Anu's world was a small, clean room of faith. For eighteen years, she had been the daughter of the Pentecostal Lighthouse—a prayer warrior, a chorister whose voice lifted perfectly on the high notes of "My Redeemer Liveth," a keeper of the flock. Her life was a steady rhythm of devotionals, vigils, and the stern, loving guidance of her Auntie Ireti, who had raised her after her parents' passing. Her identity was a holy armour, polished daily: modest, disciplined, saved.
The University of Ife, when the admission letter came, was more than a school. It was a doorway. A rumour of a self she had never met. On the day she left her auntie's Lagos flat, the air was thick with prayer and palm oil scent. "Remember, Anu," Auntie Ireti said, her hands firmly on Anu's shoulders, "your body is a temple. Not a marketplace. The campus is a battlefield. Do not remove your armour."
The journey to Ile-Ife felt like crossing into a different country. The familiar Pentecostal posters gave way to endless green, then the ancient, rolling hills of the Yoruba heartland. With every mile, a tightness in her chest—the tightness of being constantly seen and known as the holy girl—began to ease.
Her room in Moremi Hall was stark and smelled of disinfectant. Her roommate, Bimpe, was a shockwave. She arrived with a suitcase of Lagos confidence, skin-tight jeans, and a laugh that echoed. Her side of the room was instantly colonized by posters of foreign rappers and a sleek laptop.
That first night, silence was a stranger. New sounds filtered in—generators, distant music, a freedom that was almost audible. Anu lay rigid on her bottom bunk, her well-thumbed Bible a comforting weight on her chest, trying to pray but finding only the echo of her own racing thoughts.
"Abi you don dey sleep?" Bimpe's voice sliced through the dark, bright with mischief.
"Not yet,"Anu murmured.
"Good.You need to see something. Wake up your life."
A cold, blue light erupted from Bimpe's laptop, painting the concrete walls ghostly. A magnetic, shameful curiosity pulled Anu. She leaned over the edge of her bunk, peering down.
What she saw was an annihilation.
The video was pristine, graphic, and left nothing to the holy imagination she possessed. A woman, a stranger with bold eyes and a body that seemed carved from audacity, filled the screen. She was in a lavish, impersonal bedroom. Then a man entered. What followed was a raw, explicit study of coupling. It was not a suggestion, not a whispered sin. It was a clinical, close-up spectacle.
Anu saw everything. The arch of a spine, the grasp of hands, the slick fusion of skin. The camera lingered—on a mouth, on the point of joining, on the contorted expressions of a pleasure that looked like agony. The sounds were the worst part. Guttural, unfiltered, a language of pure physical hunger. This was not the "becoming one flesh" from Genesis. This was bodies as separate, colliding instruments. The woman was not passive; she commanded, she moved, she took. She used her body like a weapon and a welcome, all at once.
A tremor started deep in Anu's core. Her breath vanished. Her Bible, forgotten, slipped from her chest. This was not the dark, shameful pit she'd been warned about. This was lit up. It was power. It was a terrifying kind of freedom. A single, seismic thought rewired her mind: A body can be this. A body can do this. It can be a site of pure transaction, of naked power, of a feeling so intense it twists the face.
The video played on, scene after graphic scene, a brutal and fascinating manual. When Bimpe finally clicked the laptop shut, the darkness that returned was absolute and profoundly changed. It hummed. The small room now held a secret too big for its walls.
Anu fell back onto her pillow, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. The temple her auntie spoke of felt like an empty, echoing hall. The armour felt like a cage. And from beneath it, from a place she never knew she housed, a new, raw nerve was exposed. It throbbed with a deafening question—not of morality, but of sensation.
What does that feel like?
The chorister was mute. The prayer warrior, disarmed. Lying in the dark, Anu felt the holy girl from Lagos recede, like a tide going out. On the new, barren shore of herself, something else was waking up. Hungry. Curious