Chapter 31
ISAAC
The first thing I became aware of as I regained consciousness early the next morning was the soft murmur of Jasmine’s voice. Cracking one eye open, I saw her sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing one of the ridiculously plush robes the ship provided and nothing else.
Behind her, morning sun shone into the suite through the open curtains, turning the surface of the Nile to a liquid gold outside. Her hair was still a little messed up from last night, her phone pressed to her ear as she studied a breakfast menu.
“Yes,” she said. “Fresh orange juice. I don’t want a bottle. Fresh, and a full continental breakfast.” She paused for a second to listen, then sighed. “That’s fine. I don’t need eggs. No, I want to eat in my room. Oh, and a black coffee.”
“You’ve already ordered coffee,” I mumbled, smiling into my pillow.
She glanced over her shoulder, catching me watching her, and her grin looked nothing like the polished, public, guarded version of Jasmine Saad. “I ordered your coffee. This is mine.”
“Right.” I sat up, waiting until she’d finished and thanked the person on the other end of the line. “Good morning, gorgeous.”
She reached over to put the phone down and I caught her wrist, pulling her back to me. She laughed. “What are you doing?”
“I wasn’t done,” I murmured, tugging gently until she landed back at my side. “See, isn’t that much better?”
She burrowed into my side. “You’re very clingy this morning.”
“I’m just comfortable and you’re warm.” I slid an arm around her waist and let my eyes slide shut again. “Go back to sleep.”
“No.” She giggled, brushing a kiss against my bare chest before sitting up again. “Room service will be here in a few minutes.”
I groaned. “I’d say to let them leave the food at the door, because I have other plans for breakfast, but the coffee needs to come in.”
She made a noise of amused approval, one hand starting to trace lazy circles across my chest. “You’re going to need the caffeine today.”
“Yeah? What’s on our agenda?”
“We docked in Luxor about an hour ago, so if I was you, I’d spent this morning visiting Karnak and Luxor Temple.”
“If you were me?” I asked. “What are you going to be doing?”
“Oh, Zara and I are going shopping while you two nerd out. Trust me, this place is nerd heaven. You and Joseph can wander around, stare lovingly at columns or whatever it is you do when you flirt with architecture, but we’re hitting the markets.”
“First, I do not flirt with architecture, and second, are you sure you wouldn’t like to join us?” I stroked a thumb along the curve of her waist to her hip. “I thought you loved nerding out with me.”
“Usually, yes, but if I let Zara into the markets all by herself, we’d need to charter another ship to get everything she’ll buy back home.
Outside of that, I just did the temples a couple months ago with my family.
This time, I want to check out this little market I’ve seen on social media where they supposedly sell the best scarves and jewelry in the country. ”
“You want to go shopping for scarves and jewelry when you could be looking at ancient temples?” I sucked in an exaggerated gasp. “Who are you and what have you done with Jasmine Saad?”
She laughed. “Oh hush. It’s not so bad. I might even buy you something if you’re good.”
“You know I’m good.” I winked and rolled over so I was half on top of her, bringing my lips to hers and groaning as she kissed me back. “What were we arguing about again?”
She smiled against my lips. “I don’t know.”
Wrapping her arms around me, her hand was just skating down my abs toward my suddenly aching cock when a sharp knock sounded at the door. “Room service!”
She pulled back with a heavy sigh. “Well, that’d be your coffee.”
“I don’t need it anymore. You’ve got me wide awake.”
“It’ll go cold.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.” She rolled away from me, got up, and tugged her robe back into its proper place. “You’re going to love Luxor, Isaac. It’s worth getting out of bed for right now. I promise.”
Reluctantly, I nodded and sat up, running a hand through my hair. Jasmine opened the door and a waiter rolled in a cart. She tipped him, and as soon as he was gone, Sweet Morning Jasmine had vanished and Bossy Daytime Jasmine had taken her place.
“The cruise is flexible, but if you and Joseph wander off and get lost, the ship will leave without you,” she said as we sat down to eat. “I know how both of you are going to get the second you hit Karnak, but keep an eye on the time and meet us for lunch at two p.m. sharp.”
“Got it.” I grinned. “Where are we meeting you?”
“There’s a cafe on the shore right next to the Luxor Hotel. It’s between Luxor Temple and the museum, so you can’t miss it. Meet us there.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
One corner of her lips twitched up. “I might just like the sound of that, but not right now. Joseph and Zara are meeting us in forty minutes and we still need to shower.”
I saluted her. “As soon as we’re done eating.”
“Yep, but not together,” she said. “You don’t have any clothes in my suite to change into, and if you get in the shower with me, we’re going to miss the guide taking you to the temples.”
“Fair point.”
When I went back to my room after breakfast, Joseph wasn’t there and his bed hadn’t been slept in. Had he spent the night with Zara? I would have to ask Jasmine if she knew. It was possible he had no idea I hadn’t slept here last night either.
I grabbed a quick shower and got ready, meeting Jasmine twenty minutes later at the gangway. Joseph and Zara were there too, but none of us said anything about the night before. We followed a cheerful guide and a crowd of mostly retirement-age tourists to the dock.
Jasmine turned to face Joseph and me while the guide was helping the rest of our group shuffle into a small transfer bus.
“Alright, gang. Remember, nobody gets lost, nobody adopts a camel, and if either of you disappear because you got distracted by an interesting ceiling, we’re leaving without you. ”
Joseph’s eyes widened in horror. “You wouldn’t, would you?”
“We would,” Zara said, but her tone was playful enough that I wasn’t convinced she was serious. “Happy exploring, boys. We’ll see you later.”
She took Jasmine’s arm and guided her toward a waiting black SUV, not even giving me a chance to say goodbye. Joseph glanced at me once they were in their car, inclining his chin toward the bus. “Well, I suppose we don’t have private transport, so we should probably get going.”
“Probably.” I watched their car pull away before I followed him. “How was your night?”
He turned beet red but shrugged. “Fine. Yours?”
“Fine.”
We joined the line waiting to board and found seats on the bus. Once everyone was loaded up, we started toward Karnak. Finally, I cleared my throat and glanced at Joseph again. “Have you ever been here before?”
“Luxor?” he asked, his brow furrowing behind his sunglasses. “Yeah, once. When I was little. My cousin got married not far from here, so my parents brought me for a couple days.”
“Great, then I’ll just stick with you.”
He chuckled and seemed to relax when he realized I had no intention of questioning him about his night with Zara. I would’ve, but I didn’t particularly want to answer any questions of my own, so this seemed safer.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust my memory to get us around. This place is part of why I fell in love with architecture, but I won’t pretend to remember many of the details. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Okay, so we’ll stick with the tour?”
He looked out at the sea of gray and silver hair around us and sighed. “Yeah, I guess we will, but the upside is that we’ll probably be able to look around a little while we’re waiting for them to catch up.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Some of them are pretty sprightly.”
He chuckled. “Not as sprightly as an engineer and an architect trying to absorb as much as we can while we’re in a place entire civilizations have built their identities around.”
“That’s a pretty good point,” I agreed, then turned to face the window and looked out just in time to see columns the size of apartment buildings stretching toward the sky. “I think we’ve reached Karnak.”
He leaned across me, nodding as he let out a contented sigh. “One thing I do remember is that every inch of this place is covered in carvings that have survived thousands of years of floods, wars, rulers, and empires. It tells an amazing story.”
“I can’t wait to see it,” I said.
As it turned out, by the time we reached the Great Hypostyle Hall, I’d realize this place didn’t only tell a story.
It was a story. And an unbelievable one at that.
The largest temple complex in Egypt, it was vast, a former spiritual powerhouse of a site that had served as the center for worshiping the god Amun-Ra.
It was blatantly obvious that the people who had built this had been devout as hell, every yard a testament to their hard work, dedication, and intention to create structures that would stand the test of time.
“We don’t build like this anymore,” I murmured, my jaw slack as I tried to take it all in. “Seriously. This stone has been here for thousands of years and it might just last a couple thousand more.”
“Well, there’s some debate around that topic, but in essence, I agree with you,” Joseph said, his voice hushed with awe. “We really don’t build like this anymore. Everything is about cost and efficiency these days.”
“Yeah. Sometimes, it feels like humanity collectively decided joy was too expensive,” I joked. “Instead, we’re always after instant gratification.”
“And brutalism,” he said.
I groaned. “Who can forget about the brutalism?”
We wandered farther into the complex, stopping every few minutes when one of us pointed out another hidden detail, like how the joints fit together despite the builders not having had modern machinery.
Jasmine had been right when she’d said this place was worth getting out of bed for.
I absolutely loved it, and when we got to Luxor Temple after traveling down the Avenue of Sphinxes, I loved that too.
“Can you imagine if someone built a residential development in this style?” Joseph asked with a dreamy little smile on his face. “I would love to live in something like that.”
I chuckled. “So would I, but it’s a fantasy, man.”
“For now,” he said, finally snapping himself out of his thoughts to glance at me. “If you stay and we start our own firm, it’s something we could look into.”
Immediately, my brain flung itself down that rabbit hole. The ideas we came up with as we explored became more and more outlandish, but I’d be lying if I tried to deny that they weren’t pulling me closer to the idea Joseph had pitched the other day.
Theoretically, I could stay here and start a company with him. Hell, I could start a whole new life here in Egypt, building stuff like this. With style. Together, he and I had a hope of making the world a little less gray and a little less brutalist.
It would be amazing.
When lunchtime eventually rolled around, my brain was in overdrive and I had approximately one thousand new photographs on my phone. Joseph and I were practically giddy when we met up with the girls, who appeared to have conquered every market in Luxor.
Joseph finally stopped talking about our imaginary new, mixed-use development as he stared at the mountain of shopping bags around the table they were sitting at. “Is this all yours?”
Jasmine pushed her sunglasses onto her head and picked up a glass of water. “We only bought things we would have regretted leaving behind.”
He glanced at me, obviously wondering if she was joking, but I clapped him on the shoulder before pulling out the chair next to hers. “She’s serious, bro. If she bought it, it means she got a good deal and couldn’t find this stuff on any app on her phone.”
Jasmine smiled. “Don’t you know it.”
“You didn’t get me a rug, did you?” I teased.
She rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling. “When you decide to stay in Cairo, you and I will go get you a rug. The real deal.”
I arched an eyebrow, about to remind her that I wasn’t staying in Cairo, but then I flashed back on all the plans Joseph and I had dreamed up over the last few hours and kept my mouth shut instead.
My future remained uncertain. We ordered grilled chicken with enough bread, dips, and salad to feed our entire tour group, but in the end, the four of us managed to finish it alone.
Once lunch was done, Joseph and I pretended to be pack mules, helping the girls get their loot back to the ship. When Jasmine and I were finally back in her suite, I set down the last of her bags and was about to reach for her when my phone began vibrating in my pocket.
I pulled it out with the intention of silencing it, but when I saw Jane’s name on the screen, I sighed and held up the phone. “It’s my sister. I should probably take this.”
Jasmine nodded, her dark eyes happy and relaxed. She picked up one of her shopping bags. “I’ll start unpacking. I can’t wait to show you what I got.”
“As long as some of it is lingerie, I can’t wait to see.” I smiled and slid my thumb across the screen as Jasmine laughed.
“Hey,” I said as I pressed the phone to my ear, heading out through the sliding doors and onto the balcony before pulling them closed behind me. “What’s up? I feel like I haven’t heard from you for ages.”
As Jane started talking, Jasmine looked up, but she wasn’t looking at Luxor Temple glowing gold in the setting sun or the river behind me.
Instead of appreciating the view as a whole, she was looking only at me.
I smiled at her, already coming up with a few smart-ass remarks to tease her when I went back in there, but then my sister launched into the reason for her call, which wiped the smile clear off my face in an instant.
All morning, I’d been fantasizing about staying in Egypt, but Jane quickly reminded me why that wasn’t a real option—and also why it never would be.