by Fiona Zedde
Ny curled her fingers down the back of Duni’s neck, needing that grounding touch while her other hand pulled the wet, kissing sounds from between Duni’s thighs, the gasps from her mouth.
“You’re so good to me,” Duni hissed. “So good…” She bit Ny’s shoulder, a sharp and unexpected pain. Her hips jerked and rocked with each breath.
Ny shuddered, slid her fingers more firmly in long and hard strokes that had Duni’s heated breath puffing against her skin. The heat of it, the moisture that slid even more from between her thighs. In moments, Duni was shivering against her, teeth buried in Ny’s shoulder, a pain that pushed Ny’s hips into the ground and moved her fingers faster inside Duni. Faster. Duni’s muffled scream of completion vibrated through her. A wild motion. Ny felt her body jerk hard in a sudden and sympathetic pleasure that left her stunned, her mouth hanging open as she swallowed hard and her lashes fluttered against damp cheeks.
Duni’s breath was loud in the bush, puffing and hot and intimate, echoing the frantic drumbeat between Ny’s legs. Ny swayed in the aftermath of her pleasure, a deeper lethargy than when she touched herself in the dark secret of night. She lifted her head and reluctantly dragged her damp fingers from their sweet haven between Duni’s thighs.
“I knew you’d be a fast learner at this too.” Duni’s smile was drugged and beautiful. “I want you to do this to me again. And I want to put my mouth on you, to show you how wonderful it feels.”
Ny shivered. “I want that too.” Her voice was low and rough. It didn’t sound like her at all.
“You would—” Duni’s voice cut off at the sound of a high voice far down the river but closer than it should have been. She leapt to her feet with a soft curse. “I have to go.”
Ny nodded dumbly, her mouth already wet from the desire to drag Duni back down and taste the heat directly from between her legs. But that wasn’t being careful. “Okay.” But before Duni could move, she grabbed her hand. “Right now,” Ny said, “I am happy.”
Duni looked down at Ny, a smile touched with sadness on her lips. “You are beautiful and you are strong. No one has ever denied you anything. You’ve never suffered. Of course you are happy.” She gently pulled away. “Now, I really have to go.”
Duni smoothed her cloth down over her hips, then, after a quick glance over her shoulder at Ny, dashed through the bush and toward her co-wives downriver. Ny sat pressed into the rock, her body still singing with the aftereffects of their kisses, the explosive touches they shared. It was a long time before she was able to stand up and pretend to wash her clothes.
After finishing her small amount of laundry, Ny practically danced her way home. Her happiness was uncontained. After singing out a “hello!” to the fifth person who looked at her as if she’d lost her mind, she realized she needed to leave the village or risk giving away her secret. She changed into her hunting clothes, loincloth and the single band of cloth tied over her breasts and around her neck, and left for her favorite tall tree on the edge of the village. She sat on its sturdiest branch, the breeze of the late afternoon breeze brushing her face and throat, when she felt the vibrations in the trunk, someone else climbing up the tree. Ny looked down. Kizo’s worried face peered up at her. She frowned. He was never worried.
She swung down to a lower branch to meet him halfway. “What’s wrong?”
The branch jumped as Kizo landed next to her, his chest gleaming with sweat as if he’d run all the way from the village. “Duni’s husband. He just threw her out.”
The tree trunk scraped Ny’s back when she unconsciously flinched away from the news. Her heart leaped in her throat. “Why?”
“Don’t play games with me, Nyandoro.”
“But we haven’t…we haven’t.” She shook her head, her tongue too heavy for her to speak. But they were careful!
“Well, he thinks you have. One of the wives told him Duni met a lover at the river and hiked up her skirts for him. Or her. Is that true?”
Ny shook her head again, still unable to speak.
“I don’t know whether to say congratulations or curse you for a damn fool.” He grabbed her arm. “Come.”
They clambered to the ground, their feet dropping quietly on the thick but drying grass. The family of gazelles Ny had been watching jerked their heads toward her and Kizo, still nibbling at the grass but watching them carefully.
“What’s going on?” Ny asked as she scrambled to catch up to her brother. Her thoughts raced from one useless idea to the next. She had to set things right. “I should go to her.”
Kizo stopped so fast she almost ran into his back. “You shouldn’t do a damn thing that could make her situation worse.”
“But isn’t this bad enough?”
“The wife didn’t tell anyone it was you.” Kizo nodded in approval, then started walking again.
“That’s good.” Ny chewed her lower lip. That was very good. But… “I wonder why.”
“The stupid girl probably didn’t see any of what happened between the two of you,” Kizo said. “Maybe she just smelled Duni’s wet cho-cho and knew something happened at the river, but not with whom. I’m surprised her husband didn’t put two and two together, especially after what happened with you and Duni at the market. Then again, he was never the smartest monkey in the tree.”
It wasn’t long before they reached the village. Even from its outskirts, Ny could hear a commotion that told her things weren’t quite as she’d left them. The sound of women crying. The agitation of raised voices. A chorus of spiteful laughter from young children. Was all that because of Duni? Because of her?
“She needs me,” Ny said, walking faster. A spike of fear darted down her spine.
“No. You can’t afford to be seen right now.”
“But nobody knows that I’m the one.”
“Yes,” Kizo agreed. “So let’s keep it that way. The game will be up the second you show up in your hunting skins offering her a shoulder to cry on and a nipple for her to suck.”
He took her to his house at the very edge of the village, a secluded home where he could maintain his privacy away from the villagers’ prying eyes. Kizo’s choice not to live in the family compound had always hurt their parents, but he kept a sleeping mat at Nitu’s house simply to appease them, even if he seldom actually slept there.
The path to his house was mostly dark, lit only by the torches from other houses they passed along the way. No one on the path looked at them twice, only nodded in greeting or made some comment on the coolness of the evening or likelihood of rain. Most of the villagers, it seemed, were walking in the opposite direction toward the main square and the sound of all the excitement. A man’s angry voice, the words mostly indecipherable, rose and fell in the night.
Ny and Kizo exchanged a look.
“That stupid man doesn’t have the sense the almighty Olodumare gave a chicken,” he said.
Ny shivered from more than just the evening’s coolness. “But even the most stupid of men have power here.”
Kizo made a distressed sound and kept walking. At the front door to his house, he stopped.
“Wait here,” he said before disappearing through the doorway.
Even though Ny had left the village to find quiet, and had relished it perched high in the marula tree overlooking the savanna, the silence Kizo now left her with made her uneasy. The relentless shriek of insects scraped over her nerves, and the more accustomed her eyes grew to the darkness, the more she imagined seeing Duni, crouched in the dirt, cowering away from slaps and pinches, tears rolling down her bruised face. In the gloom, she wrapped her own hands around her shoulders, trembling. Ny felt sick with what she had caused. If it wasn’t for her and her endless wants, Duni would still have her sister wives, she would still have a place to sleep tonight. She would still have a good life.
Her dull nails found enough sharpness to dig into her shoulders. Ny hissed from the pain. It was only a little bit of what she deserved.
A light flickered on in the h
ouse, outlining the small shuttered window, then the door creaked open.
“Come in,” Kizo said quietly.
Inside the house, a pair of candles illuminated the small gathering room, revealing its low table, couch, the impala hide—Kizo’s first kill—stretched across the wall, and her brother’s serious face. He gave her one of the candles and waved her toward his sleeping room. “Back there.”
Ny frowned and opened her mouth to ask him what he was up to, but he made an impatient sound and shoved her toward and through the open doorway. The heavy wooden door slammed shut behind her.
She stumbled into the room, the candle gripped in both hands. “Kizo! What—?”
But a low sniffle nearby cut her off. She spun around, candle raised high. Ny drew in a surprised breath.
Duni huddled on her brother’s sleeping mat, her face ravaged with tears. The candlelight flickered over her body that was pulled tight on itself, making her look smaller. Shadows and light crawled over the lost expression on her face.
“He threw me away like garbage,” she croaked. “Just on her word alone.” She didn’t say who “her” was, but Ny had a pretty good idea who she was talking about. “Now I have no place to go.”
Ny sank down next to Duni on the mat, her knees weak from both relief and worry. Duni wasn’t in the middle of the village being publicly beaten by her husband, but she’d lost everything now. Absolutely everything.
Despite the few conversations she’d had with Duni, Ny knew nearly everything about her. She knew that Duni’s parents had been old when she was born and they died not long after she married Ibada, relieved that she had a man to take care of her. All she had in the village were distant relatives. No one who would be willing to take on the responsibility of a divorced and penniless woman.
Duni wiped her face with trembling fingers. “He said he will keep my dowry, the goats my baba and iya gave for the marriage.” It was his right but was still a bastard thing to do since Duni had no one else to care for her. She didn’t even have her own piece of land to grow crops for the market.
“I’ll be fine,” Duni said like she was trying to convince herself. “I know I will, but right now I just feel like even the Orishas have abandoned me.”
“You haven’t been abandoned, Duni. I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you.” Ny moved closer, but Duni jerked away from her.
“I knew I shouldn’t have given in to you.” She growled the words, like a cornered lion, brutal and angry. “I knew it, but I was stupid and blinded by your beauty and that damn charm of yours.”
Ny flinched. It was nothing she hadn’t thought herself, but it still hurt coming from Duni. She steeled herself against more vicious truths, but the fight drained from Duni as easily as it came. She clenched her hands in her hair, so hard that it must have hurt. Ny took her hands and gently pulled them from her hair.
“Please don’t hurt yourself. Please don’t. Everything will be all right.”
“Of course it will. No thanks to you.”
A soft knock sounded on the door. At her call to enter, the wooden door creaked open and Kizo stood in the faint light.
“I’ll spend the rest of the night with Nitu,” he said in their mother’s Ndebele language. “You can stay here and take care of Duni.” The corners of his mouth twitched. “Give her whatever she needs.”
Even though Duni didn’t understand what her brother said, Ny darted a glance at her, embarrassment climbing hot and fast in her cheeks. “Kizo!”
“What? She’s hurt and needs comfort beyond empty words. Besides, I know you want to feast your fill of her cho-cho.” He chuckled, a low rumbling sound at odds with the heavy tension of the room. “See you tomorrow.”
The door creaked shut, then he was gone. The only remnants of him the low sound of singing as he made his way through the small house and out the front door.
“What did he say?” Duni asked although it didn’t seem like she cared. While her tears had stopped falling, misery still lined her face.
“He said you can stay the night here. No one will bother you.”
“Please thank him for me.”
Duni straightened her spine and got up from the sleeping mat. A quick swipe of her hands across her face took care of the remnants of her tears, then she was walking away from Ny, taking careful steps around the small room. Her breaths were loud, tremulous.
Ny wrapped her arms around her upraised legs, rested her chin on her knees, and allowed Duni the space she needed. She couldn’t imagine being without the only family she ever knew, having nowhere to go. Being humiliated in front of an entire community that thought it knew her and found her guilty without any sort of inquiry.
But isn’t this what you caused, Nyandoro?
She ignored the annoying voice inside her head.
“I haven’t been alone in a long time,” Duni said. “That’s what I always complained about, having those child wives around me, crying and asking advice, telling me I need to please my husband more. And now, this…silence. It’s wonderful. But it’s terrible too. This is not how I wanted my freedom to come.”
“We don’t get to choose how the Orishas grant our wishes.” Ny trotted out the old aphorism her father threw at her when she complained about getting what she wanted but not quite in the way she’d envisioned. She winced and shook her head. “Sorry. That was stupid.”
Duni stopped pacing the room and simply watched her.
Ny scrubbed a hand across her face and over her tight braids. “I want to fix this but feel so helpless. Part of me thought it would come to this but…but not so soon. Not when you and I haven’t even…” She stopped, her words ending in a pathetic whine, convinced she was saying more stupid things.
This wasn’t the time to talk about how she and Duni had never actually been together, how the small intimacies they’d shared at the river didn’t feel like enough for Duni to lose her entire world over. The air shifted around her as Duni crouched close. Duni pressed her forehead to Ny’s shoulder, her breath puffing warm against her bare shoulder.
“It’s all right,” Duni murmured.
Now she was the one comforting Ny. The one who’d lost everything.
“Please.” Ny wrapped a hand around Duni’s shoulders and tried to lift her up. “You should be the one sitting here, not me.” You should be the one getting comfort.
Duni didn’t move. “I can’t blame you for my recklessness. I wanted you too.” She lifted her head, sadness in every curve of her face. “Until you, no one had ever courted me.” She pressed her lips together, forced a mockery of a smile. “When my parents knew they were dying, they investigated every eligible man in the village. They were the ones who approached Ibada about taking a second wife.
“They forced enough goats and cows on him that he would have been a fool to say no. On our marriage night, I was just another goat in the pen. I knew what I was getting. It was better than having nothing and no one when my parents died, but as Yemaya knows, I wanted so much more.” Duni drew a trembling breath. “I prayed at her altar for something more, and that’s when she sent you. I knew I would have to pay for it somehow, but…” Duni’s hand tightened briefly on Ny’s thigh before she moved away to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Maybe I should’ve been more specific when I asked for what I wanted.” The corner of her mouth jerked up in a puppet’s smile, sad and false.
Ny didn’t have anything nearly as useful to say. She knew where most of the blame lay. On her own shoulders. If she hadn’t been so relentless in her pursuit, Duni would be in her own bed right now, listening to the chatter of the other wives or tending to her husband’s meal or even sitting by the river in peace. She wouldn’t be in danger of starving to death on her own.
“I’ll take care of you,” Ny said. “I won’t let you become someone’s servant or slave just because of what I did.”
“No, this is happening because of what we did.” Duni squeezed her fingers together in her lap, chewed on her already swollen lowe
r lip. “But I’ll survive this. I can…I can ask Iya Angaza for a plot of land to rent and grow vegetables for the market. Maybe even take the cows to the field for women who are too old to do it themselves.” She chewed so hard on her lip, Ny thought it would bleed. “I’ll do something…” Her words trailed off into uncertainty.
Ny frowned at Duni’s lowered head. Her woman selling goods in the market? Taking care of someone else’s animals? Never.
Ny took a breath, careful not to say the things that wanted to spill hot and haughty from her mouth. She left the mat and approached Duni as carefully as she would an unbroken horse.
“Stay here with Kizo,” she said. “Let me find a place for you with my family. Soon, I’ll be of age and I can make you my first and only wife.”
Duni frowned like she couldn’t quite understand what Ny was saying. Then she smiled sadly. “The idealism of the young. Nyandoro. No. You have a life beyond the gates of the village.”
“You had a life before I touched you, Duni. You had to give it up because of me. We can be equal in loss with this, and equal in gain.” She breathed deeply and clasped her fingers together in her lap when all she wanted to do was grab Duni and make her see what was best. This was best. “I will take care of you.” She pressed her fingers to Duni’s mouth when she tried to protest. “We will take care of each other.”
Duni drew a quick breath, the warmth of it scorching Ny’s fingers. Her lips parted under the pads of Ny’s fingers and she pressed a kiss there. “All right,” Duni said.
A wave of feeling swept over Ny. A light but electric burn through the senses that energized her fingers and her legs, made her want to reach out in comfort and be more for Duni than just words. Words meant nothing if actions didn’t support them.
But she didn’t know what actions Duni needed from her. She didn’t know what to do. Her hands were calloused and clumsy with delicate things. Holding a spear was easy. Leaping on the back of a zebra just as effortless. But the thought of touching Duni, even in comfort, frightened the breath from her lungs. But she had never wanted to touch so badly in her whole life.
