A NIGHT WITH THE PRINCE OF DUBAI

The heat hit Mia the moment the plane doors opened, thick and gold and entirely unlike anything Oregon had ever produced. She stood at the top of the jet bridge for a second too long, letting it settle into her lungs, and thought: I am so far from home.

That was the point, of course. Her sister had practically shoved the plane ticket into her hands three weeks earlier — a graduation gift, six years late, purchased the moment Mia finally admitted out loud that she was tired. Tired of the breakup that had ended eighteen months ago and still somehow occupied a room in her chest. Tired of being the reliable one, the one who never did anything reckless enough to need a passport stamp.

"Go somewhere that doesn't know you," her sister had said. "Come back different."

Dubai had not known her for exactly four hours when she lost her hotel confirmation email, her phone battery, and most of her patience, standing in the marble lobby of a hotel that was not, in fact, hers. The concierge was polite but unmovable. Her actual hotel, it turned out, was eleven minutes away by taxi and she had no cash, no data, and a growing, hysterical urge to laugh.

She wandered instead. That was Mia's way — when plans collapsed, she walked until the world reorganized itself. The Gold Souk unfurled around her in impossible amounts of glitter, narrow lanes hung with more gold than she'd seen in her entire life, vendors calling out prices in six languages at once. She let herself be swallowed by it, camera in hand, grief and jet lag both dissolving a little in the noise and light.

She did not see the man step out of the doorway of a spice shop, phone pressed to his ear, expression dark with some argument she'd never know the content of. She only felt the collision — her shoulder into his chest, her camera strap catching, both of them stumbling toward the ornamental fountain at the lane's center with the specific horror of two people about to become extremely wet in public.

He caught her wrist. Steadied them both. The fountain sighed innocently behind them.

"I am so sorry," he said, in English polished by some expensive education, laughter already threatening the corners of his mouth. "I wasn't looking."

"Neither was I." She was laughing too, now, adrenaline and absurdity. "Is this a bad omen? Nearly drowning someone in the first four hours?"

"Only if you don't let me buy you coffee to apologize." He said it easily, as it cost him nothing, though something flickered behind his eyes — a wariness she wouldn't understand until much later. "There's a place two streets from here. Best karak in the souk. I promise not to push you into anything else."

She should have said no. Every instinct her mother had ever installed in her said no, absolutely not, strange man in a foreign country. But his eyes were kind, and steady, and there was something almost relieved in the way he was looking at her, like she was a problem he hadn't known he needed.

"I'm Mia," she said instead.

"Rashid," he answered, and did not offer a last name. She did not think, in that moment, to ask for one.