By Babatunde Odubanwo
The night she left, the sky withdrew its stars,
and rain came down in sheets of grief and ash.
She kissed me soft—
a slow, uncertain farewell,
and smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
The silence after her departure throbbed.
Walls pressed in,
the roof became a drum for mourning skies.
Alone, I curled around a scentless pillow,
till two o’clock—
a knock, abrupt, insistent, broke the spell.
She stood there—Arinola—damp with storm,
her lashes jeweled with rain and need.
She said no words; her eyes confessed it all:
the ache of absence,
the hunger only warmth can soothe.
We crossed a line.
Not spoken, but felt—like gravity.
Two souls adrift,
seeking anchor in each other’s arms.
I kissed her first—
her lips were fire and unfamiliar.
Hands moved like tides,
buttons undone like falling leaves.
And when her dress pooled quiet at her feet,
I saw the moon had taken human form.
Her skin—dark silk
drawn tight on curves too cruelly shaped,
her breath a gasp of mint and desperation,
her hair—a waterfall of blackness on my chest.
Her breasts, twin altars, rose with holy rhythm.
Her nipples summoned like compass needles.
I knelt—obedient,
tongue tracing paths that led to sacred ache.
She arched,
and from her parted thighs came rivers warm and wild.
“Don’t stop… go deeper…”—
a litany echoing off the storm-lit walls.
She bloomed thrice under my worshipping mouth,
then stared through me with trembling light.
When I entered her,
it was not lust—it was surrender.
Her hips met mine in reverent defiance,
and guilt, that old priest,
was nowhere in the room.
She called my name—
a hymn both urgent and devout,
her back arched in dogged rhythm,
and the bed—
our only witness—sighed beneath our sin.
At last, the trembling climax came,
and silence, soft as cotton, wrapped us both.
At 5:30,
the phone rang sharp—a blade of light.
My lover’s voice, calm with arrival:
“I made it home.”
And in my arms,
her friend lay sleeping,
her breath still warm upon my skin—
all night long.
