Colin N anna found me just as the sun started setting, marching up to me where I sat in the kitchen with Basel and Khaled. “I need your help running errands at the market.” Basel frowned at her. “You don’t need to be shopping at sunset. Let’s go in the morning. I’ll take you myself.” The old woman spun on her heels and started striding toward the door. “What I need is what I need.” When he opened his mouth again, she cut him off without even looking back. “No. I don’t want to hear it. Colin and I are going to the market.” This was as much English as I’d heard her speak since we’d gotten here, but I’d learned by now that whatever Nanna says, goes, and tonight was no exc eption. Basel blew out a heavy breath through his nostrils but nodded and fell silent. I slowly rose and waved goodbye. Both Basel and Khaled let me go, neither of them making a move to join us, which meant that as soon as I left the kitchen, I was free. It felt pretty weird, but even shopping with Nanna would be a nice break from the projections they’d had me looking over. When we reached the hallway that led to my room instead of heading to the front door, however, I started getting suspicious. Sure enough, Nanna spun around again and looked me over from head to toe. “Change your clothes.” “To what?” “Your shirt is wrong,” she said, motioning at the white button-down I had on. “It’s a work shirt. No work tonight.” I frowned but followed her the rest of the way to my room, where she stationed herself in the doorway like a guard while I changed. When I realized that meant I couldn’t shut the door while I did it, I ducked into the attached restroom, not really sure why she had to ke ep me under her watchful eye like this, but even though I hadn’t understood most of what she’d said since I’d met her, I’d already learned not to argue. A minute later, I emerged, but she sent me back almost immediately. “No.” I looked down at myself. “No?” “No. You’re not going to the beach.” I sighed but headed back into my room and wondered what she wanted me to wear if both a button-down and a T-shirt were wrong. Eventually, I emerged with a plain blue golf shirt and jeans, standing still while she inspected me once more.
She physically circled my body, then finally nodded. “Good. Come.” With a satisfied expression on her face, she turned and led me to the front door. As we finally left the house, I’d long since figured out she was helping me es cape. I just wasn’t sure why, but I followed her to the market anyway, pausing every time someone stopped her for a chat, which was often. I made out some of what she was saying in Arabic, but not much, simply waiting for her to finish talking to every other person we encountered with impatience burning in my veins. I didn’t let it show, but I desperately wanted to get back to the house. I’d been hoping to catch Deja tonight, but I couldn’t do that while she was chatting with someone over pots of whatever was cooking on the street. Eventually, she led me down to the waterfront and stopped at a restaurant overlooking the water. The old woman jerked her head toward the door when she looked at me again. “Go.” “Go?” She nodded. “Inside. Go on.” I took a breath of air scented with grilled fish and salt, seriously not understanding what was going on here. “Aren’t you coming?” She looked at me like she’d never heard a more ridiculous question in her life. “No, and don’t come home until after dark.” With that, she turned away and strode into the crowd, surprisingly fast for someone her age. As I watched, she fell into another conversation, this time with a woman selling dates, and I shook my head but went into the restaurant. It turned out to be a seafood cafe of sorts, with soft lighting and windows open to the sea, but I barely noticed any of it when I saw Deja. So I was right. Nanna did help me es cape, but not so she could take her turn to interrogate me. She was helping her granddaughter. Deja sat at a table near the terrace studying a menu. She looked up as I approached her, smiling when she saw me. “She got you out, huh? I wasn’t sure it would work.” I sat down across from her and grinned. “How exactly did you make this happen?” “Oh, I didn’t. It was all Nanna.” “Wow. I’m not sure if I should feel honored or frightened.” She laughed. “Probably both. I asked her for help this morning and she agreed.” I leaned back in my chair, my eyes narrowing a little as I realized it probably hadn’t been that easy. “Has she told you yet what she wants in return?” “I don’t think we want to know,” she said, her eyes sparkling with laughter. “It’ll probably be great-grandchildren.” I laughed. “That sounds about right.” Deja covered her mouth as she chuckled. “I told you that we probably don’t want to know.” “I thought maybe she’d just ask me to renovate her garden,” I said, doing my best not to think about what we’d have to do to produce said great-grandchildren, but it was too late.
My mind had already gone there, and judging by the way Deja shifted a few times in her chair, her eyes suddenly not meeting mine, I was going to assume hers had gone to the same place. The mere mention of it had injected a very specific kind of tension into the air between us, but at this point, I was so used to it that I wasn’t about to let it derail the dinner we’d tried to have almost two months ago. “Do you think there’s any chance she’ll just ask me to become fluent in Arabic by, like, next week?” Deja’s cheeks had become a little bit flushed, but she finally brought her eyes back to mine and shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. She definitely won’t let you touch her garden either.” “I don’t blame her. If my garden looked like that, I wouldn’t let me touch it either.” She chuckled again, looking away from me only for a moment when the waitress came. We ordered drinks, then spent the next few minutes while we waited for them to arrive discussing Nanna and all the threats she’d made to her grandchildren over the years when they’d tried to make certain changes to her prized garden. “Rami brought her some new herbs once,” Deja was saying when my beer and her glass of wine were delivered. “Nanna caught him trying to plant them as a surprise for her birthday. It was a disaster. She told him that she’d pr epared that patch for new tomatoes and made him dig out every single seed and seedling.” I laughed. “Did he get them all?” She smiled at me over the rim of her glass. “Nope. When they started coming up, she made him fly back here from Cairo to finish the job.” “That’s intense.” “That’s Nanna.” The waitress came back to take our food order and Deja helped me figure out what I wanted once I realized I recognized almost nothing on the menu. After we’d decided on grilled seafood, warm bread, dips, roasted vegetables, and fragrant rice to share, we were left alone again. “You’ve become much better at Arabic,” she said, her eyes holding mine from across the table. “Your pronunciation has really improved from those first few days.” “I’ve been practicing,” I admitted. “I now know enough to accidentally insult someone’s grandmother and make it sound like I mean it.” She laughed. “Well, as long as that grandmother isn’t Nanna, you should be able to es cape with your life.” “Yeah, I still panic every time while I’m waiting for someone to respond to me. One of these days, I’m going to get slapped.” “I’ll kiss it better for you,” she said, then burst out laughing again when I arched an eyebrow at her. “That’d make getting slapped worth it. Quick, call the waitress back over here. I need to try and insult her grandmother.” A slight, pinkish blush cr ept onto her cheeks, but she didn’t back down, teasing me for a little while as she tried to teach me how to insult people in Masri, but eventually, we moved on. When the food finally arrived, it was yet another feast fit for a king. I was starting to think that the Egyptian people knew something about the enjoyment of food that the rest of the world hadn’t been alerted to yet, and once again, it looked absolutely
amazing. “I think your grandmother would approve,” I said. “Only if you finish everything.” “I walked right into that.” She smiled. “You really did.” We picked together from the platters, talking and laughing nonstop while we ate. Despite how many times I’d imagined what it might be like when we finally got to have dinner together, I’d seriously underestimated how easy it would be to spend time together like this again. For the last couple weeks, I’d even been doubting my memories of that day I’d shown her around Chicago, figuring that I was making it into something it hadn’t been, but tonight was proving me wrong. With the whirlwind around us finally dissipating for a night, it was exactly like it had been that day, just the two of us and not an awkward silence to speak of. After dinner, Deja lifted the strap of a bag that’d been hanging over her chair. I’d assumed it was her purse, but when she set it down on the table between us, I recognized it as the camera I’d sent her. “I’ve been waiting to use this again since we got here,” she said. “It really is the nicest gift anyone has ever given me, so I figured we should take it for a spin together.” “I’m in. What did you have in mind?” She nodded toward the beach. “Let’s go for a walk?” “Is that safe?” I asked. “What if Ashanti and Khaled are out there?” “Rami, Jasmine, or Tarek are much more likely to have left the house, but if we see them, I’ll either threaten them into silence or we’ll hide.” “Hide?” “Y ep.” She grinned. After I’d paid our check, she stood and held her hand out toward me. “Come on. I have enough blackmail material on all of them that the threats should work. We’ll only have to hide if things go extremely sideways.” I knew I should probably say no and tell her it was getting late, but instead, I took her hand and let her pull me up. We’d been waiting for this for so long that I wasn’t keen on going back to the house just yet. We left the restaurant holding hands, only the last sliver of sun still hanging on the horizon as we strolled down the beach. We kicked off our shoes on the sand and I carried them in one hand, but it wasn’t long before I lost Deja. She was still only a few feet away, but mentally, she seemed to have disappeared into another realm, her camera clicking away as she crouched to photograph shells or the fishing boats bobbing offshore. While I happily tagged along behind her, she took pictures of a dilapidated wooden jetty and a stray cat weaving around between overturned boats. Eventually, I sat down on the sand with one knee propped up, just watching her work. She looked genuinely happy like this, pausing to study something before she’d lift the camera, smiling like she’d found exactly what she was looking for every single time. After a while, the sun had dipped all the way behind the horizon and she finally lowered the camera, looking up at me instead. “You know, you’re making this very difficult.”
“How?” I asked. “I’m just sitting here.” “You ke ep ending up in the frame.” I laughed. “Do you want me to move?” “No.” She started walking toward me. “I’ve decided that having you in the background makes the picture better.” She lifted the camera again. “Don’t smile.” The shutter clicked and she pulled the camera away a little to look at the picture she’d just taken. Then it clicked again. “Stop trying not to smile.” I grimaced. “I’m doing my best.” “Just act natural,” she joked, lowering herself to her knees on the sand in front of me and pulling funny faces while the shutter k ept clicking. “Stare at the water like you’re trying to solve a problem.” I groaned. “I am trying to solve several problems right now, actually.” “Okay, well, in that case, stare at the stars and try to look like you’re not trying to solve a problem.” I chuckled. “These instructions are starting to get a little confusing. None of this feels natural.” She k ept clicking for a while before she finally came over to me, lowering the camera into my lap for safeke eping while she sat down. I waited until she was sitting before I turned to look at her again. “So, am I terribly unphotogenic?” “See for yourself.” She reached for the camera and scooted closer, not stopping until her side was sealed to mine. As she scrolled through the photographs, she leaned against me, even kind of cuddling into my side. “Look at that. You’re perfect.” I gave my eyes an exaggerated roll. “Thank you, but my eyes were closed in that one.” “It makes you look thoughtful.” “It makes me look like I’m about to sneeze.” “Then I managed to capture you in your natural state,” she teased, scrolling to the next picture. Thankfully, it wasn’t of me this time. I leaned in as we looked through the ones she’d taken a bit earlier, of the sunset, the jetty, and the cat, and I smiled as I nudged her shoulder. “You have a great eye. These are beautiful.” She turned to face me, and without thinking, I reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. Her gaze dropped to my lips the second my fingertips made contact with her skin. Then she leaned in and kissed me. It was soft and quick, almost like she hadn’t quite meant to actually do it, but when she moved to pull away, I slid my fingers into her hair and brought her back, pressing my lips to hers for a much longer but still gentle kiss. When we finally pulled apart, she smiled. “We should probably head back.” “Probably.” Instead of moving to get up, we ended up crashing back together for another, much less gentle kiss. I wound my fingers into her hair and slid a hand to her hip, drawing her closer even though I knew it was stupid. My heart had started hammering as soon as her lips had touched mine that first time and my jeans were suddenly much tighter. I was pretty sure I was addicted to the taste of her. I couldn’t get enough. It was only when a dog barked somewhere further along the beach that we broke apart again, both of us breathing harder than normal. I groaned and swiped a hand across my face. Deja smiled and got to her feet reluctantly.
“We’re going to have to sneak back in,” she said when we reached the outer garden wall of the estate. “Do you think you can climb this?” I glanced at it before looking back at her. “Can you?” “I’ve got it,” she whispered. “Whatever you do, just don’t get caught by any of the motion sensors. They’re connected to spotlights that will flood the whole beach.” I swallowed hard but then clasped my hands together to give her a boost. She st epped into them without hesitation, quickly hoisting herself to the top of the wall. “Are you going to be able to get up?” “If you ke ep kissing me like you did earlier, it shouldn’t be a problem.” “Stop!” she said with a laugh. “I’m taller than you, so you can go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be there in a sec.” “Show-off,” she whispered, chuckling quietly as she disappeared on the other side. I climbed over after her, landing on a patch of grass and pausing for a beat to make sure no one had heard our entrance. No one stirred. I glanced at her. “Quiet like a panther.” She grinned and rolled her eyes before nodding toward the kitchen. “This way, panther man.” I followed her across the garden to the door, heart beating loudly in my ears. Anyone could be waiting in the kitchen. But we were in luck. The room was empty when we slipped inside and she turned to face me with a relieved smile on her lips. “I think we actually I—” Instead of letting her finish, I grabbed her hips and tugged her into me, unable to resist kissing her again since we were still alone. She smiled against my mouth before kissing me back, whispering quietly between kisses but not pulling away. “This is a terrible place to do this.” “Absolutely.” I let myself kiss her for another second before I lifted my head, taking her hand before stealing down the hall with our shoes still in my hand. We paused to listen for movement, but instead of taking off again once we knew we were in the clear, we kissed again, both of us laughing under our breath until we heard a door open somewhere nearby. Deja’s eyes widened. “We’re toast.” “We haven’t been caught yet.” I took her hand and pulled her into my room, quietly shutting the door behind us. After turning the lock, we both paused for another beat to listen, but the footst eps quickly faded down the hall, straight past my bedroom without faltering for even a second. Before I could even begin to fathom that we might actually have gotten away with it, her arms slid around my neck and she pushed herself up on her toes to kiss me again. “Alright, Colin Thayer,” she whispered. “Now that you have me here, what do you plan on doing with me?”