Kahumbu had shown enthusiasm for jogging, she really wanted to start keeping fit, but she had no motivation for it. Naturally, she's a born pessimist. She always had misplaced excuses to procrastinate.
She's quite a modern woman in a conservative society. She's a Kenyan living in the suburbs of the metropolitan area of Nairobi. People in her neighborhood were a sexist civilization. There were traditional customs on social, behavioral conduct on how the population carried itself, in variation to gender. So, taking counsel of the years, at her age wearing leggings for a jog in public was impractical. It was completely awkward and she could not make any sense of it.
Kahumbu is in her early 40's and was never married. It was one of those choices in her life that she couldn't fathom if she was right or wrong. Normally, she didn't like thinking about it. Over time she has had a faded taste for men.
She's a single mom to an adult son to whom she down-played efforts to let him fly off the nest. She was covetous of him and would find herself maliciously manipulative, if that need arose to keep him home. It was her way of cushioning herself against parental emptiness nest syndrome.
Kahumbu was an orthopedic clinician at the prime of her career. The chapter that followed immediately after college was very challenging, her admission into the corporate world was diffused in serial accounts of setbacks. Her trade was one dominated by men and unlike present times, a job hunt was an engagement filled with harassment, inequality and misogyny. The empowerment for women was not guided on merit, it was either appraised through buyouts in bribery or demands in sexual favors in exchange for employment. The latter was common and with it came bedevilment for those who acceded to it.
Itange; her son had no father or rather his dad was a deadbeat parent. His father was her former boss; 22 years ago and whom also fired her unceremoniously after she exhibited early pregnancy discomfitures. That was her penance for acquiescence to sexual coercion; a phase in her life that made her dissociate from her sense of self which resulted from both memory and identity disturbances. The lessons she learnt from experiences distilled from stereotyped prejudice and discrimination against women, stemmed her to radical feminism for reasons construed in both personal convictions and self acceptance, subsequently making her lack any enticement to accommodate a man.
She had a few entanglements in her life, fewer than most unmarried women her age. Every previous relationship being a different experience bound in prior infatuations followed by frustrations that overcame it's merit finally falling apart. Some ended in happy endings, but still not satisfactory enough to let her settle down. In all conscience or rather to focus on parenting, she took a break from courting men.
* * * *
It was on a Saturday evening, she was rummaging her house for an outfit to jog in. It was a tedious task in that she didn't find anything appropriate to wear among the clothes piled from an overturned wardrobe. She was not one who wore trousers often and the only pair that came close was a bell bottomed jeans that she owned.
Itange was seated next to her and he refuted that Idea. She also knew she couldn't jog in them; they would make her fall down.
"Mum, how do you expect to jog in those?" He asked, rhetorically.
She resigned to hold off having momentarily ran out of options. Suddenly, he dashed out of her bedroom as she was placing items back in the wardrobe. He was quick and she didn't realize that he was gone until he came back with a labored breathing. He was holding his joggers.
Kahumbu looked backwards to where he stood, startled by the thinking of her son. She smirked and asked.
"Do you intend that I...?" She paused. "Ha-ha, it can't be." She busted out quite loudly.
Despite being liberal and contemptuous of ethnic norms, she was still reserved to cultural relativism. It was taboo for mothers to share clothing with sons, notably those past adolescence.
"C'mon! I rarely wore it; it's fairly new." He tried to sound convincing.
"Mh-hmm." She nodded, thinking out loud, affirmatively.
From a revised mind-set, she opted to keep a contemporary perspective. Moreover, it was more of gratuity than sharing.
Itange stepped closer to her, holding those joggers against her waistline, stretching them down-along to her foot ankle. It was surely fitting.
"It's yours now; my gift to you!"
"Ooh-la-la! Okay."
She felt excited, the excitement one feels in redeeming hope. Finally, she had found an outfit to exercise in.
She took the said joggers, unpredictably lifting her polka dotted dress above to her thighs to wear them. The hem of her dress was inches below her butt, swinging loosely while she fitted in. As she pulled the joggers' elastic waistband up above her hips to the waist, her underwear became more revealing. Her panties were white, tightly held to her pelvis revealing a camel toe with a wet lining along her 'sandal gap'.
Itange felt a cold chill run down his spine as his barrel chest expanded without exhalation. She seemed unconscious of his presence as he stood before her. Kahumbu didn't realize her misgivings sooner as she reasonably thought her dress buffered that view from her son. She happened to have unknowingly underestimated that moment until she saw her son's face frowned. His eyes had become watery, a natural involuntary reaction for being nonplussed.
"Ew! No-o-o-o...tell me you didn't see that, uhm?" She inquired of him, pointing timidly through the gap between her legs, making it emphatically specific on her reference.
"Drop it mama!." He exclaimed. "It was just a white flash."
"Aw!" She uttered in a tone to gist apathy.
Inwardly, she felt overpowered and hushed, chiding herself to a shied low self esteem.
The next morning she rose from bed quite early than normal. She intended to make a full circuit before the neighborhood roused. After much convincing, she was to start exercising with her son for being a pair, made her feel secure in the partial penumbra of the dark-gray clouds of that dawn.
She wore the same joggers Itange gave her with a sleeveless tank top. To keep comfortable and reduce heat stress, she ought not put on a bra. Her breasts felt heavy, having a wide-set with a curvature lifting up against gravity to show her nipples in a bony protrusion through her top.
The two met in the corridor leading to the gate and so they begun. Itange was swifter than her. He would sprint, run and at times turn around and jog backwards for her to catch up with him.
Kahumbu's pace was fairly steady; short, slow steps, but she was determined to complete the lap. She was not certain how long she had to carry on but rather drew inspiration from her pacesetter; Itange, until her body would take no more.
The terrain was rugged. It was not a conventional track, but rather, a cross-country trail with not direct routes. The landscape was rocky strewn with dewed Rhodes grass. Every end of the flight phase of her stride was a thud made against the hard ground as she ran, sending shock waves back to her feet. A paresthesia prickling from a nerve compression gave in to neuropathic pain which deterred her endurance.
She suddenly stopped to recollect, standing with her arms supported on her knees. A shortness of breath had nearly knocked her down. She wheezed loudly as her lungs constricted. From her timer, she was an hour and half into the run.
Itange reversed to come to her aid. He pulled her across the path, through a short thicket and made her sit on a weathered sedimentary rock. She became herself once more, calming down as she rested. To fritter away time and elude boredom, they contrived on gossip chit-chat, made flattery and borrowed motivation from each other as they basked in the rising sun. They both laughed at her imperfections as she admitted that running was a strenuous activity that her small fragile heart could not assimilate easily. She was so forthright about her shortcomings, that it was hard to chastise her.
It was time to return home. They had a long walk ahead of them. She declined to run back; it was an insurmountable task to pace herself to run or jog in the glare of the morning sun. The surrounding area was desolated but she knew it would not be for long. She didn't intend for any of her neighbors to see her dressed the way she did; kindred as an unruly gamine.
As she stood up, she felt an involuntary convulsive movement with a soft numbing sensation on her jutting lower abdomen. The urge to relieve herself was rapidly building up and she was definite she would not reach home in her condition. The main road was still deserted and it acquainted a chance that she was not about to lose.
"Itange!" She called. "Watch the road for me please."
Her request was ambiguous to him, but as he looked back to where she was, he now understood her reason.
Kahumbu was about to squat, her thumbs on both hands were deeply sunk into the inner elastic waistband of her panties, plugged against that of her joggers as she pushed down in a twin inclusion of both garments in coherence.
She was not quick in motion, it was not a free fall. Those joggers were skin-tight along the concavities of her hip-lengths. It was a man's clothing and was unconventionally structured in her body as a woman.
As she repressed down in a jagged cyclic motility, Itange sunk in an emotional confliction against the sense to refrain. The window to digest an aptitude for responsibility for what he was about to see swiftly lost as she held her panties crossed along her knees. The scene of her thighs with a bared groin made him yield to temptation.
Kahumbu was naive to her surroundings, neither mindful, nor bothered to her unintentional infliction of emotional distress to her son. She strode her feet, shoulder width apart, squatting down with her hips below the knees with a following of a soft pour. He watched as a yellow stream of urine left between the two mounds of her labia, steaming in a dipping intonated whistle as it hit the ground with a splash. The moment became so intense for him. It arose an emotional state that made him lose perception for being sexually excited towards her as a woman.
She looked over to where he stood, to insist on him to keep to the task that their surroundings were still empty with no other road users around, but to her astonishment, she locked eyes with him.
"You can't be peeping at your mum, sincerely." She scolded, short of expectation.
