The following weeks after my first all-male encounter were confusing for me. The entire experience had been a fiasco but I definitely wanted to try again. My female friends were always telling me about how getting penetrated for the first time hurt like crazy but I always thought that they were just being cry-babies. I asked one of my classmates named Wanjiru, that one girl who’s a total slut and owns it, and she told me that she just had to suck it up and handle the pain. And it helps to have someone who knows what he’s doing.

Wanjiru’s words encouraged me to try again. I still craved that feeling of being filled up to my belly-button with hard wood. I thought about it while lying in bed and on the few occasions when I watched gay porn. Clare would ask me what’s on my mind when I daydreamed about it in class. Nothing, I’d tell her, knowing damn well that the truth would freak her out and send her into the arms of Wainaina, that asshole who was always trying to steal her from me.

Despite my best efforts, Clare almost found out a couple of times. Women are intuitive like that. They when always know when something is up and my behaviour was setting off all kinds of red flags in Clare’s mind. What tipped her off for sure was the fact that my phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

We were in chemistry class one day when I got a text from a random number asking me if I wanted to get freaky for the 99th time that month, and Clare saw me peeping at it under the desk. Her suspicion aroused, she craned her neck over to look at the screen.

“Who’s that?” she said, not a hint of suspicion nor accusation in her voice. Either she hadn’t seen the words on the screen or she was giving me a chance to explain. Ever the optimist, I chose the former.

“Nothing babe,” I said. “Just one of the messages from the news app I signed up for. Something about Henry leaving Arsenal for Barcelona.”

The lie came out so smoothly it must have sounded rehearsed, which it was. Over-protective mum was another lie that I’d come up with but the news-alerts lie made more sense since the messages were so damn many and even if I read them in front of Clare, I never actually replied to any of them.

Clare gave me a short smile. The corners of her mouth curved up slightly but her eyes remained cold, her pupils contracted so small that they shot a laser through me. I turned away from her and pretended to pay attention to our chemistry teacher explaining covalent bonds. Clare turned away eventually but she clearly wasn’t convinced.

That evening after dinner we sat together on a bench by the bus-stop. The sun was on its way down and it cast an orange light over us. From afar we looked like the perfect couple, enjoying each other’s company in a peaceful setting under the trees. But up close, things were about to blow up.

“I want us to do something fun tonight,” she said. She took out her phone and handed it to me. I took it in my hands, wondering what she had planned. “Now give me yours.”

I paused for a second and racked my brain for a reason, any reason, to deny her request but I couldn’t think of anything. I had the phone on me and it would arouse even more suspicion if I refused so I passed her my beat-up Motorola but didn’t unlock it. She didn’t know the code.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “I’ll take your phone for a night and you’ll take mine. This way we’ll know what it’s like to be the other person.”

As soon as she said that I instantly regretted handing her my phone. I came up with all kinds of pathetic excuses as to why her suggestion was a bad idea but she fought on, determined to have her way. I eventually managed to convince her that my folks would be pissed if they tried to call me but a girl picked up. The snide look on her face said that she didn’t believe me but she couldn’t think of a good rebuttal so she handed my phone back to me, took hers and stood up to leave.

“I gotta head back to dorms,” she said.

I got up to my feet as well.

“I’ll walk you down,”

“No,” she said. “I think I see Njeri over there. I’ll walk down with her.”

She walked away from me with her head held high and I knew that I’d suffer later. But I had no regrets. I’d done what I had to. I had no choice. If one of those guys from Outpersonals called then she’d know about my secret life and there was no coming back from that. As if to confirm that I’d made the right decision, a text came in at that very moment from a random number, asking me if I wanted to find out what his jizz tasted like.

Swing, Swing #2: The Truth and a Hard Place