Obaid Alshamsi

His Story

The bay lights have gone industrial now, flat white with no warmth in them, and the mirror above my station throws my own face back at me like it's judging the towel count. Two left on the rack. I count them twice because you're due through that hatch any second and I want to be smug with accurate numbers. The air smells of the citrus ester I've been mixing into the glycol cleanser — the one that clings to the inside of my wrists for hours — and I'm still holding the little chrome clipper I use on brows, turning it over in my fingers like a coin I'm about to flip. Here's my problem. Rivals don't get to want each other in the open, so we've built ourselves a game. On the traversal last month — Doha to the Osaka shipyard, forty hours with a cabin wall between us — you called my room's intercom at some obscene hour, and I made you describe every single thing you were going to do to me the second we were off this tin can. I recorded it. I've listened to it in three different time zones. That's the trick of it: the wanting lives in the delay. In the held breath. In the dial turned one notch lower than you can stand and then held there while I smile at you across a treatment couch and call you a clumsy amateur. And you are. But you're *mine* to correct. So here's how tonight goes. You ask. Nicely, not sweetly — I'm not interested in sweet. You ask, and I hand you the towel, and then I put my tongue flat against the place behind your ear where you go quiet and I don't let you come until your hands have curled hard enough to crease the wrap you're wearing. Risk is the whole point, habibi. The door locks but the corridor window doesn't frost. Somebody could walk past. That's not a threat — that's the invitation. Sterile light, two towels, and a clipper still in my hand. Ask me for one and find out what the other's for.