A Lustful Kidnapping

The highest hill near the ancient Jordanian town of Madaba, thirty kilometers southwest of the capital city of Amman and the only one around with tree covering—olive tree orchards—on it rose from the rear of the Phoenix Palace Hotel in the suburb of Al-Faysallya. Nineteen-year-old American college student, Paul Townsend, liked to do his running here not only because of the incline of the hill or the pathways cut through the orchards, providing some filtered shelter from the sun, but also because Rafik Zawati did his running here as well, and the orchards provided not only shade but some privacy for rest periods from the running.

Paul attended the American University of Madaba to the north of the city, where he was studying archaeology in close proximity to excavation work in Madaba, once a trade route crossroads in the Middle East and where important Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics had been uncovered and were being more extensively studied. His father, once an Exxon Oil executive and more recently divorced and settled in Jordan as a senior official of the Jordanian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, lived in Amman. He had brought Paul, somewhat undersized of stature, but well-formed and a handsome blond, blue-eyed young man, with him to Amman, and Paul, taking an interest in archaeology, could see no better place to go to college than the nearby American University of Madaba, where he could combine studies with practical experience at the excavations there.

He knew Rafik Zawati from their combined sports activities on the soccer field. Paul played for the university soccer team. Rafik, twenty-six, achingly handsome, sultry-dark, hard bodied and the result of Arabic breeding with Crusaders, was a standout player on the Jordanian national soccer team. He also was the teacher in charge of athletics at the Al-Faysallya Secondary Boy’s School and ran regularly on the hill behind the nearby Phoenix Palace Hotel. Whereas Paul had been raised in wealth and the privilege that goes with being American and living abroad, Rafik had come up in life the hard way—orphaned and living hand to mouth in the alleys of Amman. In doing so, he learned to survive and folded in with the criminal underbelly of the city. Despite the contrast and their difference in age, the two fit together not only because of their shared interest in soccer and running and because Rafik was a source of recreational drugs, but also because they both were actively gay and Rafik was a rough top and Paul was a submissive, preferring it rough.

Rafik was running in place at the base of the hill behind the hotel gardens as Paul drove into the hotel parking lot, parked, and jogged over to him. Each of them was wearing just athletic shorts, jocks, and running shoes. Instead of stopping to greet Rafik, Paul punched the Arab lightly in the bicep as he passed him, gave the older man a grin, and raced up the hill and into the olive trees. Rafik, the more powerful of the two and with the better running legs, hesitated for a moment and then followed. Paul ran and Rafik jogged. They worked their way in and out of the regularly spaced trees in zigzag fashion up the side of the hill, over the top and down a bit of the other side, on the side facing north, away from the village. Here the scrub was scruffier, the trees having been played out and not cared for as well as those on the southern slope.

Here there was more cover, more privacy.

Rafik caught up to Paul, Paul winded from the run, Rafik as fresh as when he had started, by an olive tree with low-hanging branches, the ones near the bottom bare and played out, the tree well off the foot path. The older man reached out, grabbed Paul by the throat, and pulled him into a brutal kiss. His other hand went to the waistband of his own athletic shorts, which, after extracting a condom disk from a pocket, he pushed down, along with the jock strap. The shorts and jock went to the ground, as Rafik forced Paul to his knees in front of him, positioned the younger man’s face in front of his crotch, and pressed the bulb of his engorged cock at the blond’s lips. Paul opened his mouth, took the cock in, and gave it suck. At the same time, he pushed his shorts down off his waist, handed his own cock and stroked himself what he sucked the cock.

Neither man had said anything in preparation for this. They didn’t have to. They’d done this before.

When he felt like doing so, Rafik jerked Paul up onto his feet, backhanded him across the cheek, turned him, and forced him down onto his belly between the low-hanging branches of the olive tree. Paul, conditioned to respond to authoritarian control, murmured, “Yes, yes, yes,” as the older man crouched behind him, one hand palming Paul’s belly and the other alternating between slapping Paul’s bare buttocks and distending and squeezing the young man’s balls, while the Arab ate the American’s ass out.

Paul extended his arms, grabbing for a hold on the gnarled branches of the olive tree, as Rafik stood, loomed over the smaller man’s body, rolled on the condom, put his cock in place, and thrust up inside Paul’s channel, penetrating slowly but forcefully, stretching the young man’s passage. Paul cried out, with no one up here on the deserted side of the hill to hear him, as Rafik started to pump him hard and deep. One of Rafik’s hands alternated from holding Paul in place by palming the young man’s belly and slapping Paul hard on the rump, as his other hand gripped the young man’s chin, pulling Paul’s head painfully back into Rafik’s chest, and Rafik’s fingers covering Paul’s mouth, controlling the young man’s breathing so that Paul was completely under his control. Paul’s hands scrabbled ineffectively at the Arab’s hard body for a few moments but gave up and dangled uselessly at the American’s side.

The fuck completed, Rafik let Paul sink to the ground under the tree, jerked his shorts and jock back on, turned, and ran off to complete his run.

Exhausted, Paul lay there for a bit, his run over, his body racked with aches from the brutal taking, but a slight smile on his face and a purr in his throat. He liked it rough. It made him feel alive. He needed to be cruelly mastered.

When Paul had walked, gingerly, back down the southern slope of the hill to the hotel parking lot, Rafik was there, leaning up against the fender of Paul’s silver 2005 SLK Mercedes sports coupe, smiling, looking oh so sexy, and smoking a cigarette.

* * * *

Lionel Townsend’s villa in Amman, adjacent to the Amman National Park and the Bisharrat Golf Club, was small, but it was well-appointed, with a large lot accommodating a stone terrace and Olympic-sized swimming pool and was in an exclusive part of town. Townsend’s position put him in charge of acquiring the oil and gas contracts for Jordan, which had been unlucky in the wheels’ spin for underground oil deposits and had to import most of its energy needs. Townsend was currently in negotiations with both the Kuwait Petroleum Company and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company bids for the Jordan contract for the next ten years. The Abu Dhabi company negotiator, Sheik Zayed al-Bunduq, was in town, and when Paul and Rafik Zawati arrived to use the villa’s pool, Paul had every reason to think his father was in talks with Al-Bunduq at the Energy Ministry.

The house was unoccupied when they arrived. Thus, Paul had reason to assume they were alone when he guided Rafik through the villa and to the pool at the back. He had driven the Arab into Amman as Rafik had a national team soccer practice in Amman later that afternoon. He had time to kill before that, though, and the two had decided to cool off in Paul’s dad’s pool.

They did cool off, but after that they heated up, as Paul rode Rafik’s cock on a pool bed on the other side of the pool from the house. Rafik was on his back on the lounger, facing the villa, and Paul was straddled on Rafik’s cock, also facing the villa. The younger blond was rising and falling on the swarthy Arab’s cock, as Rafik controlled the bounce with a collar on a leash around Paul’s neck and with sharp slaps of his other hand on Paul’s flanks and bouncing buttocks.

Mid fuck, Paul looked up at the villa to see that a man was standing there on the back, glassed-in porch, watching them fuck. He was an older man in full Arab dress—sparkling white robe, buttoning down the front that was called a thawb in the Middle East region, and a white, flowing head scarf on his head, a ghutra, with a black head band.

Paul surmised that this must be Sheik Al-Bunduq and that his father must have brought the Abu Dhabi negotiator back to the villa either to entertain him or to continue the negotiations and that the man had come out onto the porch to see the pool. He was seeing more than the pool, though, and, as he remained standing there and watching, he was obviously finding it entertaining.

In this surmise, Paul was correct. The man was the Abu Dhabi sheik. He also was entertained. Zayed al-Bunduq was a weathered and wizened chieftain of the desert. He wasn’t a stranger to what men could do with other men and he was a connoisseur in the techniques suggested by how Rafik was controlling Paul by the pool with the throat leash and the slaps on the rump. Al-Bunduq was a virile, vigorous man in his fifties, tall and muscular, so hawk nosed and ugly that he was attractive, and cruel in his sexual demands. He was particularly aroused by small, young blond men, such as Paul was, who were hard to find and put under him in the Middle East, which accounted for his frequent visits to Hamburg, Germany, where what he enjoyed was available in abundance.

He was aroused by the play of Rafik and Paul at the pool, but he didn’t linger long in the porch. He didn’t want Lionel Townsend to come looking for him and see the interest he’d taken in the sport transpiring by the pool. He’d seen photos of Paul Townsend in the house already and been drawn to the handsome young blond, so he realized this was the son of the man he was negotiating with.

He kept the meeting short but cordial and hopeful, and was waiting in his rented limousine with the driver and bodyguard who had been supplied to him by his Amman underworld connections when Rafik came out of the Townsend villa compound to find a taxi to take him to the Amman International Stadium in Al Hussein Youth City for his soccer practice. Al-Bunduq’s bodyguard, who Rafik knew and trusted, called the young man over to the limousine, where a short discussion transpired between the Abu Dhabi sheik and Rafik before the soccer player entered the car to get a ride to the stadium.

* * * *

Rafik Zawati was waiting, running in place, as usual, in the back garden of the Phoenix Palace Hotel when Paul Townsend arrived in his Mercedes coupe, parked it in the hotel parking lot, ran past Rafik in shorts and running shoes, blew the Arab hunk a kiss, and ran up the zigzagging trail to the summit of the hill and over that down to the overgrown orchard with its low-branch olive trees. Rafik gave the slower runner a good hard start before he nodded to two men getting out of a black van in the hotel parking lot. Then he followed Paul up the hill.

At the olive tree where they had met up and fucked before, Paul was stripped naked and had perched himself on low-hanging branches of the olive tree, his legs splayed, feet hooked in the branches, and his arms extended, his hands grasping branches above him. When Rafik arrived, he stripped down and climbed up into the tree to where his crotch was at the level of Paul’s face. Paul took the Arab’s cock in his mouth and gave him suck.

When Rafik was ready he jumped down from the tree, knelt in front of Paul and gave the younger man’s cock, balls, and hole attention, opening him up, while Paul swayed in the branches and groaned and moaned softly.

Rafik fucked Paul there with Paul splayed out in the embrace of the olive tree branches. As he did so, he grasped Paul’s throat and controlled his breathing. Paul’s eyes were bugging out and he was gagging when the fuck became intense and Rafik was pounding him deep and hard. As the Arab started into the release of his cum, he moved his thumbs up under Paul’s jaw bone, into the soft tissue there. Pressing in the right place, Paul gurgled, his eyes rolled up into his head, and he blacked out.

Two Arabs with balaclava masks on appeared and, taking Paul’s slumped body between them, carried him down the hill, and, seeing no one else about, bundled him into a black van and drove off.

Rafik had extracted the keys to the Mercedes from the pocket of Paul’s shorts, which hadn’t been put back on the young man and continued on his usual run on the hill pathways before he came down to the base of the hill, once more looking around to see if anyone was watching before he unlocked and entered the Mercedes. The coupe was found the next day in a parking lot on the American University of Madaba grounds.

* * * *

The two abductors kept the balaclavas on when they manhandled Paul into the room where he was kept prisoner for four days. This wasn’t anything like Paul had experienced before and he was scared shitless. So, after he regained consciousness, finding his wrists were bound behind his back, there was a cloth bag over his head, and he was lying on what seemed to be the floor of a moving vehicle, he was completely disoriented and had no idea how long the vehicle had been moving. He did discern after a while that they seemed to have left a highway and entered an urban area where the movement was slower and jerkier and he could hear the sounds of city life.

He also had no idea what sort of building the two thugs manhandled him into other than he was hustled up some stairs. It was a Tallaini Street male brothel in the red-light district of Amman’s Jubaiha section. Paul, in fact, had been in two secretly located gay bars within a block of this brothel, but he would have no idea they were nearby. The men were rough with him but not brutal.

When the cloth bag came off his head and his wrists were released, he was in a tiled bathroom and one of the hooded men was telling him in slow, simple Arabic to shower and clean himself out—that it would be a while before he’d get another bathroom break. The men seemed to know that he was an English speaker but that he could manage some rudimentary Arabic. Paul understood what they meant about not having relief time again for a while immediately after he’d showered and toweled himself off.

Returning to a small connected the bathroom he only had time to register that there was a double bed and a café table with a straight chair and that the room had walls covered with heavy, padded blankets over cinder block and two small, horizontal barred windows high on the wall under the ceilings. He was to learn that the padding was for noise insulation. He got his first inkling that that was the case when he saw that there was a St. Andrew’s cross X-frame set against one wall and chains with wrist cuffs hanging down over an open space in the room. The tile floor was slight sloping to a drain in the floor.

The windows didn’t emit light, so they must have been shuttered from the outside. He didn’t have time to take much else in because the two men, efficiently working in consort, had Paul spread-eagled, face down, on the bed and tied off with restraints, ankles and wrists, at the four corners of the bed. They stuffed a bolster under his belly, lifted and rolling his pelvis up—and pretty much telling Paul what was going to happen to him shortly—and withdrew from the room, shutting the door with a solid sound. Paul heard the lock click. It didn’t matter much; he was bound to the bed, naked, anyway. They had left nothing in the room he could use as clothing. He had still been wearing his running shoes when they brought him into the room, but they took those off him and with them with they left.

He didn’t have to wait long. A tall, elderly Arab in a white thawb entered the room. Paul recognized him as the Abu Dhabi oil company negotiator who had watched him riding Rafik’s cock by the pool at his father’s villa in Amman—Sheik Zayed al-Bunduq. Paul had no idea whether the sheik knew who he was and he certainly didn’t think Al-Bunduq would realize that Paul knew who the sheik was.

The sheik was holding a leather strap that he flicked against his thigh as he stood over the bed and unbuttoned and flared his thawb, and Paul began to moan from that point. Al-Bunduq was naked under the thawb and when he’d shrugged the thawb off his shoulders to puddle to the floor around him all he had was the strap in his hand. The sheik was a gaunt, deeply tanned, leather-skinned old man of the desert, but he was hard-bodied and sinewy, hawk-nosed, of cruel aspect and stood ram-rod straight. His eyes were black and piercing, showing sharp wits and cleverness. No lies would get beyond him. He would know when Paul’s screams were genuine or faked to gain sympathy. His cock was in full, upcurved erection and its leathery ball sacs drooped against his muscular thighs.

There was no question what business had brought him to this padded-wall cell. This was to be fulfillment of his sexual fantasy with a luscious, young blond and blue-eyed man, a young man who the sheik knew took the cock and took it rough and cruel.

He had no idea how well the young man would take the strap and more, but he would now find out. There were no introductions, no explanations. The young man lay there, on the bed, bound and spread-eagled, naked and at his mercy. Even Paul, moaning deeply already, realized that the sheik was not a man of mercy. The look in his eye and the hardness of his cock marked him a man consumed with lust at this moment.

He lifted his arm up and snapped it down. Paul cried out in surprise and pain as the strap struck his buttocks. Arm raised and snapped down to the sound of the crack on the young man’s buttocks, back, and thighs, as Paul cried out in surprise and pain—although there was more surprise, fear, and frustration than pain. The sheik wasn’t putting a lot of force behind the beating; it sounded more ominous than it was.

Still, Paul screamed for the old man, and the old man laughed as he set about his work—and his pleasure. The purpose of the whipping became apparent in the hardening it produced in the old man’s erection.

When Paul had stopped writhing and crying out and had subsided into sobs and whimpers, the sheik dropped the strap on the floor by the bed, came up onto the bed on his knees between the young man’s spread legs, and buried his face in Paul’s ass crack. As Paul resumed his writhing and moaning, now more in passion than pain, in response to the man eating his ass out, Al-Bunduq let his hands glide all over the youth’s body, enjoying the smoothness and resilience of the young skin. A hand went under the young man’s body, grasped Paul’s cock, and he stroked him off to an ejaculation, Paul was reduced to pants and moaning and, eventually, moving his hips in response to the hand job and the tongue working inside his passage.

The initial cries of “Mercy, please, no” from the young man subsided into declarations of “Oh, shit. Oh, fuck,” and, eventually, as Paul adjusted to the pain-passion of the taking into the realization that he had fantasized this using of his body and became deep moans and murmurs of “Yes, yes, like that. Oh, god, yes.”

When Paul ejaculated, the sheik rose behind him, took up the strap again, and put it into use to bring himself back to a rock-hard erection. This accomplished, he tossed the strap aside, hovered over and on top of Paul’s body, put the bulb of his thick cock in position, and took his time stretching and possessing the young man’s passage. Once aroused, the old man was as vigorous and virile as other men. The bulb of his curved cock rubbed against the channel walls they were working, caressing and punishing, stretching and possessing. The fuck slowly was owning the young man, who could not resist the mastery of the old man’s cock. Paul moved under him in coordination with the rhythm of the fuck, going with the taking now, sighing, moaning, and murmuring, “Yes, yes, yes,” as the man mastered him with his thick shaft.

At the point of ejaculation, the sheik raised up, dug his fingernails into Paul’s hips, holding the young, trembling man in tight control, and, as he released once, twice, three times, sounded out a victory cry in Arabic. Once more the Arab world had defeated the West. Receiving the man’s cum, Paul panted and gasped, his mouth yawning in being fully possessed and his eyes bugging out. He collapsed into his bound spread-eagled position, as the sheik took some victory laps of post-ejaculation thrustings as his shaft went flaccid.

When the sheik had finished and withdrawn from the room, the two hooded thugs returned, one standing at the door while the other freed the young man of his restraints. Paul was escorted to the bath to shower again by one of the hooded men, who stayed long enough after he had showered to apply salve to the welts on Paul’s back, buttocks, and thighs. The skin hadn’t been broken, but the welts were red and they burned under the salve.

When they returned to the bedroom, a meal had been set on the café table. Paul was left alone to eat it.

In the evening, the sheik returned, once more only in a flared-open thawb, again in full erection and carrying the strap. Paul wasn’t bound this time, but the sheik was large and powerful enough to be able to fully control the young man. He held him down on his belly on the bed and used the strap to subdue him again. This time the strikes were more forceful. Paul was fully cowed and docile when the sheik turned him onto his back, grasped his ankles, raised and spread the young’s legs, thrust inside him, and fucked him in a missionary position.

In the darkness of the night, alone on the bed, still moaning and feeling the effects of both the strapping and the fucking, Paul struggled with himself on seeing this as a violation or a fulfillment of a fantasy. He had no idea why the sheik had had him abducted like this and was using him so fully and cruelly. He did realize that the sheik was fulfilling a fantasy of his own, but Paul had no idea where there went. If it was just cruel sex, he could get enjoyment out of it himself and test boundaries he had wondered about. But how far would this go?

He also contemplated what Rafik’s role had been in this abduction and he couldn’t come up with a scenario that made Rafik an innocent bystander—unless something had happened to Rafik after Paul had blacked out. Was Rafik wounded or dead and lying on the hill in Al-Faysallya—or was he part of this kidnapping plot? At some point would he come in and fuck Paul too? Paul was embarrassed that he wanted that to happen. He was even more embarrassed to realize that he wanted the sheik to return and to fully use his body again.

He was shocked to realize that his reaction to the initial mild strikes of the whip the first time to the more forceful application the second time was that he anticipated and welcomed even more cruelty the next time.

On the second day, Zayed al-Bunduq did return, first in the late afternoon to strap and fuck Paul again, this time with Paul spread-eagled on the bed on his back, watching everything done to him. In the evening the sheik returned again. This time he toyed with the young man, leaving the door to the cell open as if unintentionally and Paul unbound. When Paul made a foolish dash for the door, purely on instinct, as the sheik surmised he would, Al-Bunduq grabbed him, overpowered him, beat him down, forced Paul to his hands and knees, mounted him, and fucked him on the tile floor like a dog. It was done purely for the sheik’s pleasure in demonstrating his power and control, but Paul had to admit to himself that he enjoyed it as well and that he was being opened to far broader sexual pleasure and satisfaction than he’d even experienced before.

On the afternoon of the third day, the cruelty escalated. Paul was bound to the X-frame, facing the wall and whipped and fucked. For variety that evening he was hung by his wrists from the chains dropping from the ceiling and whipped and fucked. When the sheik had worked himself up to full, throbbing erection with the effort of the whip, he grabbed Paul’s legs under his thighs, raised and spread the young man’s legs, as Paul hung there from the ceiling chains, hooked Paul’s knees on his hips, put himself into position, and penetrated and buried his cock. Grasping Paul’s butt cheeks and spreading the hole as open as possible with his thumbs, the sheik fucked the young man deep, hard, and fast. Arching his back and head and crying out to the ceiling, Paul wantonly went with the fuck, swaying against the thrusting cock, taking up the rhythm, giving himself wholly to this man who tortured and fucked—and fully satisfied—him.

Sensing the young man had fully surrendered to him, Al-Bunduq reached up, unbound Paul’s wrists from the overhead chain, carried him to the bed without losing purchase inside him, and laid him on his back at the foot of the bed. For the first time in all of the time they’d been together, their lips met in a lingering kiss that lasted through the sheik positioning their bodies most more, with Paul’s knees still hooked on his hips, and the sheik’s cock working Paul deep in his spongy core. Paul’s hands went to the gnarly old man’s shoulder blades, his fingernails digging in to share the pain with the man who was now his lover, and he arched his back, as the old man’s hands cradled and held his head, and moved his pelvis with the fuck, the old man fucking him and he fucking the old man.

The two were one, fused fucking machine.

By the fourth day Paul was thoroughly mastered and cowed. That morning, the sheik lay on his back on the bed and Paul, unbound, with the door to the cell open, and left entirely to express his own passion, saddled himself on the sheik’s hips and rode the man’s cock with wild abandon. Paul was fully invested in the visits himself and Al-Bunduq was assured that the young man had fully surrendered to him. Paul no longer cared that he’d been abducted. He was getting as much pleasure out of the old, cruel Arab as the sheik was getting out of him. The two clearly were comfortable with each other now and mutually satisfied. They were conversing, mostly dirty sex talk, but shared freely. At noon another chair was brought in and they ate a meal together at the café table.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, the two Arab thugs were given their bonus. One after the other, wearing only their balaclavas, the two men entered the room and each fucked Paul. One was tall and sinewy and one was stocky and hirsute. Both were hard-bodied and able to hold an erection, though. One was quick and clinical, taking Paul, bent over the end of the bed, swiftly in the position of the dog. The other was a lover, fondling and working Paul’s body to where the young man was begging for it when the stocky Arab spread and raised the young man’s legs, nestled in between his thighs, mounted him, and took him to heaven. Paul resisted neither of the men, was not bound or beaten during the fuck, and went with it fully. He did so later in the evening going into the night, as well, as, at twenty-minute intervals other men paid their fee to be brought into the cell to enjoy their piece of the young blond and blue-eyed American whore. This was, after all a male brothel. Paul took them all willingly and, now, with his own slice of pleasure—and to exhaustion.

In the night, he lay there, on the bed, exhausted, unable to move, unable even to close his legs, one arm dangling off the side the bed, the other one flung across his face. He had lost count of how many men at fucked him. He was whimpering—and even to his ears he realized that he was purring. The one thing he knew for sure was that he was fully satiated.

The flood of light across the bed caused him to move the arm off his face and look toward the open door from the corridor. Sheik Zayed al-Bunduq walked to the foot of the bed, unbuttoned and slipped off his thawb, and climbed up onto the bed between Paul’s spread legs.

There was no question now that the sheik was in charge and Paul was to be the docile submissive. And this was the way Paul was finding he liked it. He liked to be covered by an older man; he liked to be manhandled by the man; he even liked a little pain with his pleasure—and sometimes more than a little pain sent him straight up into arousal heaven. The young man had never before ejaculated as prodigiously and often as he had done in these four days under the control of the sheik. The young man addressed the older man with respect and awe and as the master. Paul had become a willing sex slave to Zayed al-Bunduq

* * * *

On the fifth day, the police who had been stationed in Lionel Townsend’s villa following the payment of a ransom demand of an almost laughable paltry amount, received notification where they could find Paul Townsend. He was where they’d been told to look—groggy from sedatives and sitting on a park bench in the depths of the Amman National Park, adjacent to the Townsend villa’s neighborhood. His hands were bound behind his back, a cloth hood covered his head, and he was wearing nondescript, unlabeled shorts, a T-shirt, and the running shoes he had been abducted in. The kidnapping was just one of several low-ransom snatching of children of foreign expatriates living in Amman over the period, and the amount of ransom led the police to conclude that it was the work of a minor gang operating in the city. Thus far all of the victims had been released quickly and without harm. Paul was just one more of the lucky ones, warned to be more circumspect in his life from there on out—and perhaps to hire an off-duty policeman as a bodyguard.

The police, of course, questioned Paul closely on what he had experienced, but he was able—he was willing—to tell them little, claiming he’d been drugged the whole time. He didn’t tell them he’d been molested, repeatedly and roughly, while imprisoned. And he most definitely didn’t tell them that he knew who had molested him and who obviously was responsible for having him kidnapped. He didn’t point the finger at Rafik, either.

When the doctor the police sent him to examined him, he found the effects of the strapping and whipping. Fortuitously for Paul, the doctor found this more arousing than something of concern to report to either the police or Paul’s father, and Paul was able to win the man’s silence by letting him fuck and flog him. By now, Paul had realized that the strap enhanced his own arousal during sex.

By prearrangement, Paul returned to the doctor’s office after hours and, because he had learned he enjoyed being fucked bound, allowed himself to be trussed on the doctor’s examination table, face down, arms dropped off the sides, wrists bound to the side of the table, and legs bound in stirrups and spread. Using his belt—and in later encounters a paddle—the doctor reddened the young man’s buttocks cheeks before saddling up to him from behind and on top, penetrating, and fucking him. Both enjoyed the experience enough that Paul signed on as one of the doctor’s patients with the difference that, in the future, the doctor paid him for appointments rather than the other way around.

Zayed al-Bunduq had threatened reprisals if Paul revealed anything to the police, and, as far as Paul knew, the old Arab wasn’t even aware that Paul knew who he was. In the event, though, the sheik had no worries of what Paul would say. For Paul it had become an adventure that he wanted to have. There was no reason that either his father or the police need know that, however. He had no trouble understanding that he hadn’t been kidnapped for the ransom money but because Zayed al-Bunduq wanted to fuck him. And, for this, Paul was flattered.

Shortly after Paul was released, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company won the Energy Ministry’s bid for oil and gas supply, which the Kuwait Petroleum Company objected to, giving evidence that they bid had been the lowest, but no one publicly charged Lionel Townsend with having been bribed—and they certainly didn’t connect the bid win with the kidnapping of Townsend’s son. If Townsend himself made such a connection with the Abu Dhabi negotiator, Sheik Zayed al-Bunduq, or if Al-Bunduq had made such a connection himself to force the bid win, Lionel never mentioned it to Paul

Two weeks later, the American University of Madaba soccer team hosted an exhibition game with the team of the nearby Al-Faysallya Secondary Boy’s School. Paul played on the university team and Rafik Zawati coached the boy’s school team. Paul and Rafik had not met up since the kidnapping. During the game Rafik found a moment to speak in private with Paul. The older man didn’t explain or apologize for whatever his role had been in the kidnapping. He revealed he had been part of the plot, though.

“The man who you spent four days with is back in the city and wishes to use you again,” he whispered in Paul’s ear. “If you value your safety and that of your father, you will meet with him.”

“You mean the old man who had me abducted and then molested me, over and over again. The man you helped kidnap me.”

“The way I heard it you came to love it, Paul. That you gave yourself willingly to the man after he made you realize it was what you wanted. I thought it was what you wanted. Was it?”

“Yes, it was,” Paul admitted.

“Can you then forgive my part in it? The sheik really gave me no choice but to help him. Will you go back to running with me on the hill?”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

Rafik smiled. “I’ll take you to him. We can arrange for you to just be going out with me after the game to a café as a gesture of good sportsmanship between our schools. I will, instead, take you to a house on Tallaini Street in Amman. He is willing to pay. You can start earning some of the ransom money back.”

“Yes, fine,” Paul answered. “He doesn’t have to use threats. I will go to him willingly and give him anything he wants from me. This house on Tallaini Street—is it where I’ve been before?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Rafik said, giving Paul a wary look. He couldn’t be sure yet that the young man would forgive the role he’d taken in the abduction. Rafik had taken a chance on that. He had a story prepared of being overpowered, though, and that he didn’t report it because he didn’t think Paul would want to be connected with him in public in sexual activity in the hills of Al-Faysallya. Rafik was a soccer star; the news would splash.

“But could it be the same place I was held?” Paul persisted.

“It could be. Tallaini is the street of brothels. You could have been held in one.”

“I was taken by many men there, not just the old man—and my keepers. Do you suppose . . . do you suppose this brothel might be hiring Westerners like me—on an occasional service basis?”

“You enjoyed having many men on top of you, one after the other?”

“It was exciting.”

Rafik gave Paul a pointed look, broke out into a grin, laughed, and said, “I’m quite sure they would love to hire you.”

And indeed, the male brothel on Tallaini Street was quite pleased to add Paul to their roster of prostitutes willing to take the whip.