Love's Slave (manxman)

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

(Kamal's kitchen)

**For some reason when I was writing this chapter, this song popped into my head and I thought it fit. So please enjoy Fantasia's "When I See You." Merry Christmas to all of you and Happy New Year, thank you for all your support and I hope the New Year brings you much happiness, success, health, love, and joy.  xoxo, Dianna

Jameel

Spreading the Argan oil moisturizer over my already dewy skin, I took one last wistful look at the masterpiece that was Kamal's bathtub. Taking a bath in it's sunken decadence was like swimming in a personalized pool sitting on top of the world. I wrapped myself in the warm, oversized fluffy bathrobe and stood there for a minute to let the heat of the material soak into my chilled body. Giving all thanks to Allah that I'm alive and fortunate enough to reach this point, and this place in my life. A place I couldn't even have imagined mere months ago. I'd truly thought I was going to live out a miserable existence in that filthy room. Having to endure the cruelties that man visited upon me until I died. Sometimes I had wished for death, but Allah had other plans for me and I should have never questioned my fate.

Even though Kamal was related to the man by blood, I couldn't bring myself to hold it against him or his family for my years of abuse in that house. Not when they've been so good to me. They had no clue how depraved the man was. They had no idea I'd even existed, locked away in that prison and treated like whore he'd called me time and time again. Forced to endure atrocities no other human to visit on another person. I brushed the tips of my fingers over the scars on my groin. Kamal hadn't been disgusted with them, he'd said they shouldn't bring me shame. He's emphatically expressed that the multiple scars represented the fact that I was strong, I was a survivor, that I'd been to hell stared the devil in the face and lived to tell the tale.

But what a tale it was. I tied the sash to my oversized robe and looked at my reflection in the mirror. Kamal had explained a lot of things to me. We sat for hours and hours talking about my ordeal at the hands of his grandfather. He told me that I shouldn't be ashamed of the things that happened to me because it was more than obvious I didn't have any control whatsoever in that house. I was the victim of a very sick, and possibly a mentally ill person. Kamal had painted a picture so vividly alive, so all consuming about life in general. He shared his life story with me, his trials and his triumphs. He's shared his deepest most private feelings about being a man who is attracted to other men. The term he used was gay, or a homosexual man.

Kamal had pulled up website after website and showed me that there are plenty of people who happened to love others of the same sex. There were some who didn't like either sex or people who loved both men and women. I was shocked to my core when I learned that there were men and women in this vast world that felt that they were born in the wrong body, some of them have even gone through medical treatments and surgeries to change themselves to fit who they felt they were on the inside. Then there were some who just felt more secure dressed as the opposite sex. I could identify with that, I was more comfortable wearing my hijab and my abaya than I was wearing Americanized male garments like slacks and shirts, or even the men's lightweight traditional cotton thawb.

There was so much information, so many things I had idea about or knowledge of. So many sights, sounds, and general things in one's everyday life I've missed out on. There are days that I feel so inadequate, so uneducated, and simple that it did in fact make me feel ashamed. But once again, like an angel perched on my shoulder, Kamal was there to reinforce that I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. He's even caught me in a very uncompromising position and instead of making feel like some kind of deviant, he'd climbed into that tub with me and made me feel like I was the most desired thing in his life. Sometimes I would catch him looking at me with those dark eyes of his smoldering with some internal fire, and my skin tingled not with shame but for other reasons altogether.