I liked it there. In his arms. I liked his hug. I liked his closeness. But most of all, I liked what I felt. The same thing I always felt whenever he took me in his arms. But this time it was double. A bit more than double, even.
Safety and comfort.
A moment later, my eyes snapped open, and I was suddenly aware of what I was really feeling. Something flashed in my mind, telling me how wrong I was for doing what I was doing. What I was feeling. And I had to pull away, instantly feeling empty and missing the sound of his heartbeat thumping against my ear as I pressed my cheek to his chest.
My back faced him as I turned away from him, and my hand came up to touch my temple, rubbing it softly. My head was pounding and my heart was hurting. In my ears, I could hear the sound of my grandmother as she told me how disappointed in me she was. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve sworn I could see the judging look in her eyes: judging me for being a traitor, to her and to my grandfather’s memory.
I felt his hand pulling me to him again. He was silent this time, didn’t tell me to look up at him or gaze into his eyes. He just held my face between his hands, and gave me all of the time I needed until I looked up on my own and stared into his beautiful green eyes.
“Stop running away from me,” he whispered softly. “Stop running away from me, Beautiful Princess.”
My eyes welled up with tears, and I closed them, freeing a lone tear that told of the struggle inside of me. I think he was able to see clearly how I was at war with myself with how I was acting; he was that smart, I knew he was.
Maybe I confused him a bit, but now after hearing my reasons and why I felt this way towards him and his people, I was sure he knew it wasn’t easy for me to admit, even between me and myself, that I trusted him.
“Talk to me.” His voice was a hushed whisper, tender calmness and quiet coolness.
My eyes opened and found his again, getting lost in them instantly, my heart warming at all of the beautiful feelings they were sending me, and all of the kind words they were silently telling me.
“Tell me all about it, Princess,” he breathed. “Tell me everything you feel, tell me what’s in your mind.”
“I want to trust you,” I said, still not able to voice that I did trust him, still not able to admit it aloud, “But...I feel like a cheater.”
“Because of your grandfather?”
I sucked both of my lips inside of my mouth, took a deep breath in through my nose, let it out, then nodded.
It was the prince’s turn to nod, but his nod was in understanding, not in response like mine was. He moved my hair out of my face and offered me a small smile. “Would you like to sit down?” he offered softly.
I nodded again, and he led me to sit on the nearest couch, sitting beside me then taking my hand in his–which I gave him willingly, was comforted by it even.
“We’re talking about 9/11, huh?” he asked, and my chest swelled just hearing the date.
“Yeah,” I said in a quiet voice, then started chewing on my bottom lip.
The prince nodded; apparently he had remembered me telling him about my first panic attack happening almost fourteen years ago, and with what I’d just told him...he put two and two together.
“I remember that day very well,” he said. “It was a horrible thing to watch, my father was really pissed, called it animalistic act.”
“He did?” I wondered, a hint of surprise lacing my voice. Yeah, the king was nice, kind and seemed like a great person, but was he really mad or even frowned upon it?
“Yes, Princess,” the prince replied, “I think the entire world was, not just my father.”
“Well, not Muslims.” I shook my head, then rested it on the back of the couch, sighing. It just couldn’t be that they were upset; I found it unbelievable for any Muslim to be.
“Yes, we were,” the prince insisted. “Princess, the ones who did that...I have a hard time calling them humans, let alone Muslims.”
“Really?” I looked at him. “You’re telling me your religion doesn’t tell you to kill? Please!” I rolled my eyes. He couldn’t just convince me otherwise; I knew that to be a fact about Muslims: they kill in the name of their religion.
“It does,” the prince replied, “but only when defending your life, your family, your land, your money, and only if your life was threatened in those cases–not innocent people who did nothing to you.”
“They were innocent,” I nodded, feeling the ache in my chest as I said the words. “They had no right to kill them.” A tear escaped my eyes; the pain of that loss had never ever lessened through all of these years.
“Princess, don’t always look at Muslims to judge Islam. Muslims are humans: they make mistakes. Look at Islam, it’s from Allah, and it’s perfect,” he told me, and to be honest, I had to think for a minute about those words.
Humans make mistakes, it was true, but their religion…I mean, just look what they wanted to do to his sister.
“And it tells you to kill girls for making mistakes?” I asked, not waiting for him to answer, for I knew he couldn’t–I’d just proved him wrong.
“It doesn’t, Princess,” he replied. “It’s a sickening tradition that God only knows how much I wish to wipe out of the kingdom forever.”
“You’re a prince, you’re the next in line to be a king. You can.”
“I’ve told you before, Princess: we only obey rules, we don’t make them up, not even my father has the power to do that,” he paused. “Well, he does, but people’s reactions could be really bad.”
“Or could be really good,” I said. Something in me wished so hard that they would do something about it. It was such a bad thing, and the excitement I felt at it being true, that they might stop doing that, was so great that my stomach fluttered at the thought.
The prince sighed. “Could be. Back to the topic we were talking about,” he said, maybe trying to avoid talking about Honor Killing any further–or maybe not, I didn’t know. “I was ten when it happened.”
“Yeah,” I said, not really getting the why he was telling me his age at the time.
“I was only a kid,” he said, once more pointing out his age.
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m trying to let you see that it wasn’t me who did it,” he replied, and I looked at him as if he had two heads.
“I know that!”
I think…
“It wasn’t me, or the rest of the one and a half billion Muslims on Planet Earth, Princess,” he said. “And I can assure you that all of us are ashamed of the fact that those people called themselves Muslims, because if they truly were, they wouldn’t kill an innocent soul. They never would, not even one, let alone thousands.”
I sighed. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, but...I just find it really hard to believe.” I pressed my lips into a thin line and shook my head, looking down at our joined hands resting on the prince’s knee, my eyes following the soft, slow and soothing motion of his thumb over the back of my hand.
He’s a Muslim, of course he’d say something like that…I thought.
I’d been told all of my life the exact opposite of what he was telling me now. Removing all of that and just replacing it with what he was saying wasn’t the easiest thing to do, not at all. The prince was an honest and noble person, so he couldn’t just be fooling me–but, it was still so hard to believe him. It was just me.
“I know,” he said. “I know it’s hard, but I hope that someday you can believe me.” He didn’t sound disappointed in me or anything like that. He was actually very patient, like always, and his lips held the soft smile that I’d grown so fond of over the past few days.
I rested my head back on the back of the couch once again, but this time my face was turned toward the prince, my eyes gazing at his, my fingers tangled with his own, and my thoughts busily trying to figure him out–or at least trying to make up my mind on all of these feelings I was having about him but didn’t like to admit.
One more ti
me, his hand pushed a lock of my hair out of my face and behind my ear, his eyes staring deep into my own for a moment too long before he said, “I’m sorry I said you were judgmental and prejudicial. I guess I needed to find a black key myself.”
His words reminded me of the ones he’d said to me the night before last, right before I fell asleep.
“May you find the black keys, Troubled Princess.”
“What do you mean by a black key? What does ‘Black Keys’ mean?” I frowned slightly.
“You don’t know?” he asked.
“Not really, no,” I admitted.
“Knowledge is the key, Princess,” he said. ‘‘The mind has blank, dark and empty spots when it doesn’t know about something, and knowledge is the key that opens the door to fill this empty space. Once you find that key, you see rooms and rooms in your head brightening with the knowledge you just found. That’s why people say ‘I was in the dark regarding this or that’...meaning they didn’t know about it,” he explained.
Huh!
“I see. But...what makes them black?” I wondered.
“Knowledge is all around us, keys waiting to be found. They’re easy to see and use, but not when they are black, because in the darkness, you can’t see black items. Only if you know in your heart that they’re there you might find them, and to find them, you have to work hard. Those keys are there, and at some point they were easy to find, but assuming and judging made them black. The kind of knowledge that those keys give you has to make it to your heart first to be able to pass through to your mind.”
“Wow, that’s really...wise.” I said for a lack of better word, and got lost once again in my thoughts, thinking about what he said now and before, about the black keys and if I really needed to find them myself like he’d told me the other night when he thought I was asleep.
Was it really true that I had black keys around me that I needed to find? But if it was true, why would I need them? Would they give my mind peace? Would I then be able to be friends with him? With any Muslim? Would I be able to accept them? And Arabs? Did I even want that? I didn’t know. I just wondered, always coming up with something that meant, to me, that I didn’t want them. I didn’t want those black keys, maybe I didn’t need them at all, maybe I didn’t even have them. I was just as confused as ever and I didn’t like the feeling.
I had to admit that since Janna had told me about what Prince Fahd did to her, slapping her across the face and wanting to kill her, I’d only thought of him as that bad, illiterate savage who didn’t care about his sister’s safety and well-being as long as his country’s traditions remained obeyed. But after Mona told me the truth behind his actions, my thoughts changed, and just like the prince had described, it was like something brightened in my mind at the awareness of the situation from another side. Maybe that was a black key and I had found it. But I didn’t think there were any more black keys to find and put in my head–or were there? I seriously had no idea.
I thought I might have dozed off for a bit, because I was sitting on the couch, buried deep in my thoughts and wondering about all of the feelings I was having from here and there, and the next thing I knew was the feel of the familiar touch of his hand over my hair, massaging my scalp softly, oh, so very tenderly. I was still on the couch, but my head wasn’t resting on the back of it like earlier: it was now pretty much lying on the prince’s lap. From the feel of the tingling on my temple, I knew it had been this way for a while.
“Hey,” I heard him saying, and I looked up at him, finding him smiling. I smiled back and got up, back into a sitting position, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, but it was no use: I was pretty much sleepy, very sleepy.
“Hey,” I said back, “I guess I dozed off a bit.”
“I guess I finally managed to bore a girl into sleeping,” the prince smiled. “Thank God I was only talking to you; otherwise I would be very insulted if you slept while we were doing something else,” he–to my surprise–joked.
I chuckled and playfully punched his shoulder, my sleep-fogged mind drifting to draw an image of what he’d said. I was actually shocked that I didn’t find that image disturbing at all. But then the thought of him getting back to his playful and light nature–joking around with me and slightly teasing–made me smile widely at the idea that maybe everything that had happened last night would be forgotten soon, or already was, and I wouldn’t feel any impact from it.
“Sorry, I’m just really sleepy,” I told him. “Haven’t slept all night.”
“It’s okay, you can go back to sleep. I don’t mind,” he smiled.
“Nah, I guess I’ll go back to the bedroom. It has been a very long night.”
“Tell me about it,” he sighed.
“Won’t you get some sleep yourself?” I asked.
“Not now, I can’t sleep before I’m told that Janna has landed safely,” he said.
When I looked at him without a reply, he continued, “She’s on her way to the US.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to hide the fact that I already knew that, and hoping that I was successful. “Okay, I’m gonna go get some sleep.” I smiled and got up, feeling my head spinning suddenly, making me sway a bit.
“Whoa!” The prince was standing by my side right away. “Easy there. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I think I got up too fast, or I’m just really, really sleepy.”
“Let me take you back there,” the prince said, and didn’t wait for me even to grasp what he was saying. The next thing I knew, he was carrying me bridal style, taking me back to our room.
“You like doing this, don’t you?” I teased.
“You have no idea,” he smiled brightly and I chuckled, pressing my head to his chest even more, seeking warmth, comfort and safety–all of the things that his closeness always provided. And I did feel it all, in those moments it took him to carry me from the living room to the bed, where he tucked me in like you would a little baby. So kindly and sweetly.
When he was about to step away from the bed, I pulled him by the hand, stopping him, swallowing thickly before I let out the words I knew I should’ve said long ago. “I’m sorry,” I said, and not surprisingly, the prince looked surprised. I could clearly see it, when his eyes widened slightly and his eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. “For everything that happened last night, me leaving that way without saying anything other than lying to you. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, or anyone else, or even to cause you any trouble. Please, forgive me,” I told him sincerely.
The prince was silent for a moment before he brought his free hand–that the one I wasn’t holding in mine–to touch my cheek tenderly. “There’s nothing to forgive, Beautiful Princess,” he said. “I completely understand. I didn’t before, but now I do–and I don’t blame you for wanting to leave.”
His reply, though reassuring, made a new thought occur to me. Now that he knew I’d wanted to leave all along, and had sworn that he wouldn’t have made me stay had he known I didn’t like it here...would he send me back to the States now?
The answer to that was obviously ‘yes’ and just realizing it made my stomach twist in a unpleasant way. Of course he would send me back now. He said he would’ve come up with something else had he known I wasn’t okay with staying here.
Oddly, I found that I wasn’t that attached to the thought of leaving the palace anymore, and that perplexing thought was more confusing than anything else. But then I got even more confused when I started wondering how long it would take him to come up with something to let me leave, without making anything look suspicious to others about my departure. I found a part of me wishing it would take him long enough for me to be able to gather my thoughts together. After all, why would he want me here if his sister was finally safe, as well as her reputation?
My stomach twisted again.
“Wait,” I said when he was getting up, stopping him once again. When he looked at me, waiting to hear what I wanted to say, I didn’t really know how to
say it.
A moment or two passed before I found the will to tell him, “That kiss I gave you before I left? It was real.” For some reason, I begged with everything in me for him to believe me. Even if I wasn’t able to believe what I was saying myself, or found it hard to admit it, I still wanted him to believe me.
The prince kept his eyes locked with mine for a few seconds before his lips drew a soft smile and then he leaned down and pressed those beautiful lips of his to my forehead, kissing it softly before pulling back the slightest to look closely into my eyes.
“I know that very well,” he whispered. “Sleep now, My Princess.”
At that moment, I found that of all the words he’d used before; ‘My’ was the best word he’d ever chosen to put prior my title.
The smile I had on my lips as I fell asleep was still present when I woke up a few hours later.
Light was still shining from outside the window, telling me that I hadn’t slept that long, but I didn’t feel the need to go back to sleep. I sat up on the bed and looked around, finding the room to be completely empty.
I stretched in bed, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, then called, “Mona!”
Less than a minute later, she was knocking and then opening the door.
“Good afternoon, Princess,” she smiled. “Can I get you anything?”
“Where’s the prince?” I asked, covering my mouth with the back of my hand as I yawned.
“He’s in the living room, Princess,” she answered. “I’ll go call him if you wish.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’ll do it in a few minutes,” I told her and she smiled. “I’ll use the bathroom and freshen up a bit. Could you please bring me one of those beautiful dresses I saw in the closet?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, “Right away.” She disappeared into the closet and I got off the bed and went into the bathroom, doing my thing. Mona helped me into a dress similar to the ones I’d worn the past few days, but this one had a ridiculously big sweetheart neckline that showed a heck of lot of cleavage. It fitted above the waist, and the rest was a loose, silky, floor-length skirt covered with another layer of chiffon, colored the same shade of mauve as the rest of the dress. It had wide sleeves that gave the whole dress an even more elegant look to it. I liked it a lot.
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