She didn’t know why she’d said that. She wished she could fish the words back in from the air. She didn’t like how they sounded; like she was somehow above the idea of romance.
Maybe that was why she’d said it in the first place. Maybe she wanted to feel a little less intimidated by the Sheikh, and the rowdy menagerie of emotions he was calling forth in her. But she couldn’t take her words back. The best she could do was hope for a distraction.
To that end, she tipped her glass of honey liquor up and took a large swig—unprepared for when the strong taste of it, and the burn at the back of her throat, multiplied exponentially.
She coughed and the Sheikh laughed, reaching his hand out to help, even as she waved off his concern.
“So, Lucie,” he said when they had both quieted down, as though opening up a new chapter between them. “You clearly don’t spend your time drinking. I feel a little misled; the movies always say that American students do nothing else.”
Lucie giggled, the alcohol having gotten to her now. “Well, that’s on you for believing what you see in the movies instead of asking the real article.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well then, real article: if you don’t date and you don’t drink, what do you do?”
Lucie sighed, trying to come up with something more interesting than the truth, and failing. “I study. And then I write about what I studied. And then I study what I want to write.”
He sipped his honey liquor slowly, savoring the taste. “Sounds like a vicious cycle,” he said.
“Maybe not vicious, but it is a busy one.”
They sat for a time in silence, Lucie ruing the moment she’d admitted that her work was all there was to her. Her study had always been enough for her in the past, but now she was sitting here, desperately wishing for something she could say to sound worldly or impressive, she wished that it hadn’t been.
“That sounds like a very productive way to live,” the Sheikh said at last.
Lucie had a hard time telling if there was any concealed condescension in his words. There didn’t seem to be. He seemed only to be kind, but it seemed wrong, to Lucie, that he should be so accepting.
Up until now, she’d been noticing the effects of the liquor on herself, but hadn’t been too bothered by them. Now she felt the fuzziness setting into her brain, and she began doubting herself.
“It’s what got me here,” she said, defending herself even though there’d been no accusation.
She watched the Sheikh’s face carefully. There was a pang of sadness, she thought, at his being misunderstood. She immediately regretted her words.
“Of course it did,” he said gently. “And it’s hugely impressive, what you’ve done so far; the conclusions you’ve come to with so little to work from.”
No, she’d read it wrong. It wasn’t just pain at being misunderstood. There was more to it.
“I try. I love this country. I know it isn’t mine, and I’m not trying… I’m not trying to presume anything. I just…”
He cut her off, and she was glad he did.
“And you should have had more information. What I’m doing… what I’ve been doing for the past few years should have been done a decade ago.”
“And why wasn’t it?”
It was a bold thing to say, but it was an honest question, and the liquor seemed to have reached her courage.
“I should have talked to my father. I should have insisted, and told him that it was important.”
“Do you think he would have listened?”
He paused here, and drank more.
“I don’t know. In some ways, I knew him very well. He was a good listener, and he always helped me whenever he could. But in others…” He shook his head. “It’s different. It’s different when you are more than yourself. He had to be a king. When my mother and sister died, he didn’t grieve. He had to show the country that they could go on. But no one ever told him that he could.”
She wanted to reach out to him. The man she’d seen in the car, and the man that she’d seen in the recorded televised speeches he’d given about the program she’d been accepted to and the general movement towards openness that he was moving his country toward was very different than the man in front of her.
And yet, they were somehow still the same. He had that same kind of confident vulnerability. He had an honesty to him that she could always sense, even when he was speaking about entirely unrelated things. It was like he carried that honesty, and that caring to everything he did.
And now that he was talking about the heart of it, she felt as though she were approaching something unquestioningly precious.
But then he drew back from the edge.
“I’ve been trying to make up for lost time, and hopefully I didn’t wait too long to do so. Anyway, I hope that the weather will not be such a problem that you will still have good things to say about your time here.”
She would, Lucie thought. She knew that already. Even if she never even got to see the site, other than the quick look she’d gotten earlier.
They talked on into the night. Once she got used to it, Lucie found that the honey liquor wasn’t as hard to handle as it had seemed at first. It came on strong, and made her feel brave.
They talked about her work again; it was the easiest thing to talk about, even though it wasn’t what she most wanted to discuss with the Sheikh.
And he seemed to want to listen. He listened as she talked about the dinosaur book she had had when she was a child, and how convinced she was that she was going to be the first to design a dinosaur saddle.
She talked about how ashamed she’d been when she’d found out that this was impossible, and how upset she had been with her parents for indulging the whole thing. It was only when she got to college that she’d realized her parents probably hadn’t done it on purpose.
She’d never told any of this to her classmates, or to any of the dates she’d had. Even the few guys that she had dated for a few months, she’d never dared mention it to. There was still something about it that embarrassed her, and yet she felt comfortable telling this man, this leader, that she’d only really just met.
She didn’t know whether she was embarrassed about that story because it showed that she had been so passionate about history from such a young age. It had always felt like she tried a little bit too hard, and that anyone who was listening to her would write her off as being obsessed.
And if it weren’t that, then they would look down on her parents. They would judge where she had come from. Not her for coming from there, exactly, but the place itself. There was always this unspoken assumption, whenever she talked about her hometown, that she must be glad that she was out of it.
But in Abdul’s eyes, as she told him about all of this, she found no judgment. When she talked about her passions, there was a sense of recognition. And when she was done talking, he told her about his own passions as a child, and his own foolish mistakes and grand ambitions.
And when she talked about her parents, and how she had realized much later on what they probably did and did not know, he only nodded. He didn’t expect her to judge them anymore than he could judge his own father for the choices he had made.
“Yes,” he said. “So much of life, when you’re young, is trying to prove your parents wrong. Finding out that they’re capable of being wrong seems like it should be a victory. But I’ve been learning more and more, these last few years, that it isn’t.”
There it was again, that vulnerability. He had this great big wall of secrecy around him, and it was taunting her. The Sheikh was confident and imposing, in so many ways, and yet there was this pain at the core of him that she could see him wanting to share with her, if only she could persuade him she was worth sharing it with.
As they eased gently toward the topic of his father, she felt as though he were letting her closer and closer to that place. She was certain they were just about to start speaking about him, when Abdul stood up, as though he had remembe
red something.
“I have something to show you,” he said, with a distant look about him.
EIGHT
Lucie hesitated as she looked at the Sheikh, buzzing slightly from the alcohol, comfortable and warm by the fire and beneath the stars.
But then he held his hand out, to help her up.
She melted. Her hand flew up, as though she had no say in it. She had no control over it at all: wherever he invited her, she would follow.
She tried not to think that way, as he led her out of the room and down the hall. She tried not to think about the way the fabric of his clothing revealed and then concealed his form underneath. She tried not to get a little distracted every time he looked back, and she saw his eyes light up in the glow of the chandeliers they passed.
He was bringing her through the palace. They had been up on the roof, and now he was taking her down, floor by floor. But it must have been a very indirect route, for they went down tiny back stairways, and through passageways that Lucie wasn’t sure were supposed to be known about. There were countless rooms; bedrooms, libraries, studies, but the Sheikh barely seemed to glance at them as they went further and further down.
He didn’t mention the portraits on the walls, either. He’d have seen them all his life, Lucie realized—he probably barely noticed them anymore. But to Lucie, they stuck out. There was a similarity to all the faces. They were all family, certainly. She could see Abdul’s cheekbones in one, his eyes in another.
They were mostly great big groups posing together. There were almost none that featured just one or two people. It was huge families, all looking like their lives were a little bit chaotic, but very full.
When they had been on the move for a while, Lucie began to notice that she was no longer catching glances of the night outside through the windows. The realization crept over her that they almost certainly had been going down further than eight stories.
Her suspicions were confirmed when they went through a final door, wedged secretively behind an old piano, that led to a tiny, winding staircase that brought them into the darkness below the palace.
“Oh!” Abdul said, barely visible in the dim light from the door at the top of the stairwell. “I’ve forgotten the light!”
As he started feeling his way around the walls, Lucie mentally said a little prayer of thanks to whatever ancient deity had given her pockets in this dress and fished out her phone, turning on the flashlight and helping him. It felt good, she thought, to be able to lend a hand. Especially when he flashed her a winning, grateful smile once the shock of the light spilling into the dark had worn off.
By the light of the phone, he found what he had been looking for: a torch laying on a stone shelf, complete with a lighter next to it.
Lucie realized that it would have been practical for him to leave a flashlight down here, not a torch. But then, coming down to a secret place under the palace wasn’t about practicalities.
It was about the sense of adventure.
And so, when the torch was lit, Lucie extinguished her flashlight and followed Abdul into the dark.
As they went, she made out the walls of a passageway in front of them. It was sometimes wider, sometimes narrower. She could see the stonework from the tools that had been used to cut the passageway out, and could tell by the markings that it had been here for a long time.
In the torch light, everything took on a mysterious, adventurous feel. It was still fairly dark outside the immediate vicinity of the fire, so Lucie found she had to cling to Abdul’s arm to keep herself from chancing a fall.
Not that she minded. In spite of her own better judgement, she enjoyed how it felt to touch him, here in the dark where she dared.
She got the sense, as they went, that they had gone a lot further forward that the walls of the palace above. They were no longer beneath the building—unless she’d drunk a lot more of the homemade honey liquor than she’d thought.
“What was this made for?” she asked, whispering in the dark, even though there was no chance of them being overheard.
“No one knows,” he whispered back. “My father showed it to me when I was a child. And his father before him.”