SHOOT YOUR SHOT IV

“I’m not chickening out Telvo. It’s just that…” I said.
“Ah! There’s nothing to worry about. Come on sit your ass here and make some friends courtesy of the great shisha.”
I looked at the clique and they were looking at me too. Their faces looked like saying “What’s up with this one? Never been high before? Or did he just shit in his pants.”
I sat and just then the shisha hose was passed to me by the chic seated next to me. I had to act up really well. So like someone who has done that before, I took a puff. I could feel the smoke through the vents of my chest cavity. Normally for someone who has never smoked before, the body unleashes a smoke alarm that is triggered by the throat; cough it all out! I tried to resist it but I would have died of suffocation had I resisted the cough any longer. I must have sounded like a sneezing goat from how hard the laughed at that.
“Don’t worry bruh! That’s the initiation process.” Some guy with an ear piercing said. What’s with these guys with piercings by the way? I have done crazy things with my life but nothing close to piercing my ears.
The girl next to me showed me how to make sure I don’t get chocked. It was followed by tricks on how to take the smoke out through the nostrils.
(Disclaimer: Smoking whatever kind of smoke even charcoal rolled in a paper is harmful to your health mjango!)
“Wow I can’t feel my head,” I said amidst many of the many chatters we had.
Telvo said, “Wait until you cannot feel your balls too.” We laughed.
“I hope it doesn’t reduce my performance levels,” I said. I even don’t know who was talking. It came out from my mouth but it wasn’t me.
“What do you know about performance oh ye virgin of virgins?” The chic next to me asked and everybody in the clique was like, “Oh damn!” “Shit mehn!” “That’s cold nigga!” “Somebody call his mama now!”
Wait! What the hell did that mjango just say? Somebody call who? Who again? It was fun and funny until they touched the wound I was doing so well to not only get away from as such but to get high from!
Telvo noticed that my moods had changed all over sudden. I felt sober. She who could and should not be mentioned began to circle my mind. I let go of the hose. The shisha was not the limit anymore. I had hesitated to sit there but I wasn’t hesitant to stand and leave for the big league.
 

****

“So you were angry?” I asked.
“Yes, it was more of anger than sorrow now. Angry that my sorrow was other people’s punching bag.” He said.
“You do realise they didn’t mean that,”
“I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. They had pricked my most vulnerable place. I had no way of stopping it from getting to me.”
“I feel you man,” I said.
“And I had to take my anger out on something or someone if it was possible. But especially something. Something stronger than what I had already had.”
 

****

I hadn’t noticed she was seated alone by the small bar in Mt. Everest. My mind was so occupied by the reality ghost that had manoeuvred its way to haunt me and sweep me off my feet when I was doing so well in hiding from it. I sat next to her and started to catch my breath before I could decide what to do next. Or say which plane to board in the journey to the high kingdom.
I hadn’t paid much attention to anything about her until she spoke first.
“You look like you need a drink.”
I turned and looked at her. The low lighting in the place and the hurricane in my head made my cognition levels one to bear with.
“Can I pour you one? I’m having Black Label,” She asked.
The last thing I knew I wanted was to talk. I merely pushed the glass nearby with the back of my hand towards her. She was smoking a very long cigarette. Those ones that you only see in movies. It smelled not as bad as normal cigarettes. She didn’t seem to mind my attitude. She poured a share of the bottle she seemed to have saved for herself and unlike me, courteously dragged the glass until it was directly in front of me.
Her hand had a light complexion. I was tempted to explore who the kind lady; kind enough to share her drink and had a light complexion – was. It wasn’t intentional but my eyes moved to her feet below the table instead of her face first. She was in a pair of black booty shorts and sticking out at the edge of the short was a black spot!
I quickly turned to her face. It was her, Emily. She was smiling as if she knew I had just found out it was her when I should have realised that at first glance.
“Uhm” I began to stammer.
“Tell you that you’re not dreaming?” She asked.
“If you’d be so kind, yes.”
“I told you we’d surely meet again.”
“It hadn’t even clicked. So you hang around this place too?” I asked.
“I hang around everywhere in this mansion. But here especially where I find my peace.”
“And your piece too,” I said while pointing at the cigarette between her left hand’s index and middle finger.
She chuckles, “And you what brings you here? For the first time of course.”
“Did you have to add that last part?”
“Sorry did that upset you?” She smiled in a way I found sexy.
I looked away and sipped the drink, “I just want to feel different. Even not feel me at all if possible.”
“How do you plan on achieving that?” She asked and inhaled the burning tobacco with her eyes closed. To be honest she really looked beautiful. What’s the word for it?  Yes, crush! I had a crush on Emily. I did my best not to show it through how I looked at her. Many have desired to at least be able to sit next to their crushes. But sometimes the closest they can get to them is in their fantasies as they hold pillows to their chest and hell knows where else!
“Is there anything stronger here?” I asked.
“Stronger than?”
I sighed and pulled my hair.
“Hey,” she rubbed my back. “Are you okay? You seem pretty stressed.”
“Goddamn it! I am Emily! Okay? And that’s what I’m trying to help here!”
“Give me a moment I’ll be back.” She stood up and walked across the room like she knew exactly what I need. I didn’t see who she went to but she didn’t come back empty handed.
In her hand was a cold bottle of Smirnoff Ice and two round pills, white in colour in a small transparent sachet. She sat, uncorked the bottle and dropped one pill inside. After it dissolved she got two clean empty shot glasses and poured into them.
She sat opposite me and handed me one glass.
Taking it I asked, “What’s this?”
“Exactly or even more than you asked for.”
Holding her glass half way across me, “You ready?”
We toasted and flushed them down our guts immediately after. It was fizzy and had a burning sensation at the same time. It’s inexplicable. I felt like my whole body had been baptised in a liquid fire for some seconds. At the same time, lightning of excitement struck through my body then fades away slowly.
“Ssssshiiit!!! Woow!!! What was that!”
After I regained cognition a few seconds later, I found Emily in stitches.
“You should see how you look after a shot of this.” She said.
“No kidding! Pin me again.” I said.
“Now careful, you should take this one slow.”
Even before she was halfway into saying that, I had already grabbed the bottle and was filling my glass.
The look on her face looked like saying, ‘I love how daringly crazy you are. And I like daring and crazy at the same time.’
I can’t remember how many shots I took. But halfway into them, I was super hyper. And I didn’t know I talk a lot when I’m super hyper. We talked about everything that could ever be talked about by both sober and high mjangos.

****

“Wait, so you had found what you had been looking for?” I asked.
“Yes. That pill was the magical card that night.” Mwamburi said.
“Wah! Okay. I won’t ask what it was made of.” I laughed sarcastically. That laughter when you know you want something but cannot get but you just press the button hoping you’ll be lucky to get it.
“Yea it’s best if you didn’t know.” He said. Yea, you see, I wasn’t going to hear that one after all. It’s like those times we avoid telling people some things claiming it’s for their own safety. Like not telling me a fly crash landed in my soup because if you do tell me after I finish taking the soup, then the knowledge of it will haunt me to the ends of the toilet.

****

I have never laughed as much as I laughed that night.
“So you want to tell me you’re an amateur in everything?” Emily asked. Her speech had slowed down a few knots. Mine wasn’t any better.
“Well, not everything. But maybe there are some things I am an amateur in and I don’t even know I’m an amateur.”
We laughed.
“And there are other things I may be an amateur in but I can perform as well as anybody else who has been in the game, “ I said.
“No shit Mwamburi!” She said and raised her glass.
“No shit!” I raised mine and we toasted. That was the last of the Smirnoff bottle flavoured with the guest of honour, the magic pill! I proceeded back to the Black Label and treied to have Emily give me the second pill.
“Mwamburi you’ve had enough of this.” She said.
“Just give me the bloody pill woman!” I said with my hand stretched.
“Hell no!”
“Come on now, I’m not a baby.”
“Yes you are.” She laughed. “I’m not telling you where it is.”
“I’m not a kid Emily stop foo…” I burped, “…ling”
“I think there is only one way you can prove you’re not a kid or amateur as you claim.”
“And how is that. I’m willing to prove anything.”
She didn’t respond with anything other than a scoff. That’s when I looked at her face seeking for her response and I saw it. It was more than just a response. You know that face ladies wear when they want something? She had that face on. It was not fully a smile and neither was it a full serious face. Her lips had become wet and her eyes glittered with slow winks from time to time. The slow winks drew energy from my soul. What she was trying to do was more contagious than it should be had I been sober. Damn, she looked beautiful!
Just so you know it was the pill and its other accomplices; akina Jack Daniel’s, Black Label, Smirnoff, shisha, passive smoking of tobacco and MJ and the likes – I grabbed her hand as if she was under arrest for looking at me as if she wants to suck blood from my neck. That’s nothing like what I’d do in my sobriety; at least in the way I knew myself then.
Wherever there was space to walk through, we walked through. We left the room like people exiting from a fire outbreak. We dragged each other through hallways aimlessly. Sometimes tripping and falling on things sanity could never allow and laughed at ourselves.
There was something inside me burning like an inferno. I don’t know why I felt that way. We reached some corner and as we turned to ask each other where we were going, our eyes locked. That’s when it clicked. It was her. She was the reason for the inferno inside me. I was so damn high, but my eyes were only sober when I looked into hers. I saw something and I felt something. We had a connection.

****

“Mwamburi please tell me you kissed her!” I said with hands at the back of my head.
“Well,” he laughed.
“Come on don’t just ‘well’ me here man, tell me! Aki I will break an egg on your head if you tell me you blew that one!”
“Okay fine yes I did kiss her.” He was blushing. Mjango reading this, for the first time in this story, Mwamburi blushes!
“Go order a beef burger I will pay. You deserve even more than a beef burger. You’re the man Mwamburi!” I said while trying not to punch the table. We already earned a reputation in that café and it would be absurd to ruin that.
“That’s even a tip of the iceberg bro,” Mwamburi said.
I relaxed, “Oh there’s more to the man. Okay, let’s hear.”

****

Our lips slowly let go and when our eyes opened, I saw it; she could not believe that had just happened. Neither could I. I felt like there was a circus going on inside me.
The question at the time was where we would go.
“I know just the place.” She said and began to run while pulling my hand.
She called a taxi and in no time we were on the road to Rongai. Yea, she stays in Rongai.
“Wow! I can’t feel my entire body. That was one hell of a…” then she turned, grabbed my collar and smacked me with a kiss. This was her way of giving me her version of a kiss and confirming that she? She was glad I didn’t blow the moment back there. That I wasn’t so much of an amateur after all. Okay, I assumed that part.
(Now I’m not repeating my sermon on the perfect kiss. You mjangos should have already read it by now and spread it the uttermost conversations with your baes and role-playing baes. I know you have them: part-time ‘lovers’ for the cold nights and the Netflix movies.)
The taxi driver didn’t seem to mind. I’d even be surprised if he did mind since we all know they have seen more than is allowed on TV while on their designated jobs at night especially.
Nobody was saying anything as such as we ascended the stairs of the flats. It was all laughter and calling each other funny names. My head was spinning so bad. I felt like I would pass out any time from then.
The main door to her one bedroom house shut behind her. She turned. I had already released all my weight on her couch. I couldn’t stand any more. But that was subject to change. She looked at me, I looked at her. Where the energy to stand came from, I do not know. We met halfway. Both of us unleashed our energies and pounced on each other as if bombs had gone off behind us.
She was between my arms and I was between hers. Lips were moving but not in the manner to talk. Hands were on each other but not in the manner to just hold. We fell on the couch. I can’t remember what I was saying but she just ordered me to shut up and take off her clothes. Oh yes, I was saying it was hot. My body was heating up. That was the pill beginning to kick in officially. But she could hear none of that. Or maybe she did because she was now fighting to undo my shirt and strip me off of everything that would be a hindrance to the passion that was longing to be satisfied. You bet my heart was racing because I had never been in such a hot situation.
Although not so actively, but I could hear my conscience acknowledge that it was finally about to happen. For the first time in my history, I was going to get laid! Not really a dream come true but it was among the shots this life I had chosen was offering. And I? I was going to take it!
Si we continue next week mjango?