“The opposite of love is apathy, and hatred is just love’s shadow—consume you with one, and you’re as lost as with the other, your mind chained to the same relentless fixation.”
My childhood flickered out like a faulty lightbulb, one final spark before everything went dark. What’s left are smears of sound and smoke: my mother’s bragging over secondhand trinkets, claiming status like we hadn’t pawned her gold; my father’s slow implosion when his tech startup folded into dust, his rage like static in the walls. My grandparents whispered about crossing checkpoints with wristwatches tucked into bags of expired rice, communist-era smugglers turned bitter patriots. Love wasn’t something we gave; it was something we bartered, embellished, weaponized. I learned to keep my mouth shut early, instinctively aware that truth would fracture their brittle delusions. And when I first felt myself burn for boys, I kept that fire hidden—sealed behind jokes, behind posture, behind detachment. Desire became a trespass I committed in silence.
When I married Steven, I told myself that history was closed. The obsessions I once called cravings—the wrong, beautiful men I used to chase with teeth clenched—those would rot in my past. For years, Arab men had possessed me in a way no other fantasy could. I hunted them like oxygen. I didn’t ask names. I didn’t want them to know mine. It was bodies in backrooms, sweat and heat and unspoken shame. The harder their accents, the thicker their chest hair, the more it pulled me under. I told myself it wasn’t political. That I wasn’t fetishizing. That it was hunger, pure and unfiltered. But I knew better. They were my fix, my guilt and thrill coiled into one.
Now, five years into a marriage built on honesty and stability, I feed the beast quietly. I don’t seek it out anymore—I click, I watch, I jerk off, and then I rinse myself clean. Steven knows who I was. What I liked. What I did. He never asked for details, and I never offered any. He loves me gently, even when I falter. His steadiness has a gravity to it. His humor catches me off guard. Some nights, he’ll say one stupid thing and I’ll laugh until I can’t breathe, and I remember how lucky I am. He isn’t exciting, but he’s safe. In a city that feels half-dead, Steven is alive.
After we left retail together, he moved on, started consulting. I stayed. Fell into insurance admin—risk assessments, claims appeals, spreadsheets that never end. We rent half a floor in an office block that used to house a prestigious bank, back before the street turned into a cracked boulevard of closed blinds and To Let signs. Our office is four rooms and a kitchenette, and I manage most of it now. Staff turnover is brutal. Talent’s vanished. It’s just me and three others, trying to file claims faster than the backlog devours us.
Then came Khalil.
He walked in one wet Thursday, CV in hand, soaked to the knees. His resume was strange, jagged—like someone had scraped pieces of truth off a mirror and glued them back wrong. He was born in Aleppo to secular parents, middle-class pharmacists, no history of faith. During his teens, he was sent to Belarus for engineering—his uncle had connections. What he found instead were nightclubs, older rich men buying women, amphetamines, and blonde sluts with vodka breath. He didn’t finish school. Got kicked out after brawling with a classmate. His visa expired. He bribed his way back into Europe through a fake language course in Poland. Along the way, he found a Moroccan woman ten years older, devout and veiled, who married him on paper and then kept him—she didn’t soften him, but she focused him. Now, he’s here. He has some certificate in claims adjustment from an online course. His references checked out, barely.
Khalil was stocky and thick-legged, with a boxer’s neck and a scar discreetly across his chin. His head was shaved smooth, his eyes a bruised dark, his shirt always tight across the chest. He wore cheap cologne and ironed everything. I hired him on instinct. Not because I trusted him, but because I felt like I already knew him. He was exact. Methodical. Hard on himself. He spoke with that same dense, syrupy accent I used to crave in porn. I told myself I was over it. That this was just nostalgia, not obsession.
Then he leaned over my desk to grab a lighter, and my mouth went dry. His bulge pressed against my knuckles—thick and forward, unflinching. I froze. I was his boss. Married. Responsible. And yet, my mind began dismantling itself. I imagined pushing his chair back, climbing under the desk. My mouth on denim, my hands peeling away fabric. I saw his cock—thick, straight, heavy at the base, sloping low over hairy thighs. Probably cut, flushed with blood. His balls like ripe fruit. The taste of him bitter, salt-stained, musky.
I forced myself to avoid him, but it didn’t work. One day he tried on a replacement company polo—slid it on over bare skin. The shirt clung, showing off his chest hair, curling black and wild, and the soft belly he carried under it. He didn’t suck in. Didn’t care. I excused myself to the bathroom and came without touching, just thinking about what he’d smell like.
Outside, the business district was a tomb. The coffee shop downstairs had closed last winter. Our building echoed. Most days we worked in silence, punctuated only by the clicking of keys and the rustle of files. I sat hunched over the front desk, and Khalil moved between filing cabinets behind me, lifting boxes like they were nothing.
That day, Khalil was sweating. The air-con wasn’t cutting it. His shirt darkened at the pits, clung wet to his belly. He grunted as he picked up a ream of paper and glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, Thomas, canz help? Fucking loadz heavy.” His voice cracked on the consonants, and I got up without thinking, walking over. Khalil turned his head just enough to see me watching.
Later, Khalil flopped down into the plastic chair across from me, his thighs spread like he owned the floor. “Quiet,” he muttered, scratching his stubble. “Always same. What you do when bored?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Check emails. Watch trailers. You?”
Khalil smiled, slow and tight. “I watch… different thingz.” He locked eyes with me. “You watch born?”
I flushed. “P-porn? I mean… sometimes.”
He nodded, then leaned forward. “You too, boss?” His foot nudged mine under the table. “I bet youz like forbidden stuff, yeah?”
I swallowed. “Ethnic stuff,” I whispered before I could stop myself. My voice sounded foreign in my own ears.
He leaned forward, and his breath was coffee and cigarettes. “You wanna know what I like?” he said, eyes steady. “Thingz that feel wrong but real. That kind of dirt you don’t clean off.”
Then he stood, stretched—shirt riding up again, hair tracing his belly—and walked off to the bathroom. He didn’t close the door all the way. I stayed frozen. A minute passed. Then another. He left the toilet and went to the office. And then I sneaked into the toilet myself.
The smell hit me first: sweat, arousal, something dense and fresh. The stall was empty, but on the tile floor, near the base of the toilet, were two thick drops—milky-white, viscous, unmistakably semen. Fresh.
I knelt, hand trembling, touched one. It clung to my fingertip like melted glue. I brought it to my nose. The scent made me shudder—raw, male, Khalil. I licked it, tentative. Bitter. Salted like skin. I jerked once, twice, mouth full of him, heart hammering. It felt filthy, primal, and for the first time in years, I didn’t care.
I cleaned up, washed my hands until they stung, and returned to the office with his taste still faint on my tongue. Khalil was in the back room again, stacking folders, humming some Arabic tune. He didn’t look at me.
“All sorted?” he asked without turning.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice thinned out to a whisper.
But a lot had shifted. We both felt it. The balance, the silence, the game. It had begun.