The Prince Who Came Back to Find Me Three Months Later

June in Doha was a forge of glass and asphalt. Work on the new royal complex was moving at a brutal pace: excavators roaring before dawn, concrete trucks lined up along the perimeter, steel beams flashing under a sun that seemed determined to melt everything. I walked through the dust with my yellow hard hat hanging from my belt and my shirt glued to my chest with sweat.

Ninety-two days. I had counted them one by one since that night on the hotel terrace in West Bay. Every morning, in front of the bathroom mirror, I told myself the same thing: it was a mistake, it was the heat, it was the whisky, it was the full moon, it was anything but what it really had been. I had a million-dollar contract to fulfill, three shifts of workers to pay, and a mother and two sisters in Montevideo depending on me holding on through this job. Rashid bin Tariq was engaged. His wedding had been held privately fifteen days after the contract was signed, and the official images showed him immaculate beside his Kuwaiti wife, smiling for the flashes of the whole world. I had seen the photos once. After that I had closed the browser and never opened it again.

And yet…

Every night, without fail, the scene came back to slam behind my eyelids. Rashid kneeling on the enormous bed in that suite on the thirty-second floor, his thobe fallen from his shoulders to his waist, brown skin gleaming under the blue light of the skyline. Me behind him, biting the nape of his neck, left hand buried in his black hair pulling his head back while with my right I found his cock already hard against my palm. I remembered the exact weight of that cock in my hand, thick, hot, throbbing when I closed my fingers around it. I remembered the whore’s moan that slipped out of him when I ran my thumb over the head and found it wet. I remembered shoving him onto his back against the mattress and spreading his legs with my knee while he begged me in Arabic for things I didn’t understand but that wrecked me from the inside. I had sucked his cock down to my throat, my eyes locked on his, while he gripped my head with both hands and fucked my mouth at his own pace, whispering, “That’s it, engineer, that’s it, take it all.” And when I finally climbed over his body, leaving a trail of saliva from his navel to his mouth, he had flipped me over with a strength I hadn’t expected from a prince, pushed me face down, pried my ass cheeks apart with both hands, and buried his tongue in my hole until I was screaming into the pillow. Then came his cock. No hurry, no mercy, pushing centimeter by centimeter until he drove it all the way home, crushing me into the mattress with ninety kilos of muscle and royal pedigree on top of me. He had fucked me for almost an hour against that window, the two of us reflected in the glass like animals, until he came inside me with a hoarse roar and I spilled mine over the white sheets without even having touched myself.

That was “that night.” And that had been ninety-two days ago.

Every time my phone vibrated with a message from the royal team—“His Highness requests a progress meeting on site”—my pulse seemed to leap out of my body. Every time I stepped into the temporary offices set up inside the white containers by the perimeter, my eyes searched without meaning to for that tall silhouette in a white thobe among the spread-out plans and yellow hard hats.

That morning, Rashid appeared without warning.

The crown prince’s convoy came through the south gate in three matte-black SUVs, no flags, no sirens, no visible escort. He got out of the second vehicle wearing an immaculate white thobe, the ghutra perfectly arranged, dark sunglasses covering the upper half of his face. The beard was still trimmed with that almost military precision I had seen the first time. But something had changed: even from a distance I noticed thin shadows under his eyes, as if sleep were taking its toll on him too.

I took off my hard hat and ran a hand through my hair, soaked with sweat and dust. I had left my shirt open three buttons because that day the heat index was close to fifty degrees. I felt, without wanting to, how his gaze stopped for half a second on my hairy chest and the old scars crossing my side. And I knew, with that certainty that only exists between two men who have already fucked, that he was remembering exactly the same thing I was: his tongue tracing those scars one by one in the silence of the suite.

—Your Highness —I greeted him, and my voice came out rougher than I had planned—. We weren’t informed of your visit.

Rashid took off his sunglasses. His black eyes pinned me exactly the way they had three months earlier, on the terrace, before the first kiss.

—No warning was necessary —he said, allowing himself the faintest smile—. I own the project. And many other things I have yet to claim.

We walked the site together. The engineers and foremen moved aside with that mixture of respect and fear the bin Tariq name inspired. Rashid asked technical details in a low, precise voice: curing times, the quality of the white marble that had just arrived from Carrara, modifications to the private wing of the palace. I answered with plans open in front of me, with calculations I knew by heart, with my mind on my work. But my hands were speaking another language. They gestured too close to his, almost brushing them, and at one point, when I pointed to the lower level plan over an improvised work table, his fingers covered mine for three eternal seconds.

Neither of us pulled away. I felt all the blood rush straight down to my groin. The loose work pants barely hid what was happening to me. Rashid noticed. He lowered his gaze for an instant, and a dark smile crossed his mouth before he recovered his prince’s composure.

—The plans have changed —Rashid murmured without looking at the paper—. There’s a suite I want added to the west wing. More secluded from the rest. More private. No access from the main corridor.

I swallowed.

—Your Highness, a change like that would delay phase two by at least six weeks. We’d have to redo the structural calculation and relocate two ventilation ducts.

Rashid lifted his gaze from the plan. The sun struck his cheek. A drop of sweat ran down his neck and disappeared under the white fabric of the thobe. I followed it with my eyes and imagined licking it from his collarbone to his ear.

—Six weeks is a small price —he said— for having a place where no one can enter without my permission.

The heat I felt then had nothing to do with Doha’s weather.

***

We managed to get away from the rest of the team once we had been touring the site for nearly an hour. We stopped beside a stack of steel beams piled in the meager shade of a yellow crane. The metal was so hot you could fry an egg on it.

—We can’t keep doing this —I whispered without looking at him, pretending to study a diagram—. Every time I come to the site, every time I see a message from you on my phone, I think about that night. About your cock in my mouth. About how you opened my ass with your tongue before you put it in me. I get hard in the middle of meetings, Your Highness, and it’s driving me crazy. I’m afraid someone’s going to notice the way I look at you. I’m afraid of myself.

Rashid took a step toward me. The smell of oud, sandalwood, and clean sweat filled the air I was breathing.

—You think I don’t think about you, Mateo? —His voice was a low growl, meant for only me to hear—. My wife sleeps beside me every night. My father wants an heir before the end of the year. And when I close my eyes, all I see are your callused hands spreading my ass and your mouth telling me, “I can’t stop thinking about you.” I fuck my wife thinking about you, engineer. I come inside her imagining I’m inside you again. I got married two months ago and I still taste the tobacco from your cigarette on my tongue and your come on the roof of my mouth.

I backed up until my spine hit the scorching metal. I barely felt it. My cock was hard as a rod inside my pants and my legs were shaking as if I’d run a marathon.

This is going to destroy both of us.

—They’ll deport me, Your Highness —I said at last—. I lose the contract, I lose my professional license, I go back to Montevideo ruined and with a red flag at every embassy in the Gulf. You… —I swallowed—. God knows what they’d do to you here with things like this. Your religion, your lineage, your wife, your father… there are too many things against you.

Rashid smiled with a bitterness that split me open inside.

—My religion taught me to fear hell since I was a child —he said—. And here in the desert, you’re teaching me that real hell can be spending whatever life I have left without touching you again. Without fucking you to the hilt again. Without hearing you beg me in Spanish not to stop.

We fell silent. Hot wind lifted thin columns of dust between us, as if the sand itself wanted to shove us into each other. In the distance, a foreman called him by his title; Rashid answered with a sharp wave of his hand without taking his eyes off mine. Before turning back, he dropped his gaze to the bulge distorting my pants and held it there for a full second, like someone laying claim to what was his.

Before returning to the convoy, he stopped a couple of steps away.

—There’s a private dinner tonight at the old palace —he said—. Just key investors from the project. You’re on the list. —He lowered his voice until it was barely a thread—. Come. Even if it’s only to torture ourselves a little more.

I wanted to say no. I wanted to say I’d buy a ticket to Barcelona that same afternoon and leave the project in my deputy’s hands. I wanted to say I was a grown man and I knew perfectly well when to run.

—I’ll be there —I answered instead.

***

The old palace of the bin Tariq family was half an hour from the city, hidden among soft dunes that changed shape with every storm. When I arrived, the wrought-iron lanterns were already lit and the music of the oud and qanun filled the inner courtyards with a discreet murmur. I left the car with the valet, straightened the black shirt I had chosen almost without thinking, and went in.

I saw him right away.

Rashid was in the center of the main hall, impeccable in a black thobe embroidered with gold thread, talking to two Qatari businessmen. The wedding ring gleamed on his right hand every time he lifted it to gesture. I was wearing my shirt open with no tie, my beard fuller than usual, the shadows under my eyes from three months of bad sleep.

Our gazes met over the crystal glasses.

And that was it for the dinner.

We did not speak alone. We did not touch. I was seated on the far side of a long dark-wood table, between a Bahraini sheikh and a Swiss banker who kept asking me about delivery deadlines and the cost of Italian marble. Rashid presided at the head. But every time he lifted his water glass, his eyes crossed the room until they found mine. And every time my fingers brushed the stem of my wine glass, I knew he was watching how I brought them to my mouth and sucked them for a moment before lowering them again.

It was an entire conversation held in silence.

A promise and a threat at the same time.

In the end, when the guests began to say their goodbyes and the staff cleared the plates onto silver trays, Rashid gave me the slightest nod of his chin toward the side corridor. I waited a couple of minutes so I wouldn’t raise suspicion. Then I went out.

The hallway was dark except for two bronze sconces. Rashid was waiting there, leaning against the wall, back straight, black eyes shining in the dimness.

When I got close, he lifted his hand and, with the back of two fingers, brushed the hand hanging at my side.

Just that.

A touch that lasted less than a second.

And it was enough to close my throat and make my cock hard against the seam of my pants.

—Three months —he whispered without looking directly at me—. And every day has been worse than the one before. Every time my wife works me with her hands, I think of yours. Every time she sits on top of me, I think about how you sat that night, taking yourself all the way until your ass touched my balls.

I clenched my fist until my nails dug into my palm. I had the urge to grab the collar of his thobe and slam him against that wall, tear the embroidery with my teeth and eat him right there, kneeling on the Persian marble, not caring if a guard might round the corner.

—How much longer are we going to keep pretending, Your Highness?

He lifted his eyes. His black eyes, in the soft light of the corridor, looked like two bottomless wells.

—As long as it takes —he said— for the whole world to stop mattering to me. Except you.

That was all. A servant appeared at the end of the hall carrying a tray of empty glasses, and Rashid withdrew toward the main room with the perfect elegance of a man who has spent his whole life hiding things. I stayed a few seconds longer, leaning against the cold wall, trying to remember how to breathe, my cock throbbing inside my pants like a second heart.

***

I went back to the hotel after midnight. I drove myself, with the window down and the desert air hitting my face. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer on a worksite and my erection still hadn’t gone down, stubborn, pressed against the zipper the entire way.

I went into room 1402 without turning on the lights. I tore off my black shirt without unbuttoning it and threw it to the floor. My pants fell at the foot of the bed. I stood naked in front of the window, Doha burning below in yellow lights, my cock pointing at the ceiling, the purple head shining in the dimness.

I threw myself face up onto the cool sheets. Closed my eyes.

And there he was again. Rashid in the black thobe embroidered in gold, kneeling between my spread legs, spitting on my cock before taking it down to the base like he had done that night on the terrace, with that prince’s mouth trained to recite surahs of the Quran now sucking on his knees in a hotel bed. I grabbed my cock with my right hand and started jerking off slowly, imitating the rhythm with which he had sucked me. The fingers of my left hand slid over my chest to pinch my nipple, and I imagined they were his, the wedding ring cold against my skin. I arched over the mattress like an animal.

—Your Highness —I murmured to the ceiling, like an obscene prayer—. Your Highness, Your Highness, Your Highness…

I spat into my palm and took my hand to my ass. I shoved two fingers inside to the knuckle, imagining it was his cock, and I screamed into the pillow when I hit the spot he had found that night with the tip. I fucked my own hand thinking of his face, his beard scraping my thighs, his voice growling, “That’s it, engineer, squeeze it.” I came over my stomach in a discharge so long I stopped counting the pulses, and the semen climbed up to my chest, to my neck, warm and thick, while I kept saying his name in a low voice as if he could hear me through the desert.

Rashid, meanwhile, returned to his private quarters in the new palace. His wife slept in the adjoining room, breathing peacefully like someone who still knew nothing at all. He locked himself in his own black-marble bathroom, pressed his forehead to the cold shower glass, and pulled his cock out of the silk pajama pants. He masturbated slowly, biting his lip until it bled so he wouldn’t shout, imagining Mateo’s mouth, Mateo’s callused hands, Mateo’s tight, hairy ass opening for him against the window of a suite from three months ago. He came against the glass in four thick spurts, breath coming in ragged bursts and one tear running down his cheek, and he didn’t know whether it was from pleasure or rage.

Neither of them slept that night.

The desert kept waiting, patient, with that centuries-old patience of the sands that have watched empires fall. And the contract neither of them had signed kept being written, line by line, in the silence growing between us.

I knew it that night, staring at the ceiling of room 1402 at the hotel with the semen still drying on my chest: sooner or later, we were going to sign it in ink. And when we did, there would be no going back for either of us.