Side Effects

Chapter 22

If being woken up by a call from an angry Anna was bad, being woken up by Viola pounding on the door at 8am when I'd been up most of the night with Alaya was worse. At first, I thought there was an elephant in the room above us, or maybe some construction outside the hotel, but that was wishful thinking.

"Who the fuck is banging on our door?" Alaya groaned as she rolled to face me in the bed. "Make them stop so I can take a shower with you!"

"I got it," I grumbled, wrapping a robe around my naked body before stumbling out to the door. Of course, as soon as I opened it, Viola stormed into the room.

"I see you found a little tart to parade about with!" she yelled in her thick Italian accent, as my foggy brain tried to reason out why she would be here early and looking as though she'd had a good night sleep. Ah. Charles must not have offered much, of course.

"Viola, she's not a tart, she's, my girlfriend. Now, what the hell could you possibly want this early in the morning?"

"You know what I want!" she cried, as she started to unbutton her blouse. "And you know I can satisfy you!"

At that point, Alaya came out of the bedroom, completely naked, and even Viola's eyes widened at the display. "I don't think there is any part of my papi that needs to be satisfied at the moment. I wore him out you see."

Viola just looked between the two of us, swallowing harshly. "Fine. When you want a grown up, you know where I am." She quickly buttoned her blouse up, and then stomped out of the room, leaving a rush of air she left so fast.

"Well, that wasn't how I wanted to be woken up!" I groaned. "I'm so sorry!"

"Don't be. You can hardly be blamed for that. I'd be jealous too if you left me and were with another woman. But I don't plan to lose you, to her or anyone else." Her hand slipped under the robe, fondling me gently.

"I have no reason to leave. Everything I want is right here." I could feel myself already responding to her touch, fatigue be damned.

"Good! Then let's go wake up properly, and then get some coffee to get the day started!"

Which is exactly what we did.

After another day in Rome that was spent sightseeing and picking up our remaining clothes, we had to head onto our next stop in the city of Bamako, the capitol of Mali. We planned it well, leaving at night in Rome for a nine hour flight. We could sleep through the flight, then wake up, go to the lab, get all the information we needed, and then get right back on the plane around lunch time to fly up to Copenhagen, Denmark. I was already expecting Alaya to ask for a chance to sample the local cuisine, and I was thinking that perhaps we could get some to bring with us on the outbound flight, so we didn't mess up our schedule. I was sure that the crew would like the food too, since it was probably fresher than anything in the freezer. 

"So, we're not spending the night?" Alaya confirmed as we flew through the air. We were snuggled up in the bed, hoping to get some sleep, but were just chatting instead.

"No, there is nothing here for us other than the lab," I told her. "They do research there on all kinds of exotic diseases here. They trap mosquitoes looking for dengue fever, yellow fever, or anything else. They also did all the COVID research for us here. We have a couple of labs back in the states as well, but this is our biggest exotic disease one."

She had a bit of a frown on her face as she listened, and it made me wonder what she was thinking. Luckily, Alaya was curious, and always spoke her mind. "Other companies that did COVID research, didn't they do that in the states?"

That wasn't the question that I had been expecting, and honestly, I wasn't sure about the answer to it. "You might be right, and I wish I had a better answer than saying I don't know. But I'm not involved in that side of the company, so can't explain why the decision was made to do it that way."