The Boyfriend

by Abigail Barnette

  “Yes, we will be.” Neil put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “All though, I fear I won’t be able to eat a bite. I overdid it a bit with breakfast.”

  “Me too. My BS was up already this morning.” By BS, I meant “blood sugar,” but I liked the abbreviation better. Diabetes was, in fact, BS.

  Neil gave me a look of grave concern, and I immediately regretted saying anything. It was weird. When he’d been sick with cancer, I’d wanted him to open up to me, to share everything. Though our illnesses were different, I could understand now why he hadn’t wanted to. It was boring having to think about a disease all the time.

  “What did you used to say to me?” I asked, nudging him with my elbow as we walked. “Don’t reduce me to numbers on a chart?”

  He winced. “Must every word I’ve ever spoken come back to bite me in the ass?”

  “Get better at words?” I suggested. Then, I felt like I’d jinxed us. I would probably say something incredibly stupid.

  As we reached the conservatory, I thought of the photos El-Mudad had sent us. The moment we walked through the doors, I knew immediately that the tall, slender girl with the same sand-gold skin and black hair as her father was Amal, and the girl with darker skin and long black hair down her back was Rashida. Amal wore a short, androgynous faux-hawk. Rashida had freckles across her nose and cheekbones. Amal looked more like her father, Rashida more like her mother. They spoke five languages. They played tennis. They also sat on the couch and binge-watched TV and rolled their eyes at El-Mudad’s dad jokes.

  I knew so much about them already, but they were strangers.

  El-Mudad watched us closely as we entered, and the scrutiny was almost too much to bear. “Rashida, Amal, I would like you to meet my friends, Neil and Sophie.”

  I lifted my hand in an awkward half-wave. “Hello.”

  Neil was either way more comfortable or way better at faking it. Of course, he’d parented a teenage girl before and probably wasn’t as interested in seeming cool and trying too hard. “We’re delighted to have you here. Your father—”

  “Has told you so much about us, I’m sure,” Amal interrupted with cool, sophisticated boredom. It wasn’t aggressive or mean-spirited. Just cut straight to the point. It was very...European of her.

  “And sent pictures.” I cringed internally at the Midwestern “cool mom” desperation in my voice. “He’s very proud of you both.”

  “He brags about us,” Rashida said, beaming.

  Neil chuckled. “That he does.”

  “Shall we?” El-Mudad asked, motioning to the round, marble-and-wrought-iron table set up in the space where the conservatory’s paths converged. I tried very hard not to think of what had taken place there just a few nights before.

  Neil and I sat beside each other, with Amal as his left and Rashida at my right. El-Mudad took the seat across from us, where he could carefully observe every interaction. I unfolded my napkin and spread it across my lap, building a mental bubble around myself to hopefully protect from the intense scrutiny of El-Mudad’s gaze.

  “You’ve just come from France, haven’t you, girls?” Neil asked, reaching for his water glass.

  Amal motioned for one of the servants. Without making eye contact, she said, “Champagne, please.”

  People who are more sleek and polished than me for eight-hundred, Alex.

  Neil blinked, but said nothing; I was sure he hadn’t been the type of father who would have been cool with Emma downing alcohol in the middle of the day in her teen years. But El-Mudad didn’t react as though this were strange at all.

  Rashida answered Neil’s question. “We were in Nice with our mother. She loves Nice.”

  “I don’t know why,” Amal said with a worldly sigh. “I begged her to take us to Monaco.”

  “I’ve never been to Monaco,” I blurted, mentally scolding myself to shut up. These girls had probably traveled to space in Elon Musk’s private flying saucer or something. I couldn’t compete.

  Why do you think you need to compete?

  “You should go,” Amal said, animating suddenly. “The shopping alone—“

  “Perhaps that’s why Bijou didn’t want to take you,” El-Mudad said with a laugh. “Amal can spend half a million in a day if you let her.”

  And why shouldn’t they let her? Neil was rich. Bonkers level rich. But El-Mudad had so much more and stood to inherit an even vaster fortune from his father. These girls had grown up with indulgent, globe-trotting parents who likely gave them everything they wanted.

  “And there are men in Monaco,” Rashida said casually. No matter how wealthy and well-brought-up siblings were, they would start shit with each other, apparently.

  “Rashida!” Amal gasped, and El-Mudad’s eyes cut sharply to his daughter.

  “And does your mother know about the men in Monaco?” he asked sternly. “How many times have I warned you—“

  Amal rolled her eyes and replied to him in Arabic. He responded in kind, but I could recognize “do you want to wind up like me” in any language. I had heard it from my mother enough. And El-Mudad and his ex had started their family very young. He wasn’t even forty yet, and he had two teenagers.

  We’d already heard the story of his relationship with Bijou. They’d met when he’d been at school in France, and when Amal had come along as a happy accident, El-Mudad and Bijou had married. The experience reflected Neil’s own with his daughter, though the relationship between Neil and Valerie had ended much earlier. El-Mudad had only divorced his wife a few years prior, though their marriage had been casually over before then.

  Maybe that’s why his daughters were so reluctant to make friends with us. I knew that their mother had carried on an open affair with the woman she’d eventually left El-Mudad for. Maybe Amal sensed there was such a relationship between her father and us.

  That struck me as kind of ooky, even though it was hypocritical to think so. I couldn’t be all gung-ho on the polyamorous life and judgmental about involving children in poly families. That was unfair.

  “I’m sorry,” El-Mudad quickly apologized. “Amal, let’s not fight in front of Neil and Sophie. We’re guests here.”

  Neil waved everything away. “I had a daughter of my own. I remember the days of worrying about chasing men away.”

  Yeah, like your son-in-law, I wanted to joke, but I couldn’t. We weren’t at the joking stage yet.

  “Had?” Rashida asked curiously.

  Neil nodded and kept his tone carefully neutral, probably so he wouldn’t scare her away from asking him things in the future. “She died three years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Amal said, and it was genuine, not some cool affectation.

  “That’s why Sophie and Neil care for their granddaughter,” El-Mudad reminded them. “I’ve shown you pictures of Olivia.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have a granddaughter,” Rashida said, eying me suspiciously.

  “I’m thirty,” I said with a shrug. “Neil is older.”

  “So, you’re thirty,” Amal began. “My father is thirty-nine. And Neil is...in his forties?”

  “God bless you,” Neil said with a laugh. “I’m fifty-four.”

  “How will those age gaps work between the three of you?” she asked, utterly nonplussed.

  Me, however? I was plussed. I was plussed the entire fuck out. Neil was taken aback, too, his mouth opening to emit an uncharacteristic, “Uh...” sound.

  Amal shrugged and accepted the glass that the staff member brought her. “We’re not sheltered. Please, don’t try to lie about the obvious.”

  “No one was lying,” El-Mudad said gently. “I wanted to tell the two of you in our own time.”

  Rashida slammed her palm on the table, seething. “I’m so angry at you, Baba!”

  I wondered if I could make a break for the door and then later claim I’d gotten sick. The possibility of barfing was genuine, anyway. This was a disaster. It had started off okay, but it had become a horrifi
c shipwreck out of a Greek tragedy.

  “Come now. Why would you be so angry?” El-Mudad asked.

  Rashida pointed at Amal, who crossed her arms smugly. “Because now I owe her ten-thousand dollars.”

  If I’d been drinking anything, I would have done a spit-take. Ten-thousand dollars was the going rate for a bet between siblings?

  “You placed a wager on this?” El-Mudad asked, relaxing slightly in his amusement.

  “Apparently, they don’t need to be in Monaco to gamble,” Neil laughed.

  “As long as you’re not upset by all of this,” El-Mudad said gently.

  Rashida shook her head. “I’m mad about losing my allowance. I’m not mad that you’re in love with them.”

  “We’ve been through this before.” Amal lifted her flute of champagne to her lips. “Of course, that went so well...”

  “The last thing we want to do is hurt your father,” I rushed to reassure her. The cat was out of the bag, so there was no point in trying to stuff it back in. The better course of action would be to try and gain the cat’s trust.

  They’re not cats. They’re girls, I reminded myself. You’re not going to be able to lure them in with treats and stuffed mice.

  Neil nodded in agreement. “And this isn’t a new relationship. We’ve known each other for...oh, at least six years now.”

  Despite his calm and reasonable demeanor, I knew Neil had to have been freaking out in his head. He was sexually adventurous and socially open-minded—when it came to himself. There was still a streak of posh, uptight conservatism in him when it came to dealing with his family.

  “And you’re just telling us about it now?” Rashida asked her father, her brow creasing with hurt.

  “I don’t have to explain my dating life to you,” he said, slightly scolding. “But it was important that you meet them now. Because I’m going to be living with them.”

  “What?” Amal shrieked, echoed by Rashida’s, “You’re moving to England?”

  “Not England.” El-Mudad glanced at us uncomfortably. “We can discuss this in private.”

  “We can discuss it now.” In that moment of firm, mature defiance, I saw Emma. Without knowing her, without ever having met her, Amal was the very spirit of Neil’s daughter. She wouldn’t be steamrolled or brushed aside. “Where are you moving?”

  “America. New York.”

  “Baba, no!” Rashida protested. “It’s really dangerous there!”

  Dangerous there? For a moment, I wondered if she’d misheard her father. Then I remembered what the United States looked like from the outside. To girls raised in France, the idea of school shootings and men brandishing guns in Panera Bread was undoubtedly horrific. It shouldn’t have been so thoughtlessly common place to me as it was.

  “It is,” Neil agreed. “But we have security.”

  “And I have my bodyguards,” El-Mudad said.

  I’d never realized that. It hadn’t ever come up. To my knowledge, he’d never brought them along.

  Of course, that was to my knowledge. Maybe they’d been with him all along at our house, mingled in with our regular security guys. Shamefully, I had no idea who all worked for us.

  “And you never have to come to America to see your father or us,” Neil went on. “I have homes in London and Iceland. Your father has his properties. There’s no reason we couldn’t spend time with you there.”

  That took me by almost more surprise than the sudden announcement of our relationship and living arrangements. Neil was already speaking to the girls as though he was their father or something. Maybe that was just an automatic thing he couldn’t shut off.

  “Sophie and I don’t want to take your father away from you. And we would never put you in a situation where your safety was compromised. Or even a situation where you felt your safety was compromised,” Neil went on. “We never would have taken this step if we weren’t all serious about each other. We knew from the moment we began discussing this that you were both parts of a package deal. If we hadn’t wanted that, we would never have gotten this far.”

  I supposed Neil was right that we’d known from the start that the girls came along with El-Mudad. But meeting them in person made that responsibility so much clearer.

  And we’d bungled things so badly with this meeting.

  “So, you’re fine with him ruining your marriage the way he ruined his?” Amal asked us pointedly.

  El-Mudad sharply raised his voice to reprimand her in Arabic. She drained her champagne flute and stood.

  “Forgive me,” she said coolly to Neil and I. “I’m not hungry.”

  El-Mudad watched her helplessly as she left, until Neil said, “It’s all right. Go after her.”

  Which left us all alone with Rashida, who continued to look at us as though nothing was amiss. Which led me to believe that maybe Amal and her father were prone to big arguments.

  Rashida looked between us expectantly before saying, “You...do have stables on your property in America, don’t you?”

  Neil cleared his throat and looked desperately around. “I wonder what’s taking so long with our lunch…”

  We were in way, way over our heads.

  Chapter Six

  The grand ballroom of Langhurst Court had been made over beautifully for the holidays. Just not specifically for our party; the room had been decorated for the Christmas-themed tours. A dazzling tree that could have been the centerpiece of the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker reached all the way to the gilded frescos. Draped in gently twinkling white LED lights, matching white and gold ornaments, and wrapped all the way to the very tippy top in a seemingly continuous gold brocade ribbon tied in a huge bow, the tree almost made me believe in Santa Claus again. In place of presents, at least forty large white poinsettias surrounded the base.

  I stared up, open-mouthed. “I never thought I would see this room and think it looked small.”

  El-Mudad put his hand at the curve of my back. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Hand,” I reminded him quietly, and he jerked his arm back. It absolutely sucked to stand beside him while he looked the way he did and not be able to touch him. Though my family hadn’t shown up yet, I didn’t know when my grandmother or an aunt would pop through the door, determined to go help in the kitchen.

  But El-Mudad did look amazing. His hair was parted on the side and carelessly tousled, and he’d chosen a navy suit that emphasized his broad shoulders and lean waist. Instead of a tie, he’d decided to leave the collar of his crisp white shirt open.

  “You didn’t have to get so dressed up, you know,” I said, unable to resist fixing a lapel that didn’t need to be fixed. “Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

  “You’re dressed up.” He gestured to my cranberry colored silk Zac Posen cape dress.

  Admittedly, with the dramatic swoop of fabric that hung from my shoulders, I could have been a background actor from a Luc Besson space opera. “My family knows what to expect. I’ve always been a little...”

  “Extra? Is that what the kids say these days?” El-Mudad teased. He looked down at his outfit. “Perhaps they will expect that of me, now?”

  I smiled, but it felt stiff. I honestly didn’t know how my family would react to El-Mudad.

  Whom my Uncle Doug had already referred to as our “foreigner friend.”

  “So, um...” I had no idea how to broach the subject, and I cursed myself for not doing it sooner. “You’re going to be in a room like...full of Midwestern white people. And I just feel like I need to pre-apologize for that.”

  “Do you think I haven’t thought of that already?” he asked, and my cheeks instantly burned with shame. “Sophie, I don’t live in some bubble where I’m protected from American opinions. I know what people from your background may think when they see me. I’m suspicious. I’m a terrorist. I’m a Muslim threat to your freedom.”

  I hated that he was right. I hated that, before I’d left my home and my isolated culture, I had shared some of tho
se same assumptions.

  “Having money doesn’t protect you from prejudice,” he explained. “Not from the world. Not from your girlfriend’s family...not from your girlfriend.”

  That made me blink. “From me?”

  He laughed. “Sophie, do you remember how long you danced around my religion?”

  “Yeah...sorry.” As it had turned out, El-Mudad didn’t really have a religion. His father had come from a strict religious home and had rejected his faith as a result, and El-Mudad’s late mother had never been devout. He had been raised in cities all around the globe, was the most cultured, educated person I’d ever met, and for some reason, I’d been afraid that he wouldn’t understand the subject of race or xenophobia or Islamophobia, despite having lived with it his entire life.

  He’d navigated the conversation with the patience of a saint, but I was still horribly embarrassed and ashamed that I’d been anything like the people he’d encountered in his life.

  “Oh, stop,” he admonished, and he took me into his arms despite our no-touching rule. The embrace was far too brief. “You underestimate the sheer patience I’ve honed throughout a lifetime of putting up with white people.”

  “And your girls?” I asked softly. God, I would cut off my whole family if they did anything to hurt two innocent kids. Not that I thought they would, but if Facebook had taught me anything, it was that I didn’t know some of my relatives half as much as I’d thought I did.

  “If someone says something ignorant, hopefully I’ll be able to correct them without losing my temper. But we can take care of ourselves, I promise,” he assured me, and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Leave room for the holy spirit,” Neil called across the ballroom, startling me. He laughed when I jumped away from El-Mudad. As Neil came closer, he added, “My darling, you look incredible tonight.”

  I did a little twirl, holding my arms out to accentuate the short cape on the back of the dress. “You like?”

  “Very much.” Usually, Neil would have kissed me, but with El-Mudad standing there, it would have felt like we were rubbing it in.