it only earned me a curse and more pulling on my pants and hard pressure on my legs from the women to make me stay in place.
Once my pants were all the way down my legs, my tears and screams were uncontrollable. But despite how foggy my mind was, I remembered one thing that I was truly sure of: I remembered who could save me from all of this. I remembered how he would stop it all, how he was my safety, and how he was my comfort. So I cried out at the top of my lungs, wishing, hoping and praying that he would hear me.
“Mazen!” My call for him was a scream, my voice hoarse and my tone speaking of undying fear. “Mazen, please, help me! MAZEN!” A new round of tears found their way out of my eyes, as I remembered myself in a situation I’d been in before that’d had me calling the same way I was now. But that was to a man who I’d loved more than the whole world, a man who never replied to me nor came to my rescue because he was already dead, and the memory hurt just as much as the reality had.
“No, stop it!” I cried out. “Stop it, stop it!” The queen was now pulling on the side of my panties, but my arms and legs didn’t stop struggling against the five women that were holding me down. I was trying my hardest to press my legs together so my panties would stay in place.
Being that nude in front of those strange women filled me with shame and embarrassment, and my tears rolled down even heavier.
When my body started to give out, and my throat hurt so bad because of all of the screaming, I knew there was no way out of this. I even started wishing that the queen would just see that I was a virgin and not put that cloth inside of me to see if I would bleed or not. I was that desperate, but because I’d been a fighter my whole life, I tried one more time. “Mazen, please, please, please!” I pleaded shrilly. “Mazen! Help me, Mazen, please!”
It was only when I heard his voice and saw him entering the room, followed by an out-of-breath and panting Mona, that my body stilled, and my breaths slowed down just a bit. His orders, that weren’t in a language I knew, caused the women to release my hands and legs immediately–including the queen, who let go of my underwear that she’d pulled from the side down my left thigh.
I saw his eyes which were filled with shock, disbelief and anger as they traveled from his grandmother, who was now sitting on the floor, to my shaking form on the bed, and then to his grandmother again. It only took less than a second before his decision was made to come to me first, especially after his grandmother pointed to me while telling him something, as if she was encouraging him to help me first.
His yelling didn’t stop, not even when the women hurried out of the room. I pulled my legs up to my body and curled into a ball, hugging my knees to my chest as I sat on the bed, not even finding the will to try and adjust my undies back in place.
The prince’s hands pulled his mother off of the bed by her shoulders, not forcibly, but with enough pressure to remove her from the bed, which pissed her off. She started yelling at the prince, who yelled back at her with an even louder voice that was almost deafening. I’d never seen him that mad, not even when he was hitting Jasem. His face was red, and I’d bet that was what he saw as well: red, his anger causing him to forget his promise to only speak in English in my presence.
Their foreign language was scaring me most of all, because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I was shaking. “Mazen,” I gasped his name through trembling lips, needing him near, to get her out of here, to end all of this, to close our bedroom door and to let it all be peaceful again.
He only looked at me for a second, his hard eyes too angry to soften, before he looked at Mona, who was now trying to help the Queen Mother into her wheelchair again, but failing. He told her to do something that