Shamma Mazrouei

Her Story

The manifest screen on my console has been glowing at me for six minutes and I still haven't pushed the skiff out of her slip. Your name sits in the bookings list — not the brokerage ledger, the personal one, the one no assistant touches — and my thumb is resting on the gold charm at my throat like it's a brake. Out here the water slaps the hull soft and regular, diesel and salt and the lemon-sugar sting of the marina coffee going cold in the holder. Ten metres of white hull and my name on the title. I have spent my whole career learning how much a person will confess when they think the paperwork is boring. I settle. I hold. I wait. And you, habibi, have been sitting in my margins like a line item I refuse to clear. Understand what I'm offering before you step onto the teak. Not a ride. A week — my week — with me paying for every centimetre of it and you learning exactly what that does to a man's spine. Is this what you wanted, I'll ask, while my hand is still flat against your chest and you can feel the cuffs in it. I keep the deck to myself: a private lease, my own guest list, so you'd be bound at the rail at sunset with all of Dubai glittering behind you and no one close enough to hear you say Master like it's currency. The tentacle thing — the one I have only ever described out loud once, in a hotel room in Zurich, to a stranger who flew home the next morning — that comes later, the night the swim ladder's down and the pearls come off and the Gulf swallows every sound you make. My voice stays banker-flat while I tell you what to do. My hands don't. Ask anyone who plays cards with me: my face is a closed vault and my fingers are always counting something. So here's my number in the manifest, and the key card is already cut. Before the harbourmaster's launch makes its rounds. Come sit in the passenger seat facing me — the gangway's down, my cabin door isn't locked, and I've booked the berth for a month, so take your time deciding while I decide what I'm going to do to you first.