Twisted (erotic) (#6, 101 Nights)

Chapter Two: Alisha

“What is it?” EJ asks suspiciously.

I roll my eyes without leaving the stovetop. “Macaroni and cheese.”

“We had that yesterday.”

“It’s got hot dogs in it today.”

“Hot dogs? I’m Muslim. I can’t eat hot dogs.”

“Omigod, EJ. You haven’t prayed once in the past two days and you’re an admitted man-whore with half a dozen sex tapes online! You draw the line at hot dogs?” I snap, fed up with the royal expectations of the man I’m stuck in a one-bedroom apartment with. “These are beef hotdogs, and it’s your damned fault for sending a white boy named Jonny from Nebraska to an Arabic grocery store. He can’t read those squiggles you call a language. Of course he’s going to come back with hot dogs and mac-n-cheese!”

“I’m from Iowa,” the security team member grunts from the couch.

“It doesn’t matter, James. She couldn’t find either of those if they were the only states on a map and labeled,” EJ retorts.

“And my name is Josh.” George’s loyal employee flipped on the television, ignoring both of our glares.

EJ returned his attention to me. “You’re Puerto Rican. Don’t your people eat rice? Why can’t you make that?”

“Can you cook?” I snarl and sling half a cube of butter into the freshly drained noodles.

EJ doesn’t respond.

“That’s what I thought. So shut up and eat your mac-n-cheese!”

Jonny-James-Josh clears his throat. “Sorry about that,” he says. He’s the only member of our security team who will come into the apartment instead of guarding the front door from the hallway.

Not that I blame him. EJ and I do not get along. I want to say it’s nerves and fear for those we love, but it’s personalities as well. We’re both a little too high strung for our own welfares and unaccustomed to being idle, which is a dangerous enough combination. He also has the opposite approach to everything I do without the calmness of George to soften what he says and does.

What’s making life unbearable, though, isn’t our clash. It’s the fact it’s constant, because we’re all but trapped in a tiny apartment together, stashed away until EJ’s aunt can finalize her master plan to take over the world and dethrone EJ’s father, who would kill both of us if he knew we were here.

Well, he’d kill EJ, which isn’t sounding like a bad idea right now.

I dump his half of the childhood staple into a bowl. He’s not impressed, even with the addition of hotdogs. My laptop is sitting on the counter beside him. He won’t go anywhere in the apartment without it, his attention focused on the unmoving dot that is our only link to George and hopefully, Natalie.

With my usual suspicion about everyone, I placed a GPS tracker in every left shoe of George’s several days ago, which is coming in handy. We know where they are. We know who has them.

Except EJ and I can’t act. It’s just us, until Aunt Malika – who dislikes EJ maybe a little more than she does me – is ready to launch her plan.

Restless, agitated, I take my lunch and go to the window looking out over the city. Through the buildings, I can see a small, dark blue sliver of the bay housing the main port of Nijala. It’s so close … and I’m helpless. EJ and I could probably manage to rent or otherwise obtain a boat, but we couldn’t storm a tanker with just the two of us. Besides, we’d have to get close enough to get a more accurate read on which tanker it is. I imagine it might look suspicious if the two of us are trolling every ship in the massive bay.