The question landed between us as a stone dropped into still water. Her expression changed immediately. She looked away, suddenly fascinated by the ceiling. “Dayo, abeg. Can we talk about something else?”
“No.”
Sally turned back to me, frowning. “Why are you doing this now?”
“Because I want to understand something. You told him you were a virgin, knowing fully well that you weren’t. Why?”
For several seconds, she said nothing. Outside, thunder growled again, followed by a violent burst of rain against the window. Finally, she sighed. “I know Afeez very well,” she began quietly.
“Even before we started dating, I knew the kind of person he was. I knew his views about chastity. I knew how much he valued a virtuous woman. If he had known the truth about me, he would never have dated me. He wouldn’t have treated me the way he does now.”
I stared at her. “So you decided to lie to him?”
She pressed her lips together. “I didn’t plan for everything to turn out this way.”
“There’s something you need to understand,” I continued. “You can’t build a relationship on a lie and expect it to survive forever. What happens if you two get married? What happens when the truth eventually comes out? Don’t you think it will be much worse then?”
She dragged a hand over her face. “I know. I know, okay?” Her voice cracked with frustration. “I just don’t know what to do anymore. It started as a joke. I thought I could get away with it, and before I knew what was happening, I was already stuck.” She looked at me helplessly. “I didn’t think things would get this serious.”
I watched her in silence. Then I noticed the tears. They slipped down her cheeks slowly, catching the faint light from the window. For a moment, I felt nothing. Perhaps I had become too entangled in the mess myself to sympathise properly.
But I couldn’t bring myself to forget the deception simply because she had started crying. I had seen too much of Afeez’s devotion to her to dismiss what she was doing as a harmless mistake.
I knew how much he cared about her. I knew how far he would go to make her happy. Anything she wanted, Afeez found a way to provide. And that was what bothered me most. There was a time he had told me, that he had renovated part of her family’s house for her parents. It wasn’t something he had done for recognition.
He genuinely believed he was building a future with her. The thought that someone could accept so much from him while deliberately concealing something that mattered deeply to him made my stomach churn.
In my mind, the ending was already taking shape. One day, Afeez would discover the truth. There would be arguments, accusations, and a kind of heartbreak that no amount of money could repair. And by then, he would have invested even more of himself in the relationship. Kai, my guy, was about to see shege pro max.
But how had he failed to notice the signs? That was the question that kept troubling me. I hadn’t even been particularly close to Sally, yet something about her had always made me suspicious. Sally’s circle of friends hadn’t exactly helped my suspicions.
There was Angela, whose stories alone could fill an entire book. Then there was Ruka, a girl whose reputation seemed to precede her wherever she went. I had heard enough about her sexual stories to know that she and Sally moved in circles where sexual boundaries were viewed rather differently from how Afeez imagined them.
He knew these people were her friends. He knew the stories also, yet somehow, he had convinced himself Sally was different.
That was one of the reasons I had once encouraged Afeez to take their relationship further physically and fuck her. But he had refused. Every time I suggested it, he would shut me down. I could still hear those words in my head.
“Dayo, not every relationship has to be about sex,” he had told me on one occasion. “I respect this girl. I don’t want to spoil what we have.”
The irony was almost unbearable. He had been so determined to protect the purity he believed she possessed that he had never stopped to question whether the image was real. Perhaps love really could make a person blind.
Or maybe Afeez had simply seen what he wanted to see.
I turned towards her again. “Let me ask you something else.”
She sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “What now?”
“What’s your sex life actually like? How sexually active have you been?”
For a moment, she simply stared at me. Then, to my surprise, she smiled. She wiped away the remaining tears, gave a little chuckle, and settled more comfortably against the pillow.
That sudden change unsettled me more than the crying had. “Dayo,” she said, shaking her head, “you really want to know?”
“That’s why I asked.”
She studied my face as if deciding whether I was ready for the answer. “I’ve been sexually active since I was fifteen.”
My jaw dropped. “Fifteen?”
She nodded. “It started with my Economics teacher when I was in secondary school.”
I stared at her, struggling to process what I had just heard. At fifteen, I had been sneaking around to watch pornography on my brother’s phone.
I barely understood what a real sexual relationship involved, let alone the complicated world she was describing so casually.
“Wait,” I said. “Your Economics teacher?”
“Yes.”
“And you were fifteen?”
She laughed. I couldn’t laugh with her. There was something deeply disturbing about what she had just disclosed, and beneath my shock was a question I couldn’t immediately put into words. Had she understood what was happening to her at that age?
Had there been pressure, manipulation, or something she had never told anyone?
But she was already moving on, speaking as if she were recounting an old school adventure. “Before I turned eighteen, I was having sex two or three times a day sometimes.”
“Ah-ah!”
She laughed again at my reaction. “Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t about money or anything like that. I just loved sex.”
I shook my head slowly. “Jesus.”
So this was Afeez’s supposed virgin. Virgin Sally. The words sounded almost absurd inside my head. Suddenly, memories of my own encounters with her returned in uncomfortable flashes.
Things I had previously dismissed now seemed to carry a different meaning. I wondered how much I had misunderstood and how much I had simply refused to think about.
She watched my expression with amusement. “I continued like that for years,” she said. “Dayo, if I tell you my body count, you will scream.”
“I think you’ve already done enough damage to my heart for one night.”
She chuckled. “I used to keep records, you know.”
I turned sharply towards her. “Records?”
“Yes. I actually kept count.”
“Of all the people you’ve slept with?”
“Of course.”
I rubbed my face. “God abeg.”
“And even after that day we fucked three days ago, I have fucked someone else.”
For a second, I couldn’t hear the rain anymore. I simply stared at her.
“What?”
She repeated herself, without any apparent embarrassment. “After you and I had sex three days ago, I slept with somebody else yesterday.”
Three days. It had been only about three days since we had crossed that line, and she was telling me that she had been with someone else in the meantime.
My heart did gbim. I sat up slightly, my mind racing through possibilities I didn’t want to entertain. I imagined the number, the years she had described, the secrets she had kept from Afeez. Then I imagined what would happen if Afeez ever discovered everything.
He wouldn’t merely be disappointed. It would damage him forever! He would question every memory, every promise, every moment in which he had trusted her.
He would wonder whether any part of their relationship had been genuine, and the worst part? I was now part of the secret. I couldn’t tell him the truth without confessing my own betrayal. Whatever moral high ground I thought I possessed had disappeared the moment I crossed that line with his girlfriend. I had become an accomplice in the very deception that angered me.
Sally’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts. “Then, at some point, sex became boring.”
I turned to her again. “Boring?”
She nodded. “So I started experimenting with women.”
My mouth fell open. “Women?”
She burst out laughing. “Dayo, close your mouth. Flies will enter.”
I stared at her, still trying to catch up. “You mean you’ve also been with women?”
“I still do women,” she said with a small chuckle.
I looked away, exhaling slowly. At this point, I didn’t even know what to ask next. The woman beside me was nothing like the person Afeez believed he was preparing to marry. But I was beginning to understand that the problem wasn’t simply her sexual history.
It was the elaborate wall of lies she had built around herself, the promises she allowed Afeez to believe, and the fact that she seemed willing to let him keep believing them.
Then her laughter faded. “Dayo, I sincerely regret everything I’ve done.” Her voice had changed. “Sometimes, I wish I could go back and undo so many things.” She swallowed hard. “I wish I had never started lying to him. I wish I had done things differently.”
Fresh tears gathered in her eyes. This time, her voice trembled as she spoke. “I don’t even know how to get out of this anymore.”
Outside, thunder cracked across the sky. Somewhere in the house, a door or window rattled in the wind.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered.
She nodded. “Afeez is back…”
Neither of us moved.
Written by Tito
Buy Oniranu Books on Selar.co from anywhere in the world
This post has already been read 242 times!
