The Arrangement
"His father's new Malindi wife was supposed to be a marriage of convenience. She has other arrangements in mind."
My father's third wife arrives in January.
The wedding is small—just paperwork and a nikah at the local mosque, no fanfare. Amira bint Omar comes with two suitcases and a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes.
"A marriage of convenience," my father explained when he first told me. "She needs citizenship. I need someone to manage the house while I travel. Everyone benefits."
He didn't mention that she was forty-four. Didn't mention the curves that made my mouth go dry when I first saw her. Didn't mention that she'd be living in the room next to mine while he spent eight months a year in Dubai.
Everyone benefits, he said.
I'm starting to think he was right.
Amira is half-Yemeni, half-Swahili.
Born in Malindi to a mixed family, raised between the coast and the Arabian Peninsula. She carries herself like royalty—spine straight, chin high, moving through my father's beach house like she was born to own it.
Which, in a way, she was born to want.
"My first husband died poor," she tells me one evening. "We're on the veranda, watching the Indian Ocean turn gold. "My second husband left me poorer. This—" She gestures at the house, the land, the view. "This is what I should have had all along."
"And my father?"
"Is a good man who needs a wife and doesn't want romance." She sips her juice. "I'm a practical woman who needs security and doesn't want to pretend. It works."
"Sounds lonely."
She looks at me. Her eyes are dark, lined with kohl, ancient.
"Everything is lonely, Omar. Marriage, singlehood, everything." She sets down her glass. "The only question is what kind of loneliness you can live with."
My father leaves three weeks after the wedding.
Business in Dubai. Then Abu Dhabi. Then Muscat. The pattern of his life—gone for months, back for weeks, always moving.
"Take care of her," he says at the airport. "She's your mother now."
I look at Amira, standing beside me in her modest dress, curves straining against the fabric.
"I'll take care of her."
She doesn't need much taking care of.
She runs the household with quiet efficiency—managing the staff, handling the bills, keeping the beach house in perfect order. What she needs is... less practical.
"I'm bored, Omar."
It's month two. We're at dinner, just the two of us, which has become normal. The cook has outdone himself—grilled fish, coconut rice, fresh mango—but Amira picks at her plate.
"What kind of bored?"
"The kind that comes from having nothing to do except wait for a man who's never here."
"We could go into town. The marina has—"
"That's not what I mean." She sets down her fork. "I'm forty-four years old. I've been married three times. And I've never once had a man who actually wanted me. Who looked at me with—" She stops. "Never mind."
"With what?"
"Hunger." The word hangs in the air. "Your father looks at me like a business asset. My previous husbands looked at me like a burden. But you—"
"Amira—"
"Don't pretend you don't." She stands, moves around the table. "I see you, Omar. I see you looking at me when you think I don't notice. My hips when I walk. My chest when I bend. I'm not young, and I'm not thin, but I know when a man wants me."
She stops in front of my chair. Close. Too close.
"Do you want me, Omar?"
I should say no. Should remember she's my father's wife. Should think about consequences and betrayal and all the reasons this is wrong.
"Yes."
She straddles me right there in the dining room.
Her weight settles on my lap—two hundred and forty pounds of Yemeni-Swahili woman—and she kisses me like she's been waiting her whole life for permission.
"Not here," she gasps. "The staff—"
"Where?"
"My room. Our room now."
Her bedroom is larger than mine.
Overlooking the ocean, decorated with silk and oud, the kind of luxury my father built for a wife he'd never appreciate. She locks the door behind us.
"I should feel guilty," she says, undressing herself. "I don't."
The dress falls. She's wearing nothing underneath.
Her body is a geography of excess—heavy breasts with dark nipples, a round belly marked with silver stretch marks, hips that curve outward like the prow of a dhow. Her thighs are thick, dimpled, pressing together.
"Your father hasn't touched me since the wedding night," she says. "And that was... perfunctory. Two minutes. Maybe less."
"I'm not my father."
"Prove it."
I prove it.
I take my time. Kiss every inch of her. Worship her breasts until she's gasping, then move lower—her belly, her thighs, the heat between them. When I taste her, she screams.
"Omar!"
I eat her until she comes. Then again. Then a third time, until she's begging for mercy, until she's pulling me up by my hair.
"Inside me. Now. Please—"
I strip. Her eyes go wide.
"That's—your father isn't—"
"I told you. I'm not my father."
I sink into her slowly.
She gasps, adjusts, accommodates. Tight from neglect, but wet enough to take me. When I'm fully inside, I pause.
"Okay?"
"Move. Wallahi, move—"
I move.
And I don't stop.
I fuck her until the bed breaks—literally breaks, one leg snapping under our combined weight. We collapse onto the tilted mattress, laughing, and then I fuck her on the floor instead.
She comes three more times before I let myself finish.
When I finally spill inside her, she's crying.
"Thank you," she whispers. "Thank you, thank you—"
"We're just getting started."
We establish a routine.
My father calls twice a week. We answer together, the dutiful son and wife. She tells him the house is fine. I tell him business is good. Neither of us mentions what happens after we hang up.
Every night, I go to her room.
Every night, she's waiting.
The arrangement, we call it. My father arranged for her to be here. We've arranged something of our own.
"What happens when he comes back?" she asks one midnight.
We're in bed—her bed, our bed now—tangled in sheets that smell like sex and oud.
"We're more careful."
"For how long?"
"As long as we need to be."
"And if he finds out?"
I pull her closer. Feel her weight against me, her softness, her warmth.
"Then we deal with it."
"You'd risk that? For this?"
"For you." I kiss her forehead. "Yes."
She's quiet for a long moment.
"I've never had anyone who would risk anything for me."
"You have me now."
My father comes home for two weeks in August.
We're perfect. Polite stepmother and dutiful stepson. Separate rooms. Proper behavior. He never suspects a thing.
"She seems happy," he observes one day. "More relaxed than when she arrived."
"The ocean agrees with her."
"I'm glad. I was worried she'd be lonely."
I think about the things that have kept her from being lonely. The sounds she makes at night. The weight of her on top of me.
"She's adjusted well."
He leaves again in September.
Before his taxi arrives, Amira kisses his cheek like a proper wife.
Then she looks at me over his shoulder.
Tonight, her eyes say.
I nod slightly.
Tonight.
The arrangement continues.
My father's business keeps him away. His wife keeps me close. The beach house becomes our world—days of domesticity, nights of hunger satisfied.
"Is this love?" she asks one evening.
"I don't know."
"Does it matter?"
"Not to me."
She smiles. "Good. I've had enough of love. It always disappoints." She pulls me closer. "This never does."
Years pass.
My father grows older, travels less. But by then, the arrangement is so natural that no one questions it—the devoted stepson who takes care of his father's wife, the grateful wife who manages his home.
They don't see what happens behind closed doors.
They don't need to.
Some marriages are convenient.
Some arrangements are more.
And some stepmothers become something else entirely.
Mama Amira.
That's what the staff calls her.
But in the dark, with the ocean murmuring outside, she's just Amira.
And she's mine.