THE BIT

I don't know where he came from. He was a stark stranger who tacked himself beside me after the most flimsiest display of banta by the bar. He tugged me to him as I turned from him and proceeded to show me streams of a woman's nude upper body. She was the woman he is seeing. Every now and again, as he scrolled, he stared at me with a static snigger which I decided to appease with a nod of approval.

He told me she was a freak. The biggest he'd known. And that he had a good Christmas and new year. Really good.

Didn't divulge the bit that bothered him most. The bit that revealed he had seen her five times and so far every encounter ended, to his frustration, with him going down on her in a public bathroom.

He didn't mention how once she pushed his head away from her to answer a phone call lasting twenty minutes. And then with a flick of thumb and finger, signaled for him to continue. He couldn't bring himself to tell the bit where he obeyed with little protest.

He left out the bit where her indifference to him as anything more than a tongue for hire aroused a curious affection in him for her. And that he sometimes sent these affections in text message form but got nothing in return as tender. Except pics of her naked chest and the address of a different and busy pub to meet next.

And how, after she had her filling in the toilets, she would leave him at the pub, wobbly in his unfinished energies, leaning in on any woman that came close, and full of awkward relief the moment he caught a lonesome black man to share his bounty of pics of her exposed white breasts.

By Chima Nsoedo