by C. L. Donley
To say that five months was a long time for Bel to go without sex was like saying five months was a long time for the sun not to shine. It was simply wrong and impossible. He sensed that he had been outgrowing his self-prescribed life of sexual avoidance therapy for a while, but now that the end had come, he was confronting its successor: grief.
Once he returned home, he was finally strong enough to visit Leilani’s grave. So strong that he merely stood and wept. She was buried with his stillborn son in the royal mausoleum.
He wept because of how faded she was for him now. His memory was cramped with conquests, personal and professional. Most of all, he ached with betrayal, standing in front of his wife’s grave, another woman on his heart and mind.
If Leilani’s passing had killed him, slowly becoming little more than a distant itchy wound on his soul after a dozen years, then Kimberly Pritchard had turned him into a zombie. A corpse with a warm heart, cursed with the sudden, vivid desire to live but without the ability. But he had to stay away. Even if the ghost of his dead wife hadn’t been present in her eyes, he still would’ve had to confront all the fears that he had of loving again, and potentially losing again.
Last year’s weekend in Spain relentlessly plagued him, a weekend filled with quiet despair, the suffocating scent of love positively everywhere. San Sebastian with its Moroccan ruins even made him sick. He’d kept it all to himself, though he thought it would seep painfully out of his pores if he didn’t get out of there.
He’d naively agreed to the invitation, thinking he had to be there to see his closest friends celebrate, thinking it was just another elaborate celebrity-filled party. Had he been so far removed from the memory of his own wedding that he’d forgotten? Flowers and vows, the superstitious foreshadowing of cloudless sunshine, such a traitorous omen. The shitty weatherman of life. For his wedding day too had been a perfect day like no other, with the pleasant blessing of wind blowing through Leilani’s dark hair. The memory profited him nothing now. It’d meant so much to them then when there were two of them, and there was such a thing as the future. Now it was meaningless. That same beguiling air was present at Grayson and Amara’s wedding, as it likely stalked every June wedding.
But if he hadn’t gone, he wouldn’t have had occasion to lay eyes on the most captivating creature he’d ever met. That exuberant muse that he’d unlocked and brought feverishly to life that magical weekend, one that seemed to last an entire lifetime. And the pious way she’d walked down the aisle with him in her elegant Grecian inspired bridesmaids dress, her gorgeous tresses straightened and laying tame across her bare shoulders, filled him both with longing and years old dread.
The moment she left, and he was alone again, he was racked with ineffable shame and guilt. However irrational he knew it was, he’d felt the cold shackles of adultery. He’d felt his first tangible connection to a living woman since Leilani. He’d pulled the sheets over his head and cried, afraid to sleep for fear she would have her vengeance in his nightmares.
After he faithfully refused to answer whenever she called, Kim sent a simple three-word text announcing she was pregnant and he wasn’t surprised. He was, however, paralyzed with fear. Fear of the birth canal, the delivery room. Hell, fear of just… life. He’d lived through his own mother’s grief at the loss of her own child, his older brother, and it was more than he could stand to imagine.
Then another three-word text after she’d miscarried.
He was relieved. At first.
He usually spent Thanksgiving with Dale, Grayson, and Amara. Instead, he paid quadruple for a pilot to spend crucial free time away from his family to fly Bel wherever he wanted to go.
Then he paid for sex for the first time in his life.
He’d told himself he could, that the loss of this child was good news. He was truly free from her now. He erased all her angry, sometimes tearful voicemails that he’d saved and listened to whenever he wanted to punch that gaping space in his chest.
He gambled away 2.6 million dollars at an underground casino in Macau. He started fights that no one was willing to finish. For over a month he went awol, celebrated no holidays and returned to work in a stupor. In the months following he avoided Amara like the plague, contemplating firing her so he couldn’t be bothered with the association every day. Contemplating avoiding them all.
He’d needed to get away from all things America for a while. More than that, he needed to go home. He hadn’t wanted to, but if work hadn’t helped, nor did vacation, then there was only one remedy that he hadn’t tried, the one he was most reluctant to.
A day’s flight later he was in the palace library again, the library that time forgot. It still dwarfed him in adulthood the way it had done in childhood. The smell, even the quiet, filled him with happy memories. Even the painful ones were now happy. It seemed he had tears in his eyes day and night since he’d been back in Ghassan after two weeks. Feeling was coming back into him. Just when he’d need it the least.
“Father is dying,” Fahid, his younger half-brother, divulged to him in the palace courtyard, speaking Farsi.
“We’re all dying,” Bel concluded glibly.
“The doctors are giving him one year. And we suspect they were kind because they were in fear of their lives.”
“Let me guess: syphilis has rotted his brain,” Bel darkly joked.
“Ironically no. Cirrhosis of the liver.”
“His lifestyle would catch up to him, one way or another.”
Bel loved and respected his father, but he was, what they called in the States, a fuckboy. Even in his old age.
The palace was filled with concubines and their offspring, and they suspected the country was littered even further with illegitimate children. It was scandalous enough when his father had resurrected the practice of having concubines, but the people overlooked it for the sake of their king, King Hafiz, whom they dearly loved.
Despite his numerous and at times embarrassing indiscretions, King Hafiz had only ever loved one woman: Bel’s mother, Queen Alya. Queen Alya had only two full blood sons by the king, Bel and his late brother Marcus, before she was rendered infertile early in her reign. Later his mother privately divulged to him that it was an untreated STD that her husband the king had given her that was the culprit. And while his mother had been so forgiving of her husband, Bel had not. Now, it seemed, his father’s chickens were coming home to roost. However expected, it was still scary.
“Why am I just now hearing about this?” Bel grilled his brother.
“We too are just now hearing. It seems you always know when to come home,” Fahid answered.
Bel tried to visit frequently, usually around holidays, but rarely stayed longer than a day or two. This time, he’d been home an astounding two weeks, and showed no signs of leaving. His mother had been conspicuously hands-off. In her effort not to smother him, she had a habit of neglecting him.
“Why hasn’t anyone told me that father is sick?” Bel asked his mother at dinner. Queen Alya motioned with her wrist, and her attendants left her.
“How long do you plan on staying in Ghassan?” his mother answered him in English. Strange.
“I don’t have a plan.”
“How is your business doing?”
“Mother, just say it.”
Queen Alya looked at her son.
“Ghassan will need a new king.”
“I agree.”
“You are the king’s only full blood son.”
“I abdicated long ago, and I meant it. And that was before Leilani died.”
“Semih is quietly campaigning.”
Semih was one of Bel’s fourteen half brothers— a harmless bookish playmate as a child, who used to watch soundlessly for hours while Bel broke computers apart. Not one that ever seemed particularly ambitious.
“Let him campaign. Fahid is the obvious choice and will have Father’s blessing.”
“Semih’s mother has been a mosquito in your father’s ear of late, and I suspect th
e real reason for Semih’s sudden desire to be king.”
Bel sighed. You gotta be shitting me right now, he thought. No matter how peaceful or prosperous a kingdom was, there was always someone for whom peace and prosperity weren’t enough. There was always someone who wanted power. Still, he refused to consider it any more than a royal family nuisance.
“What could Adela possibly say to father to convince him to choose Semih over Fahid?”
“I don’t know, but your father has refused an audience with me twice now.”
What…the fuck.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me, mother, but no one would be so delusional as to betray you while there’s still breath in my lungs. Are you saying that there’s some elaborate, extensive plot to kill me?”
“No.”
“Then this is a silly conversation. Stop worrying. I will talk to father.”
That night, Bel lay in bed feeling as though there was an anvil on his chest. And he remembered why he left for the States and never returned.
No one knew who he was in the States and no one cared. No one bowed to him in the streets, nor could he order around grown men twice, three times his age. And aside from the job he attained at Magellan through his father’s military connections, everything he’d achieved was of his own merits. He started a company because he could. It made him a billionaire. He hadn’t even meant to do that. America was the land of opportunity, and not that he was looking for it but he’d gotten one, and proved to himself and others that he was a somebody, and not just because of who his father was.
His mother had been a prisoner of war when his father had met her. She’d successfully talked herself out of being killed, out of being raped, into earning a private audience with his father, who was commander of the Ghassani army at the time and the future king, and eventually into being released.
She was the smartest woman he knew, and deep down, he knew that if she was worried, then so should he be. Fahid didn’t seem to know of any such campaign. The whole situation made him want to spit out the bad taste of politics that had manifested in his mouth. His family had generously let these whores and their offspring share the palace. And now they were high off their pampered lifestyle and catching dangerous bouts of amnesia. Granted he loved his half brothers and sisters, which made any potential betrayal among them that much more infuriating. He didn’t want to have to go Rambo and slit their ungrateful throats, but he would. His brother should never have died. If his older brother Marcus were still alive, none of this would be happening.
The past. A cancerous hook lodged and now embedded in his soul, unable to be removed without also killing the host. He was now old enough that he wasn’t in the mood to run from his royal life anymore, but he was still far from being in the mood to be king. Bel had put off living life with the intention of eventually returning to it. But it seemed no matter how much time he gave himself it was never enough.
The next morning, Bel requested an audience with his father which he, of course, was granted.
He didn’t go to the throne room, which was customary. Instead, he was taken to the king’s private chambers. Once there, they were left alone. What did the king have to say that he did not desire an audience? If he were going to ask him to reconsider the throne as he suspected, why wouldn’t he want the entire hall privy?
His father looked thin, but not frail. Still every inch the king. Bel saw his immediate future instinctively, and it made his jaw clench. Bel out of his mind with grief, beating his father’s casket bloody while his mother looked on in tears, a coronation done in secret.
“You have been home these two weeks and only now have you come to see me? Your mother must have sent you.”
“No one sends me anywhere,” Bel answered. His father smiled.
“Did they tell you I’m dying?”
“Yes.”
“Are you not relieved?”
“No.”
“Your mother knows I love her. She also knows that I cannot guarantee her safety after I am gone.”
“I can guarantee her safety.”
“Not unless you plan to do so from this throne.”
“To hell with the throne. The entire kingdom can burn for all I care.”
“You would let your people be torn apart by civil war?”
“A palace full of power hungry bastards and their whore mothers hardly constitute civil war. Let them destroy each other from the inside.”
“And what of our dynasty?”
“Dynasties come to an end. The people can govern themselves.”
His father laughed. “I see the ‘land of the free’ has seduced you as well.”
“America has been good to me.”
“I’m glad. No one’s more proud of what you’ve accomplished than I am, Belkacem.”
“Thank you, Abba.”
“Not only are you the rightful heir but the people love you. You have put the country of Ghassan on the lips of foreigners.”
“Thank you, abba.”
“I believe I’m being poisoned.”
Bel took a breath and closed his eyes.
If his father believed it, then it was true, that much he knew.
His father once credited his ability to be underestimated to his military and political success. And now, his father, sharp as ever, intended to find out just what the plan would be once he was dead and gone. He had given his own life to get this information.
“What have you done? What have you let them do? And for what?”
“Let them poison a dead man if they want,” replied the king. He continued, “There is a guilty air in the throne room since you have returned.”
“‘The guilty flee when no one pursues them.’”
“They seem to think you are privy to something.”
“I am privy to nothing.”
“Do you know if your brother were alive today, I would still pass him over and give my crown to you?”
“But he isn’t. So we’ll never know.”
“Your brother was too eager to please me. To please other people. It made him foolish. It got him killed.”
Bel seethed at his father’s words.
The king chuckled. “I’ve made you angry.”
Bel remained silent, refusing to be goaded by him.
“You are wise beyond your years Belkacem. You would make a great king. Precisely because you do not want it.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
The king was tired. And he didn’t trust that he’d be able to disseminate all the wisdom to his son that he would need. He’d been patient with his son’s pain, one he could never understand, but there was simply no more time.
“Keep your enemies close, Belkacem. Listen to them. They will tell you exactly what they want.”
“It hasn’t worked so well for you, abba.”
“Of course it has. We’re having this conversation now, aren’t we?”
Lying asleep in his massive bed in the guest house, he was awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from Dale of all people.
He didn’t have a good feeling about it at first, but then he realized that it was probably only about noon in California.
Except…wasn’t Dale in the Netherlands?
He’d been commuting for months now to be with his new girlfriend, Amara’s best friend Mya. He’d thought about visiting the mere four hours to meet them. But he couldn’t be around anything that reminded him of that haunting weekend in Spain just yet, even though being with his best friends was one of the last bastions of freedom he had in the world. There was nothing remotely royal about him when he was with them, in fact, he was the least of the three of them. And they accepted him. He loved and trusted them.
When he answered the phone, he’d never been so grateful to code switch.
“Bro,” Bel answered.
Dale went on as if they hadn’t been somewhat estranged. As soon as he heard his voice, it was as if they’d talked yesterday, w
hich on some level didn’t surprise him.
“You in a good mood, bro?” Dale asked.
Bel sighed. “I could use a weekend in Malibu right now,” he lied.
“That bad?”
“You have no fuckin’ idea, dude.”
“Amara says you’re on leave or something?”
Bel smiled at the mention of his plucky employee, of his other life.
“Is she and Grayson with you?”
“Um… yeah. Where are you?”
“Home.”
“Oh. Like, home home?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the weather in old Ghassan?”
“Hot.”
“How come you never invite us to your palace, bro?”
Bel scoffed. “Because it’s crawling with std’s.”
“I’ve looked it up on the map, you know.”
“Finally.”
“It’s got coastline. I think you’re holding out on us. You’re ashamed of your cracker friends.”
“You do not want to come here; it’s like… Jersey Shore with Arabs.”
“There’s no such thing as that,” Dale laughed.
“I shit you not. When I got here, I found out that my father is dying.”
“Aw dammit, Bel. I’m sorry.”
“Today he told me he thinks he’s being poisoned.”
“Holy shit, bro. By who?”
“Fuck if I know. It’s like, some serious Lion King shit I’m in the middle of right now.”
“Well, when it rains it pours I guess… are you at least sitting down?”
Bel sighed again and braced himself. His bad feeling had been right.