I paid my boyfriend to ruin my life.

I am my father's only son and, because of it, his most trusted. In March, two years ago, he called me into his room and gave me a check of five-hundred thousand naira. My jaws went slack. He smiled.

“You will soon leave school,” he said, his hand cupping my shoulder. “I know education is the best legacy a father can give his son. But we live in different times and money has become a more immediate need.”

“Yes, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy.” I couldn't say more. What else do you say when something bigger than your chest falls on it? I zombied out of my father's room. When I got to the balustraded corridor, I started dancing.

I visited my boyfriend the next Saturday. I met him lolling in his dingy room, before a row of black beer bottles on his center table, uttering gibberish, arms flailing in the air. The sun had barely even come up. I leaned against the rickety door jamb and tried not to let my disdain darken my face. He didn't like it when I judged him. He said it made him feel small and dirty. On his birthday, while attempting to hug me for throwing him a party, he had lurched over my shoulder and sprayed my white shirt until it became yellow-brown, like the poop of a jaundiced child. I held him while he retched, his friends watching me, revulsion drawn on their faces, more at me than at him. I couldn't go home that evening. I washed him up. Patted his body with a towel. Slipped him into dry clothes and tucked him into bed, his head at first across my thighs before I removed it.

I was already stinking. I divested myself of my shirt, slippery with puke, and squeezed it under water in the bathroom. I left it in the bucket and shook So Easy all over it. I went back to the scene of his barf. I scrubbed the soiled tiles. Then mopped. I was remembering how my fingers had cramped up as I stood there in his room that Saturday morning.

He looked up, his eyes bleary and bloodshot. “You. You are here.”

He cracked open a cigarette pack and slid a stick into his mouth. My relationship with him had also been a stretching stench of nicotine. And not just nicotine. He and his cousins rolled and smoked Loud all the time. It was the reek of Loud that turned me on the most. It pushed my unsaid words, with each of his thrusts, far into a place too dark to analyze. Because of the smell of smoke and psychedelics, I got pliable in his hands. I would let him shove at my head while I sucked until my jaw throbbed; I would also let him drain himself on my eyelids, welcome his slaps as he plowed me—anything—as long as I could inhale the cannabis on his breath.

I sat next to him and told him about the money. I told him things. Virtually anything about me. My sisters hated the glow on my face anytime I saw him. They loathed how they could actually see that my heart beat faster. They said he would crumple my radiance. I found it funny, how they couldn't see that the mere possibility of him crumpling things about me excited me in my underpants. That it was why I gasped in bed and whispered to him, “Tighten your grip”, when he choked me.

I whispered the same thing that Saturday morning. Yes. We fucked. When I told him about the money my father gave me, he tottered to his feet, lumbered up to me, dragged me into bed and started unbuttoning my trousers. I tried to imagine my sisters, to push him away, to tell him firmly that this money matter was what we should be discussing. 

But the clouds from his mouth, of alcohol and nicotine and weed—these clouds swallowed me up. Melted into our moans. His hands found my throat and I said, “Tighten it.”

I was sobbing. I did not know I was, until I said those words. “Tighten your grip,” I said again.

I was not the only one he dug. He had many girlfriends. And he had told me many times not to love up. Because both of us are men.

“Squeeze my fucking throat,” I said, my breath shorter, my legs crossed and taut around his waist, my pelvis straining to match his thrusts.

He drew back slightly to watch me in surprise. I had never said so much during these moments. His eyes looked like lamps and I smiled through my tears.

I nodded. “Go on.”

Two hours. I checked it on my phone afterwards, as I watched him sit on the mattress, naked, smoking. Two hours of many rounds that dissolved into nothing for him. The thought hardened into rocks in my belly and in my chest. I started talking more about the money. I had my own bank account. I would go and cash it on Monday.

He watched me with slitted eyes, through bluish-white clouds, and said, “Be careful with that money.”

On Monday, I cashed it. Saved four-hundred thousand naira. And left the rest as cash in hand.

Time passed. He suddenly seemed to need more money than ever. His mom was at the hospital. His younger brother wanted to write the UTME for university. His childhood friend wanted to have a wedding and he had been included in the list of groomsmen. And his ex-girlfriend had a small surgery that must be done on her.

He consumed more packs of cigarette than I'd ever seen him do. He withdrew like a snail. I had the sensation of holding a fog. It suddenly looked like he would disappear through my fingers. I parted with the hundred thousand naira in my hand. I took trips to the bank. Too many. More than I wanted to.

At first, I told him I had lost my ATM card. An excuse devoid of power. Once, he threatened to stop touching me. So I ran to the bank again, avoiding my reflection in the glass panels, unable to watch my own face. When the bank manager asked me if all was well, I said all was well.

The night they discharged my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, he let me come for the first time in years, a quivering outburst all over his belly. I sent him an extra credit alert that same night and he thanked me with another round of merciless choking. 

We lived in antithesis. In bed, he called me “slut”. Afterwards, anywhere else we met, he called me “Bros” and hit my palm. An action empty of affection. Empty of friendliness. I tried to find a reason to leave. Just one. But I only had to think of his lack of artifice, his sharply sticking-out points, and his fingers around my throat, to know that I would never leave.

Five-hundred thousand naira finished. Barely five months. I cannot point to one thing I bought or did for myself. 

My father called me one Sunday morning and asked me to lend him two-hundred thousand naira. It was an emergency about his health. I blubbered. I couldn't form the words. Then he started prodding me. The truth left my belly in jerks. My father was stunned. He wanted to know what I did with it. I gifted him my silence. 

He yanked me along to the bank. They printed out my account statements. They had my boyfriend's details written all over. My deposits into his account. My transfers. New things started to choke me as I watched my father read the statements aloud.

Back in the car, he asked me who this guy was. He did not know who I am, which meant telling him who “this guy” was would be me telling him about me. I had to tell him. All the weights I carried in my neck asked me to.

My father did not speak to me afterwards. It got so heavy, the silence between us, that I had to eventually pack a bag and leave the house. That was the last time I saw him alive. His health failed. He died, just months after the bank trip. The day my eldest sister called to tell me, her words slurred by snot, I was wrapped around my boyfriend's body.

“Daddy is dead,” she said.

I cut the call and told him about it and he tried to suck my nipple. I pushed him with all my strength and he hit his head on the wall. Enraged, he grasped a beer bottle and swung at my forehead. I leaped out of his room, grateful that I was not fully undressed. I ran all the way home, nothing on my feet. The road turned to a stream because of my eyes. My father—because of Muslim rites—was already in a casket when I arrived.

I started murmuring to the floor. “I did not hug him goodbye the day I left. I did not tell him how sorry I was. I did not even look at his face before I left that day.”

I sank onto the compound floor and clenched my fingers around my throat, with all the intention in my veins. But I knew. I knew that, no matter how hard I squeezed, there were things I would never be able to squeeze out of my head. For life.