How Rose's Abuser Began to Take Advantage
As a pretty and brilliant fifteen-year-old girl, I stood out among my peers and many of the boys in my school devoted themselves to wooing me. They wrote both anonymous and signed love letters which they posted to my desk. I did enjoy reading them all, and it felt nice to be wanted/desired the way they did me.
After getting the letters over time, I was tempted to respond to one of them. I chose the one written by Dike, a handsome and popular seventeen-year-old senior who was also the only son of the principal. Of all the boys who tried so desperately to woo me, Dike was the most interesting of them. His letters were quite romantic and intriguing. I read them over and over and couldn't stop myself from imagining our future together in some fancy house full of lovely kids. And so I wrote him back, letting him that I liked him too and would very much like to be his girlfriend. Consequently, it wasn't long before our puppy love began, albeit secretly.
Unbeknownst to me, it wasn't just the boys that found me attractive. Some grown men did too and one of them, surprisingly, was my mother's lover Kalu. The nightmare he later subjected me to began when he and my mother decided to move in together. As you can imagine, I disliked the idea of living together with the man. But since I had no say in my matter, I had no choice but to go along with it. I, however, tried my very best to avoid this man but all to no avail. He always seemed to be all up in my face, initially trying a bit too hard to be friendly to me.
One afternoon after school, I was in the kitchen warming some soup and preparing eba when Kalu came home unexpectedly. Normally, he came home late afternoon/evening time because as the proprietor, he usually stayed back to perform some administrative tasks. But that afternoon, he was unusually home earlier than expected. He then joined me in the kitchen and began his annoying and uncomfortable attempt at a friendly chitchat. He asked about school, and for the umpteenth time asked whether I liked the school. He told me about how he revamped the school after inheriting it from his father, positioning it as the best private secondary school in the whole of Umuahia and beyond.
I just couldn’t care less about this story. All I wanted more than anything was to be as far away from him as possible. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. I just could not understand why he didn’t see my disinterest despite my feigned smiles and nonchalant nods. I wished my mother was home at the time. But then she wasn’t, as she had to be at work at the hotel until later that evening.
I later served Kalu’s meal at the dining table and rushed to my room to eat mine, declining his offer that I join him. As soon as I was done eating and had gone back to the kitchen to wash my plates, he came back to the kitchen too, carrying his tray. By this time, he was bare-chested and sweaty, having removed his shirt due to the heat. I collected the tray from him and placed it on the zinc, expecting him to walk away. But he stayed put and surprisingly began to explain to me why he was half naked.
“The weather is just too hot,” he said. “Aren’t you feeling the heat?”
I said nothing. I just busied myself doing those dishes even though I could feel his eyes boring into my back as he stood there behind me. For a while, there was an awkward silence in the kitchen, except for the clattering sounds of the plates. And then he began to talk about how the peppery soup and hot eba combined with the heat to make him sweat. How he wished NEPA could restore the fluctuating power so the fan could at least help the situation. And then he suggested that I could help my fanning him in the meantime. I said nothing and once again, an awkward silence descended upon us.
Before I knew what was happening, Kalu was right behind me, closer than normal with the heat from his body and his fading cologne all over me. I was frozen at the spot as I rinsed the last plate, scared as his nearly erect penis pressed against my buttocks. When I finally tried to move away from him, he held me and whispered into my ears-
“I need you, Rose!”