Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: book 2 Panama to the Baja Bash***

Izzy and Aeon were both already awake by the time Sybil and Penny got out of bed and joined them in the kitchen while they were preparing breakfast.

They gathered in the white marble kitchen of the 2-story suite on the 36th floor atop the Waldorf Astoria Panamá City. Through the tempered glass walls, they could see the sunrise over the old city to the east, as well as view the Pacific to the west.

“Smells good.” Penny yawned as she walked in wearing panties and a sports bra, with Sybil in tow wearing biker shorts and Penny’s pink Hello Kitty tank top. Isaiah dropped a sausage into Mau Mau’s waiting maw as he passed the package to Aeon, then returned to the cutting board, chopping vegetables: onions, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms. The pan-fried potatoes were already done and waiting in the warm oven.

“Good morning, ladies. We’ll have breakfast ready in a few minutes. Have a seat, coffee’s fresh.”

Sybil took a seat at the table while Penny made her way to the coffee. Sybil noticed the TV was muted on a 24-hour weather channel, the closed caption scrolling across the bottom of the screen as the storm moved through to the north.

Aeon’s classics playlist provided the soundtrack: vintage soul music, R and B from the middle of the 20th century. Aeon and Isaiah had grown up listening to this music and sang along with Al Green, unironically crooning the lyrics to the song “Love and Happiness.”

Heads bobbing, hips shaking, toes tapping in time to the music as they prepared the food. Penny walked up to Aeon as she was cooking, hugging her from behind and planting a kiss on her neck. Aeon smiled as she continued sautéing the vegetables and meat for their omelettes. Izzy cracked the eggs two at a time and dropped them into the bowl. He added a splash of milk, a pinch of kosher salt, and a dash of freshly ground black pepper before he began beating the eggs with a fork.

Penny knew Aeon well enough to know that she was in a good mood if she was making omelets for breakfast.

“So, I take it that the two of you had a good time at dinner. And after dinner,” she said, sitting down with Sybil and taking a sip of her coffee.

Aeon, the front half of her Afro under a teal-colored silk scarf, wore only Izzy’s shirt, while he was dressed in only his usual morning’s wear white muslin linen trousers.

“So, what are we drinking this morning?” Penny asked, peeking over the rim of her coffee cup.

“Well, since it’s breakfast, I was thinking mimosas.”

Penny wrinkled her nose. “Yuck, we can do better than that. I was thinking French 77.”

“Well,” Isaiah said with a smile, “it looks like Penelope has volunteered to be the bartender.”

Sybil and Isaiah laughed simultaneously.

Aeon noticed that they had a similar sense of humor and laughter. But there was also a hint of Isaiah’s mother present in her laughter. It wasn’t a copy of her laugh but a hint of it. It sounded as if she and Izzy were family. She still didn’t trust the cyborg, but she had to admit that she had been nothing other than curious and helpful since Isaiah flew to Japan to oversee downloading her consciousness into the synthetic body made in the Ichi Taro facility in Tokyo. After seeing what she saw her doing in the orgy in Havana, she was disturbed, but now, after seeing her with Penny for the last few weeks, she was getting used to her presence. No one outside of this room knew she was not human except the old man who oversaw the construction of her chassis, Ichii Taro himself.

Penny stepped behind the bar and gathered her ingredients: champagne, elderflower liqueur, gin.

Sybil moved to a barstool to watch as she mixed the concoction in a large cocktail shaker with ice, then strained the mixture into the pitcher.

“You can be my guinea pig.” Penny grinned as she poured a glass for her, topping it off with the champagne and a lemon twist.

She turned the coupe glass up and drained its contents in a single gulp, lemon twist and all, then set the empty glass on the bar.

“Ah, that was tasty.”

Everyone erupted with laughter at the same time.

“Sybil, my love,” Penny counseled, “I’m afraid you may have a problem with alcohol.”

Aeon said, giggling,

“Your girlfriend is an alcoholic.”

“No, she’s not an alcoholic, she’s a drunk. Alcoholics have to go to those goddamned meetings,” Penny said defensively.

Aeon laughed every time she heard her say that.

“But listen, sweetie, you don’t drink these like a shot of bottom-shelf tequila; you take a sip and savor the complexity of the flavor.”

Sybil smiled innocently. “Okay, I would like another French 77, please.”

I was going to, but I was distracted. She looked at Sybil and smiled.

Izzy finished chopping the vegetables and grating the Monterey Jack cheese before he took a seat on the couch, his charts spread across the coffee table as he tracked the storm a few hundred miles to the north slowly moving across the TV screen. He checked his maps and marked their course.

“Put that away and come eat,” Aeon said sternly, addressing the command to Isaiah. He got up and joined them at the table.

The omelette was one of his favorite meals alongside the cheese covered hash browns. Everyone had a bowl with half a grapefruit. There was a bowl full of fresh salsa. Thick slices of toasted bread. Honey and butter.

Izzy sprinkled a tablespoonful of sugar over his grapefruit and dug in with the spoon. Sybil watched, then copied his technique, enjoying her first grapefruit.

“We take vitamins, but I still try to eat as much citrus fruit as possible.”

Aeon chimed in, agreeing with Izzy. “Same here. Living in the bush eating MREs, you can’t always get a balanced diet, so a multivitamin is a good thing to have in your backpack when you can’t get enough natural vitamin C.”

“Why worry about vitamins? I read somewhere that it just makes your piss more expensive,” Penny said flippantly. Sybil giggled as she sipped her drink slowly.

“Better safe than sorry when it comes to avoiding scurvy.”

He liked the toast since they rarely had any on the ship.  Bread went bad too quickly getting moldy, and took up too much space, so they used tortillas instead. They took up a fraction of the space in the freezer and traveled well.

Sybil, sipping her drink, tasted the food, complimented the cook, and clandestinely fed Mau Mau the majority of her meal.

“Will the storm reach us here?” Aeon asked, her mouth half full.

“No, it’s not our problem unless we’re foolish enough to sail into it.”

Aeon wondered if the maps were in his luggage when they arrived, or had he gone to the dock last night after she fell asleep and retrieved them.

“What do you two have planned for the day?” Penny asked, sipping her drink.

“We were going to explore old town,” Aeon replied. “It’s the remnants of the town that was destroyed before it was rebuilt into this modern city. It was destroyed, then rebuilt twice.”

“You had me at old town.” Penny laughed. “I gotta see what this place used to look like.”

I’m going to need to wash my hair first.

I would have thought that you washed it last night when you were in the tub. Aeon said thinking aloud.