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—how sweet the release was? How perfectly the heat of their bodies countered the coolness of the air? Did she know, as the release came, how beautiful the whole thing was? How he felt at one with the universe in that moment? That he could feel each and every last grain of sand on the beach—that for a moment he was every last grain of sand, he was every last star, casting their twinkling glows down upon them, celebrating their union? This was perfection—
This was love.
***
“Come see me tomorrow,” she said, when he took her back to her apartment.
“You can come with me,” he said. “You won’t need to go through immigration, you know?”
She smiled sadly and shook her head. “I don’t want to go back to the UK,” she said. “There’s too many bad memories there.”
For the second time, he was tempted to ask her what she meant, with bad memories. But he didn’t want to push his luck just yet. “Well, we can make new ones, together. Drive them out.”
Melinda offered him a cup of tea, but they both knew that it was just a polite gesture at this time of night. He would have to go back, now—he might be a man of twenty-eight but he did need to return his father’s car and reassure the man that he had not been out whoring and drinking. It was strange, he thought as he got back in the car, how whoring and drinking seemed almost inconsequential in Amsterdam, but when he was with Melinda, it felt like an insult to call it merely “whoring and drinking”. They’d shared something real, a connection. It wasn’t just sex anymore. It was—
“Love,” he breathed, as he drove back to the royal palace.
The valet nearly wet himself with relief when he showed up at the garage with the Bugatti—intact, without a scratch, as he’d promised. He could understand why the man had been so nervous: some twenty years ago, his older brother Malakar had taken their father’s new Ferrari 360 for a ride. Malakar had driven the older Ferrari Datyona—the one with “only” 350 peak horsepower—without incident several times and he’d assumed that the newer one was much the same. The car had not ended well—and neither had Malakar, who’d been forced to buy their father a new one. It meant that Malakar had had to go for three years with just half of his trust money.
Bashir couldn’t help but grin as he recalled the years Malakar had spent grumbling about having to pay their father back. He’d had to chauffeur his brother around during most of those three years, and they’d become close. There was something about driving that invited them to open their hearts to each other. It was during these rides that he’d first heard about love and duty, honor and loyalty—not as part of a lecture being given by his father, but from one brother being “requested” to marry someone he barely knew to another. Bashir would have shared the same fate except for the fact that he was the baby and his mother had insisted that he be free to choose who he wanted to marry—a fact that no doubt rankled his older siblings.
At that time, it’d seemed fair to him—he was so far down the chain of succession, and his portion of the trust fund was the smallest, by far. The only luxury he’d been afforded was having Misha with him in London, and that was mostly because his father wished to “protect his investment”, which was what he considered Bahshir’s degree.
But now, now that he’d fallen head-over-heels in love with Melinda, he finally understood the enormity of the privilege that had been extended to him. He could go on dates with her, get to know her without the legal confines of marriage, have a chance to discover what made him happy. For someone whose life so far had been muddling along, doing stuff because he could and because it seemed interesting, to suddenly have a chance to discover who he truly was inside was like waking up one day to discover that the sun rose in the west.
He needed to talk about this. He wanted to find Miriam and ask her what she thought of it all—but he didn’t think she’d be willing to see him after he told her that he’d been out on a date with a caterer. His father—well, he could forget talking with him. Marrying the woman who’d once threatened to destroy their family was not indicative of sound judgment in matters of the heart.
Bashir took off his shoes and crept through the house silently in his socks. He didn’t want to run into his father or Alya, and Miriam would probably be asleep by now. The only people that were awake at this hour were the guards, and he didn’t need one of them accidentally sounding the alarms.
He made it to his suite unnoticed, and stepped inside, sighing with relief. He turned on the lights—
“You’re late,” said Misha.
Bashir jumped. He had not expected to see him in his suite, but there was the bodyguard, as immovable and as stone-like as ever. Has he been sitting in the dark, waiting for me to come home? Bashir hung up his jacket. “Didn’t one of the servants set you up in the guest quarters?” he asked.
“Yes, and it’s quite nice,” Misha said. “But your father was worried about you.”
“So worried he sent you to ask if I was all right?” Bashir asked, pointedly, wondering why his father seemed to think that Misha was apparently better at being a father than he was.
“You’ve made it clear to him that you want nothing to do with him,” said Misha. “He’s acceded to your wishes, and so sends me instead.”
Bashir felt the flush of humiliation burning hot in his cheeks. He’d been caught in a trap of his own making. “Well, I’m late, then,” he said. “Weren’t you following me? Surely you knew what I was doing.” And I hope you enjoyed the show, jerk.
“Whether I know what you were up to isn’t the point,” Misha said, confirming Bashir’s suspicions that he’d been followed. He had to admire the fact that Misha had somehow managed to follow him all the way to Manama and then to Jaffa without being seen, or raising suspicions. “The point is that you were out and your father was worried.”
“If he worried about me he should have made a better choice of his second wife,” Bashir grumbled. “What’s it to you, anyway, how I spend my time? You’re still getting paid, and I still cover most of the costs you incur. Why do you care so much? Why do the people who care so much about my happiness despise me for spending my one day in Bahrain with the one woman who makes me happy?”
Misha stood up, ominously silent. He headed for the door, and then stopped and said, “We don’t despise you, sir. We envy you.” And before Bashir could say anything, he left, closing the door behind him.
Bashir undressed and sank into his bed, falling into an uneasy sleep, full of weird dream fragments: his father, standing over him, while Melinda laughed at him from below. Miriam saying, “I’m so happy for you,” while holding a beating heart, her hands covered in blood. Malakar stepping out of a smoldering wreck of a car, his clothes burned and tattered, blackness and emptiness where his eyes should have been. Bashir woke with a start at 5 am, wondering what, if anything it all meant—feeling guilty, for the first time, about how he’d treated his father.
Their flight back to London was at 8 that night, so he had twelve hours to settle everything before he returned back to his life of reading legal briefs, drinking and whoring. He got up, restless, uncomfortable with the understanding that if he wanted his father to approve of Melinda he’d need to accept Alya—not sure if he was willing to do that, but knowing that he’d have to try.
He went to the kitchen to brew himself a pot of tea. The servants wouldn’t be awake yet, and anyway there were some little rituals that were better when they were done by himself: fussing with the glasses, measuring out the tea in the strainer, finding the perfectly-sized lump of rock sugar. He liked to put the sugar under the tea leaves, so that it would sweeten the tea as he poured the water over it.
He found a tin of butter cookies—the ones that were supposedly Danish but he’d never seen them when he’d gone to Copenhagen—and he took two and went to sit by the pool. In the east, the sky was lightening, the blue-black of the night fading into the red-gray of the desert dawn. The air was cool, and for a moment he could imagine himself back in London, in his apartment, in the hours before he had to run for his classes and work on writing up his thesis.
He jumped when he realized that there was someone else sitting by the pool. It was his father. At first he thought the king had fallen asleep in the chair, but then his father turned to him, smiling sadly. “Bashir. Come, sit.”
