Sated
Two Men. Three Years Apart. Only One Fit.
She was sixteen days from being deported when she asked her new boss where to buy condoms.
Three years ago, Dolly Samuel’s mother put her on a plane out of Kerala. Nobody in that house ever used the word punishment. Nobody had to.
What they took from her was Irfan. Gentle, devoted, endlessly patient, and good to her in every way a man can be good to a woman. She has spent three years believing that losing him was the tragedy, and that the restless thing she could never put a name to was a defect in herself.
Now the visa is running out. There is one nursing job left in all of Bahrain that will still take her, one interview standing between her and a flight home to Thrissur, and a black dress that has never once failed to do its job.
Faris Al Ansari is not what she expected. Younger. Rumpled. Wire-rimmed glasses he keeps taking off and cleaning every single time his eyes drop below her face.
He gives her the job.
Then she stops in his doorway and asks him one last question, and finds out in a single night exactly what has been missing, and that it was never a defect at all.
A full-length standalone. Explicit throughout, no cliffhanger, no fade to black. Adults only, 18+.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Dolly Samuel came to Bahrain three years ago on a student visa. She finished the degree, got the licence, and has been waiting ever since for somebody to give her a nursing job. This afternoon she has an interview. It is the last one of the day, and the last one she has left.
At two minutes to four, a door opened and a woman walked out. She was holding her file against her chest with both arms. Tight.
A candidate. She kept her head down as she walked past where Dolly was sitting.
“Ms. Samuel?”
Her head snapped forward. The first thing she registered was that he was not what she had built.
She had built a man in his fifties. Thobe, or else a very good suit. Somebody’s uncle with a wall of framed photographs and a habit of talking to the middle distance over your head.
What she got was a man in his early thirties, and about six foot two, which against her five foot two she noticed immediately and filed. Slightly rumpled with it. Collar button open, sleeves turned back to the elbow. Wire glasses. Dark hair that had been dealt with hours ago and had since made its own arrangements.
The questions were correct and standard, and he asked them well. Her clinical background. Her licence. What she had done with three years.
“Stamina,” he said, to the file. “Riffa will run twelve-hour shifts on rotation. Nights included.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s a long time on your feet.”
“I can go all night,” Dolly said pleasantly. “I’ve done it before.”
Faris did not look up.
He reached up, took his glasses off, and started cleaning them on the hem of his shirt.
His eyes without them were dark, a good deal warmer than they were behind lenses, and they were currently directed at the middle distance with tremendous concentration. He put them back on. He asked her something about difficult patients. She answered it fully and correctly, in complete sentences, while a separate department of her brain got on with the business of removing his shirt.
“Hands,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Cannulation. Difficult veins. Elderly, dehydrated, collapsed.”
“I’m good with my hands,” Dolly said.
He glanced up.
It was a routine glance, the sort you make to check an expression before you frame the next question. Except that it went fractionally south of her face on the way.
He caught himself instantly. Cleared his throat. Reached up.
Glasses off again.
Cleaned a second time.
They did not need cleaning.
The interview ran forty-one minutes. At the end of it he slid an offer letter across the desk, and Dolly read it properly, and took the job.
Dolly picked up her bag. She walked to the door. Her hand was on the frame.
She stopped.
“I had one last question,” Dolly said.
He waited.
“Now that work is done,” she said, and tilted her head slightly, watching him, “what about play?”
The silence ran three full seconds.
She watched it move across his face. The surprise first. Then something a good deal warmer. Then the flush, which started somewhere under the open collar and travelled upward at a speed she found genuinely impressive.
He opened his mouth. A sound came out that was not a word. He closed it again.
“I — that is to say —” He stopped. Started again. “I’m not sure that’s —”
“Forget it,” Dolly said, taking pity. “Just tell me one thing.” She kept her face perfectly straight. “Where does a person buy condoms around here?”
The flush went nuclear.
Continue the story in Sated.
A little more spice — on me — for my lovers
This part is for my lovers only.
Sign up, sweetheart — it’s free, and I don’t bite. Unless asked 😉
All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.