I Took a Leave of Absence and Crossed the Ocean Alone

When I tell people about it now, years later, they get uncomfortable. Not because of what I did, but because of how naturally I talk about it. But that is the only honest way to tell it: I was thirty-four, had recently gone through a breakup that had left me dried out inside, and had a job where I had been slowly burning out for far too long without realizing it. One ordinary morning, staring at my computer screen, I understood that if I didn’t leave right then, I never would.

I asked for a year’s leave of absence. My boss asked me if I was sure. I absolutely wasn’t, and that was why I signed.

I chose a volunteer program in a rural region of West Africa. I would teach English to boys and girls from the villages, in a school with adobe walls and a corrugated-metal roof. I sold almost everything I owned, put the rest in storage, and boarded a plane with one suitcase and the feeling that I was diving into a swimming pool without knowing whether there was any water in it.

***

The village had a name I still don’t know how to spell properly. It was three hours along a dirt track from the nearest city, surrounded by acacia trees and a heat that sank into your bones. They put me up in a small whitewashed house, with a hammock on the porch and an older woman who cooked me rice and fish and scolded me in her language whenever I skipped my afternoon nap.

The first few days were pure survival. The language, the water, the dust, the insects. But something inside me began to loosen. In Europe I had lived by counting the minutes; there, time was something else, broader and slower, and for the first time in years I slept straight through the night. Also, for the first time in years, I woke up with my hand between my thighs, soaked, without remembering whom I had been dreaming about.

I met Bakari in the third week. He was the son of the head of one of the clans, a man my age, tall, broad-backed, with enormous hands that looked capable of splitting firewood without an ax. He came to the school to repair a roof beam and stayed to watch me teach, leaning against the doorframe without asking permission, wearing a half smile that made me lose my place in the sentence. I couldn’t help looking at the bulge outlined beneath his light-colored trousers, and he noticed, and he didn’t move.

—You teach well —he told me afterward, in clumsy but confident English—. The children listen to you.

—They talk more than they listen —I replied.

—Like you —he said, and left before I could find an answer.

***

It didn’t take me long to realize I was looking for him. I invented excuses to walk past his house, wore the only decent blouse I had brought, laughed too loudly whenever he was nearby. I was thirty-four and behaving like a teenager, and the worst part was that I loved it. At night, with the fan buzzing and my panties pushed aside, I touched my pussy thinking about him, about those huge hands opening my legs, and came biting the pillow so the woman sleeping in the next room wouldn’t hear me.

One night, after a harvest festival, we walked back together. The moon was so low it seemed to hang from the branches. He barely said a word. He stopped in the middle of the path, put one hand on the back of my neck, and kissed me with a calmness that completely disarmed me. I had expected urgency and found patience instead, and that was a thousand times more dangerous. His other hand slid down my back, squeezed my ass through my skirt, and pulled me against him, and I could feel his hard cock pressing into my belly, thick and insistent, like a promise that needed no translation.

That night he didn’t come into the house with me. He did the next night, when I could no longer think about anything else.

I remember it with a clarity that surprises me. The hammock creaking, the heat pressing our skin together, his body covering mine until it blocked out the moonlight. He wasn’t in a hurry about anything. He undressed me slowly, looking at me as if he wanted to memorize me. He sucked my nipples one at a time, unhurriedly, tugging with his teeth until a long moan escaped me and he silenced it with his mouth. He moved down my belly, kissing me calmly, opened my legs with those enormous hands, and buried his face between my thighs like a man dying of thirst. He ate my pussy slowly, his broad, hot tongue licking me from bottom to top, stopping at my clitoris to suck it until I arched my back and squeezed his head with both hands. He slid two fingers inside me and kept sucking, and I came in his mouth, biting my lips, my legs trembling and my whole body soaked.

When I finally felt him inside me, I had to bite my hand to keep from waking half the village. He pushed all the way in with one slow, incredibly deep thrust, right to the bottom, and stayed still for a second, letting me feel what he was. He was thick and long, and filled me in a way I had never felt before. He was slow at first, deep, each thrust taking me up another step, and then less and less slow, until I stopped being polite, dug my nails into his back, and begged him in my language for things he didn’t understand but knew how to do anyway. He fucked me on my back, turned me over and fucked me on all fours, holding my hips, then lay underneath me and made me ride him while he squeezed my tits with both hands. I came twice more before he spilled inside me with a muffled growl against my neck, his cock throbbing, his hot cum filling me until it overflowed down my thighs.

He called me strong woman in his language. It took me weeks to understand that, to him, it was the greatest compliment.

***

For almost five months I was his and he was mine, or so I thought. Bakari came every night he could. I learned to cook what he liked, learned words from his language that no manual teaches, learned how to argue with a look. I also learned to suck his cock the way he liked it, kneeling between his legs on the porch while the village slept, taking it all the way down until he came in my mouth and I swallowed everything while he watched me with a mixture of amazement and pride. I began to seriously consider staying. Leaving Europe, my leave of absence, my entire life behind, and bearing his children beneath those acacia trees.

But I was exactly what he wanted at night and what he couldn’t stand during the day. A woman who had opinions, who traveled alone, who didn’t lower her head. In his world, that was a flaw to correct, not a virtue to admire.

—You can’t go to the city by yourself —he told me one afternoon, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

—I’ve been going everywhere alone for twenty years.

—Not here.

The arguments became more frequent than the caresses. He wanted me indoors, quiet, waiting for him. And the tighter he held on, the more the feelings I’d had for him began to fade inside me. Desire doesn’t die all at once; it drains away drop by drop, until one night you realize that nothing trembles inside you anymore when you see him come in, and your pussy doesn’t get wet when he puts his hand on you.

***

Bakari’s father, Demba, was the complete opposite of his son. Older, with a graying beard, and a calmness that didn’t need to prove anything. He spoke polished French, had traveled when he was young, and with me he talked about things that bored Bakari: books, distant cities, why a woman would cross half the world to teach in a village.

I didn’t seek him out, or so I still tell myself. But there was a rainy afternoon, one of those when the sky suddenly collapses and the world shrinks to a porch, when we were left alone. He looked at me differently. I held his gaze longer than I should have. His hand, calloused and large like his son’s but more patient, settled on my knee and moved up the inside of my thigh with a slowness that made me close my eyes. When he touched me over my panties, they were already soaked, and he felt it, and smiled without saying anything.

Demba was measured where his son was fire. He led me inside without hurrying, closed the door, sat me on the edge of the mat, and knelt in front of me. He pulled my panties off with his teeth, laughing softly at himself, and opened my legs with those broad hands. He licked my pussy with a craftsman’s patience, his tongue moving in and out, rising to my clitoris and descending again, without hurry, as if he had all day. I grabbed his head and came against his mouth, unable to keep quiet, the rain muffling my moans against the corrugated roof.

He undressed slowly, and I was surprised by how well preserved he was, by that thick, still-hard cock rising between his legs. He took his time, read me as if I were one of his books, asking me with his hands before going on. He lay me down, climbed on top of me, and eased it inside inch by inch, looking into my eyes the whole time, until he was fully inside. He began to move slowly and deeply, rocking in a way that made me moan softly each time he reached the bottom. Then he asked me with his hands to climb on top, and let me set the pace.

I rode him on the mat while the rain pounded the metal roof, shameless, in control of every movement for once. I mounted his cock and lowered myself slowly, all the way down, tearing a hoarse moan from him. I began moving back and forth, bracing my hands on his chest, feeling him scrape against my clitoris with every rock. He put his hands on my hips and let me set the rhythm, watching me the entire time with a serene smile I have never seen on anyone else. I bounced on him faster, feeling his cock slide all the way in with every descent, my tits bouncing, sweat running down my chest onto his. I came on top of him, squeezing his cock with my pussy, trembling, and he managed a few more thrusts from below, gripped my hips tightly, and came inside me with a long growl, his hot cum rising inside me.

We didn’t take precautions out of carelessness; I was still on the pill from Europe, and that gave me a sense of security I didn’t appreciate at the time.

Bakari found us. I won’t embellish it: he opened the door at the worst possible moment and stood petrified for one second that lasted a century. I was still astride his father, his cock inside me and his cum dripping down my thighs, and I didn’t even have time to cover myself. Then came the shouting, the words I didn’t understand but didn’t need to, and the next morning they made it clear that I had to leave the village.

***

I settled in the city, in a rented room above a mechanic’s shop, with a fan that made more noise than wind. I could have gone back to Europe. I still had months left on my leave and an open-ended ticket. I didn’t go back.

Because something in me had changed, and I didn’t want it to change back. The burned-out woman who had stared at the computer screen had been left on another continent, and the woman who had replaced her wanted to keep discovering herself.

The city was noisy, dirty, alive, full of people who looked at me curiously and men who approached with a mixture of boldness and courtesy that didn’t exist in my country. I stopped counting and started enjoying myself.

There was a musician who played in a bar by the harbor and sang me things I didn’t understand until he translated them for me in bed. I fucked him the first night, against the wall of the little room he had above the bar, my skirt hiked up to my waist and my panties hanging from one ankle. He had a guitarist’s long fingers and knew how to use them: he slid them into my pussy while biting my neck, and when I couldn’t take any more he turned me around, made me brace my hands against the wall, and shoved his cock into me, fucking me standing up, his hands squeezing my tits beneath my blouse, until I came moaning his name out loud.

There was a university professor, serious and shy, who loosened up when the light went out. In his office, with the door locked and the air conditioning barely working, he became someone else. He sat me on the edge of his desk, opened my legs, and ate my pussy with a hunger that didn’t suit him at all, while I knocked the papers digging into my ass onto the floor. He fucked me right there, between books and folders, moving slowly so we wouldn’t make noise, covering my mouth with his hand when I came so no one in the hallway would hear me.

There was a fisherman with rough hands who smelled of salt and sunlight and treated me as if I were the best day of his week. He took me to his boat moored at the dock, late at night, and fucked me on the wet nets while the water slapped against the hull. He had a short, thick cock and used it with the energy of a young animal, pounding me without pause, turning me over, putting me on all fours, fucking me from behind while gripping my hair until he came on my ass with a growl and I burst out laughing at the star-filled sky.

I didn’t fall in love with any of them, and that was precisely the point. For the first time in my life, sex didn’t come with an emotional contract attached, or the question of whether it was going anywhere. It went to bed, and bed was enough.

***

Sometimes I wonder if I regret it. The honest answer is no. I went back to Europe after the year was over, returned to my job, cut my hair, bought myself a new coat, and no one at the office noticed the difference. But inside, I was no longer the same, and you can’t see that in a coat.

I learned that desire isn’t something you have to ask permission to have. I learned that you can love a man and still refuse to be his shadow. I learned that freedom comes at a high price—it cost me a village, a love, and the gaze of a man I hurt—and that I would still pay it again without hesitation.

Much later, I heard that Bakari had married a woman from his clan, quiet and young, exactly the kind of wife he had always wanted. I hope he is happy. I never heard anything else about Demba, and I prefer to keep his smile beneath the rain and the memory of his cock inside me while the sky fell to pieces.

I tell this without shame because it was the best year of my life, the freest, the one that gave me back to myself. I crossed an ocean alone to teach English to some children, and in the end I was the one who learned the only lesson that mattered: that a woman’s body is also a country, and no one has the right to place borders on it except herself.