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At first Bashir thought his father was merely angry—that he couldn’t possibly mean those words. But then his father turned and left his suites, calling for the guards. Bashir had been unable to believe his ears—his father was calling him an intruder, telling the guards to evict him and take him to the closest bus stop and leave him there. It was all Bashir could do to grab his laptop, phone, and the bag that Misha had packed for him, before the guards grabbed him and dragged him out and into the back of a Land Rover. They began to rattle over the dusty strip of asphalt.
Ordinarily Bashir had a casual relationship with the guards—they knew who he was, and that he didn’t like being saluted or groveled at. “If you need to tell me something, just tell me,” he’d frequently tell them. “I may be royal but I promise you, my ears won’t bleed if you tell me something terrible. Even if it is about my father.” That last sentence frequently left them in fits of laughter, and they’d spent whole afternoons griping about his father.
But how quickly this camaraderie vanished. The guards that left him at the bus stop—guards he’d frequently played cards with and chatted about girls with—were stone-faced and silent as they stopped, pulled him and his belongings out. They didn’t even look back or wave him good-bye. For some reason that hurt more than being kicked out of his home.
He’d sat at the bus stop—a little plexiglass shelter with a too-narrow-for-comfort stool in the literal middle of the desert three miles from anywhere. The bus took over an hour to arrive, but he never remembered how he’d spent that hour. His mind was a complete blank. Every time he tried to think of what to do next he’d fall into a stunned stupor again, so that when he finally saw the bus approaching it felt oddly like waking up. It was something to focus on, something more substantial than the nebulous dread that was clouding his mind, at any rate.
The coughing, wheezing bus that was spewing a noxious cloud of gas responsible for the deaths of at least five polar bears by global warming creaked to a stop thirty feet too late. Whatever optimism the sight of the bus had given him was quickly dispelled as he gathered together his things and approached the bus. The inside stank of piss and shit and was still stuffy from the heat of the day.
“Five dinari,” the driver said, when he’d said he was going to Manama.
He looked in his wallet—and the first of his problems came to light: he had no cash on him. Shame burned him—he’d never not been able to pay for the things he’d wanted—and for a moment his mind went blank as he fought back the terror at the thought of having to spend the night at the bus stop—or forever. Eventually he was able to convince the driver that Melinda had five dinari—that he could call her and she’d meet him in Manama with the money. The driver scowled but let him on, grumbling about how terrible rich people were. The other people on the bus—mostly women, some men—and one chicken farmer, apparently, who had a contraption with three cages, each holding two fat chickens—stared at him, their faces blank, their eyes resentful. Or maybe it was just that he was imagining things. I am the prince of Bahrain, he wanted to shout to the world. But the words would not come—because for all he knew his father was striking his presence from everything in the palace. I was the prince of Bahrain. Somehow that only made him sad.
Melinda, thankfully, managed to meet the driver, as she’d promised. She paid the five dinari, smiling ruefully at Bashir as she did so. “Thanks,” he’d said, as they got into her car.
“You don’t use much cash,” she observed.
“Never had to,” he’d said.
Now, sitting on the floor of her apartment, looking out over the sparkling city below them, the emotions came to him, hitting him like in waves, one after another—anger, despair, dread, fear. Anger that his father could still be so close-minded in the twenty-first century, despair that he was twenty-eight and had no idea how or if he could survive in the world, dread anticipating a life where every cent would have to be scraped from the gutters his own hands, fear that that wouldn’t be enough. He wasn’t stupid. He’d read the papers, he knew how hard it could be for a man like him.
“Then maybe we should go to London,” said Melinda. “The jobs are there.”
“I just opened my flat for renting, and sold my car,” he said. “Misha is there picking up my personal effects. If my father hasn’t ordered him back to Bahrain already.”
“That’s really bollocks,” she said.
“You have no idea,” he said. “I’ve lost everything I ever had, in three minutes.” Suddenly he laughed—it wasn’t really his, and part of him had known this all along.
“You think your father is really going to cut you off?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea what he’s going to do,” he said. “He could decide to forgive me tomorrow, or never.”
She put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “You should have just agreed,” she said. “I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
“I know,” he said. “And part of me is kicking myself for being so obstinate. But I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself if I had.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t,” she said, kissing him.
“Even if it means I’ll be a deadbeat boyfriend?” he asked, smiling. Making a joke of it was the only way he could keep his sanity right now, with the swirling mess of muddy emotions in his blood.
“I’m going to say ‘yes’,” she said, pushing him down onto the floor. “Because even though you’ve never held a job before, I think—” she began to unbutton his shirt, her hands kissing his bare chest like flowers, cool and pale. “I think that you can’t not want to pull your own weight. I think you’ll eventually be glad to be out from under your father’s thumb. We’ll spite him with our happiness.”
It was the best way to get revenge on his father for being so cold as to kick him out like that—he couldn’t refute that. And her hands running up his body felt so good—and her perfume, a blend of jasmine and lilacs, accented the heady scent of her, the delicate scent of her skin, soft and soothing to his mind and body. Despite the turmoil of the night, he could feel the fires of desire begin to glow within him. “You’re a good man,” she whispered. “That’s all that matters.”
“How do you know I’m good?” he asked, as she undressed before him, her body twisting and curving as she slipped out of the confines of her dress. The lights were dim, and the windows were open to the desert chill, which made goose pimples spring out on her skin, making her nipples stand up. He reached for her breast, and felt her heart beating, sending its pulsing shivers through the softness and into his hands. “We barely know each other.”
“I know you’re hurting,” she said. “I know you called me when you needed help. I know that I want you in a way that I’ve never wanted a man before.”
He reached up and pressed a kiss against her throat while his fingers toyed with the buds of her nipples. She shuddered, pressing her body against his. “I want to make you happy,” she whispered, “and when your father decides to look you up, whether it’s a week or a year or a century from now, I want him to see you with real smile on your face, and real joy in your heart, when you tell him this was worth every cent of the fortune you gave up.”
Her conviction was contagious. Of course we can, he found himself thinking, as he found her hips with his hands. The fiery warmth deep in his guts, that had been burning quietly as they kissed and groped each other, grew to a roaring flame as he felt her close around him, the slick hot wetness tight around him, squeezing him even as he stretched her. His blood began to run hot with need.
The boundaries between his body and hers dissolved—where their skin touched, there was no him and her, only a sensation of heat and desire, raw and primal, mingling, and their bodies pulsed together, and the flames that had been stoked began to consume him. The urgency was there again, the pressure was there, the need was there—and it felt like she was sending a pulse of pure desire through his hands straight into his core every time he touched her. The need—it was almost too much.
It was too much—the sweet, sweet, pleasure of release washed over him, and the flames of desire suddenly melted into liquid satisfaction. Her voice, as she cried out above him, seemed far away—the look in her eyes was distant, and he slipped into the sweet, soft darkness with her body folded around his like a cloak of happiness.
When he woke again, he found that they were curled up, face-to-face, on the floor. She was still asleep, her body soft and slack. He touched her face. She smiled at him, and he understood, then, that he hadn’t chosen to be with her instead of his father’s pawn. He already was with her—she was already a part of him—it was just a matter of realizing it.
