nearly tipped me over the edge.
Fuck. Rosemary. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I clench my eyes shut tighter when I feel a traitorous, childish sting.
What is she doing here? Why is she—?
No.
Stop.
I breathe.
And breathe, and breathe, and breathe.
When I open my eyes, the stairs seem further than they should be.
“Please don’t,” I try to snap, but the words come out wary and exhausted. I’m still not sure who I’m talking to. My rapidly deteriorating mind, perhaps.
Rosemary’s still out there. I can hear her.
Before I can stop myself, I’m inhaling. Deeply. Helplessly.
My stomach practically tries to shrink in on itself, my mouth flooding with saliva.
All my life I’ve known hunger. My mother had called it a curse, this unfettered need to consume regardless of how depraved the appetite. She’d trained me to ignore it, to grow so used to its consistent pang it became as inconspicuous as my heartbeat.
So I remember, vividly, the first time I truly began to understand the depths of that hunger.
Though the ache had sharpened then, it hadn’t been when Rosemary and I had first met, nearly thirteen years ago, now.
It had been a few weeks later, the first time she and I had spent significant time apart.
I hadn’t felt the ache of missing her—or rather, I’d found it easy to ignore because we’d texted and called each other throughout the three-week Christmas break; I still feel a heady rush when I think back to every phone call I’d had to sneak away to make; all those secret text messages, exchanged under the covers and in the dead of night, my phone on silent, screen darkened—my control so perfect my mother hadn’t had a single suspicion I was having my first true taste of something she’d have deemed forbidden.
Then school had resumed, and we’d returned to campus. We met that same day, practically the moment I’d arrived—she’d turned up a few hours before me—and I hadn’t even bothered to unpack my bags.
I’d caught sight of her standing all shy and expectant in front of Chiamaka Hall, and something in me had come sharply awake—a slumbering beast startled to life by the brightening of her features when she’d spotted me.
I heaved in air in great, big gasps, as if all this time I’d been suffocating, and seeing her again had forced my lungs into rapid, excessive motion. The sun had shone on her short, dark curls, framing her oval face, her dark skin warmed and glistening, her lips so soft and full.
I remember half-jogging, stopping just short of entering her personal space.
She’d clutched her left arm with her right hand, her pretty, blunt light-green nails digging into skin, teeth sinking harshly into her lower lip, like she wanted to fall into my arms as badly as I suddenly wanted to fall into hers.
That unfamiliar desire had been obvious in its reciprocity but terrifying in its intensity, preventing us from closing the distance, like if we so much as touched, we’d end up fucking passionately for all of homophobic Nigeria to see.
We’d spent the day together in the room she shared with a single roommate, recapping our holidays—things we’d already discussed a hundred times but felt new because we were saying them face to face.
I remember, as the hours had passed and the sun had set, the look in her eyes, the way they’d pathetically tried to mirror this new, gaping want that had spread through my limbs, digging savagely into my bones like the prickly roots of a stubborn tree.
The way we carefully hadn’t touched since we’d reunited; we’d been on her bed, lying on our sides, the few inches of space between us making every part of me ache with the need to be closer.
I remember the way those dark brown eyes had periodically darted to my mouth; always quickly—a microsecond and away, probably hoping I wouldn’t notice.
Her roommate had gone clubbing, and even after the sun had set, Rosemary and I had refused to leave the bed.
Refused to move, like moving would disrupt this feeling, as frightening and novel as it was.
She’d mentioned something about classes. Cracked a joke, I think. In the warm silence following our laughter, the ache had grown unbearable. We’d shifted closer at the same time, my naive moth drawn to what she thought was a safe, warm light, instead of deadly, crackling ultraviolet.
Our foreheads had pressed together, and I’d forced myself to think of all my mother’s warnings, of all the reasons this would never work, and managed to grit out a miserable but resolute, “We can’t.”
She’d exhaled shakily, her warm breath against my parted lips a mockery of the kiss we would never get to share.
“I know,” she’d whispered, her voice as choked and anguished as mine.
Four words, and we were over before we’d ever begun.
We’d spent the next three years content at simply being at each other’s side—we didn’t dare dream of anything else, somehow knowing—without ever actually saying it out loud—that this was the kind of hunger one could never satiate.
As graduation had approached, though, we’d grown restless.
Greedy. I’d known it was futile, but I’d been foolishly frantic, desperate for a future where I could keep her, even if I couldn’t have her.
We’d clung on with bleeding fingernails, pathetic enough to even talk about it like it meant nothing—pretending that getting married wouldn’t be a hardship because at least we both also happened to be attracted to men; talking about living side by side and raising our future kids together, staying involved in each other’s lives in the only way we knew how.
Then my mother had died.
I’d thoughtlessly assumed the ever-present need to be as close as possible, to fill my lungs with Rosemary’s scent and her scent alone, to lick and bite every inch of her skin had been a result of years of suppressed sexuality talking, evidence of the so-called “madness” my mother claimed nipped at the heels of all Takieme women, stubborn and relentless as a territorial bush rat.
Despite her warnings, her strict, unforgiving training, a part of me had naively clung on to the belief that I could be—that I was normal. That she had to be lying or exaggerating. Befriending Rosemary had made my belief worsen.
Those dark, final days I’d spent buried in grief and ungodly desire had forced me to face reality. My mother might’ve lied about the “madness”, but she hadn’t lied about that wretched hunger.
Her death had made me want to hold onto Rosemary and never let go.
It made me—made the beast, I realise now, want to wrap around her like a python and squeeze, grind her bones down to dust and then consume her ashes.
End her life so it wouldn’t be taken from me—so she wouldn’t be taken from me; so that even in death, she would belong to me, forever.
I’d been downplaying my deterioration long before I’d swallowed my pride to come here, but seeing Rosemary again makes me realise just how badly I’d done so.
This flimsy, comical control is the single useful thing my mother had left me—it’s all I have left, and it’s fading. Fast.
What will I be when it’s gone?
I rip myself away from the door, heading blindly for the kitchen.
Two rooms between us and I can still smell her. Clean sweat and damp forest soil with a fresh minty undertone.
And blood, warm and rich, running through her veins. Unlike back in uni, where all her outfits had been paired with a small touch of green—green earrings, green bangles, green scarf—today, she’s dressed entirely in green.
Grass green top with spaghetti straps so thin I can’t stop thinking about how easy it would be to rip them off.
A silky skirt with a grassy pattern that hugged those thick, curvy hips and thighs, stopping at her shins, her feet in dark green crocs decorated with the charms of flowers and stars.
Dangling teardrop-shaped earrings made with Ankara cloth.
My once telenge best friend, a frail, petite thing back in uni, now has her shorter frame padded all over with luscious softness. Her nails had been painted a deep green, and had she not been wearing her crocs, I’m sure her toes would have been painted the same shade.
Her hair was done in a half all-back style with three star-partings, the braids at the back of her head tipped with large beads, most of them in warm yellow and brown, the only pops of colour on her frame in a sea of green.
I’m shaking. With how I’m feeling right now—like my stomach wants to eat itself, like I’m literally going through withdrawals—I can’t believe I’d been able to walk away from her.
When I’d done it back then—ten years ago today, which I can’t stop thinking feels like some kind of auspicious omen, while simultaneously telling my foolish heart to stop fucking dreaming—I’d been thankfully numb, too full of complicated grief for my mother and everything her death had meant.
I grip the edges of the sink so tightly the aluminium threatens to fold underneath my fingers.
I can still smell her. Fuck. I can still smell her.
Is she still standing out there? The thought makes a knife twist in my chest. Is she staring up at the front of my grandmother’s house, looking like a lost lamb—one that had finally found its shepherd, only to be rejected once more?
That last thought reminds me why I need to stay away.
Her mouthwatering fragrance lingering around me—the delectable scent coming into the kitchen from the open window—reminds me why I need to stay away.
The way my mouth hasn’t stopped watering, my gums aching, stomach cramping, reminds me why I need to stay away.
I am not her shepherd. I’m definitely not her saviour.
If she had even an inkling of the thing that lingers just underneath my skin—
The aluminium folds in my grip like clay, moulding into the shape of my thin, unnaturally long fingers.
One day. I’ve barely spent one day in this house, and all I’ve gotten is the total and absolute destruction of everything I’ve ever known.
The last thing I need is my ex-best friend poking her nose where it doesn’t belong, discovering things that would worsen the distance between us—that would irrevocably alter the way she remembers me.
I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired.
And, fuck. The beast is fucking starving.
Impossibly, like the hunger has inadvertently ignited something, Rosemary’s heady scent intensifies, thickening around me like a cloud of perfume. I spin around, panting, half-afraid I’d find her standing right there.
My relief is short-lived when I hear a tenuously calm exhale. My spine stiffens.
“All right,” she’s whispering, seemingly to herself, and I’m stalking out of the kitchen, hunger rapidly morphing into anger.
She’s in the foyer, her back to the staircase, staring up at the blank wall like she doesn’t know how it got there. Her old trunk and duffel bag are both inside, too.
“What are you doing?”
She spins around, brown eyes wide behind her glasses. Fuck, the glasses. They’re new. Thin, round, fancy golden frames that complement her cool, dark brown skin, and make those doe eyes look even bigger, even more guileless. The beast wants to fucking ruin her.
“I thought I told you to leave.”
“I’m sorry,” she says immediately. “I tried, I promise I did—I just—I … can’t.” She clenches her eyes shut and visibly, rightfully, braces herself against my disbelief.
“You can’t?” I snarl derisively, then—
What the fuck?
“What the fuck,” I say out loud.
The front door is gone. I glance wildly down the length of the foyer, down the stretch of the entire wall.
It’s simply gone, as though it never existed.
“What the fuck.”
I’m going to have a panic attack.
I storm to the kitchen, chest heaving faster when I find that the back door is fucking gone, too.
The windows, like most Nigerian houses, have iron bars built into the concrete on the inner sills to prevent burglary.
But for every room, the bars of at least one window are required to be able to open in case of emergency.
I check every window. There are no openings, even though I could’ve sworn I’d noticed the padlock on the window above the sink—on the one in the sitting room, behind the two-seater sofa.
I grip the metal bars. They’re hot to the touch.
“Genevieve …”
Fuck. Jesus. Her voice. I can’t.
I grip tighter, then yank. Hard. Harder, trying to pull the bars straight from the walls, even though, to Rosemary, I must seem like I’ve lost it.
I pointedly ignore the almost mocking silence around me, my helplessness and frustration mounting with every failed attempt.
This is only my second time ever at my grandmother’s, so its alarming how much I hate this fucking house.
And I hate my grandmother for leaving it to me, for feeding my mind with the shit that had brought me here in the first place, even though I’d honestly had no choice.
My arms threaten to dislocate from my shoulders, my elbows threatening to lock. Only then do I stop.
I can feel my ex-best friend hovering feebly behind me. The walls seem to be closing in.
I think of how breakable she is, how painfully, pathetically human. Her scent is already permeating into the rest of the house, slowly sneaking its way from where she’s standing and into every crevice, clinging soft and misty like morning dew.
“I can’t do this.” It comes out sounding more desperate and pathetic than I intended.
I don’t look at her when I brush past, daring anything to stop me as I make my way up the stairs.