Welcome to Dubai (The Traveler) by Omar Tyree

relationship expert? You’re on your own with that. I’m not Dr. Phil.”
    “Yeah, what good are you?” Gary retorted playfully.
    “Just don’t lose your phone out there, or it’ll cost you a lot more to call. The code I gave you is very specific.”
    “What, like digitized to my iPhone?”
    “Something like that. I don’t know how it works, I just know that it’s awesome.”
    “So if someone stole my phone, I would be able to track them down?”
    “In a heartbeat.”
    Gary paused and looked at his iPhone. He asked, “What did you do to it? You like, bugged me or something?”
    Jonah paused herself. She said, “If I tell you, are you gonna act like a kid or a grown-up?”
    “I
am
grown,” Gary responded.
    “Okay, well, that phone is able to tell me a lot of things. I switched it for you a long time ago.”
    Gary looked at the iPhone again and didn’t see anything different about it. He asked, “Can you ah, hear everything I do or say, even when I’m not using it?”
    “Knowing
you
, I wouldn’t want to do that,” she joked. “But it’s a possibility, yeah.”
    Gary said, “So I am like James Bond then.”
    “I’m just trying to do my job and protect you,” she told him.
    “Shit, I’m thirty-one years old now,” Gary snapped at her. He felt disrespected.
    “And how old is the president? Age has nothing to do with it.”
    “Okay, well, if I’m so important to Mr.
Unknown,
then how come I still can’t meet the guy? This is ridiculous! What kind of life is this?” he stated in reference to his father.
    “It’s your life,” Jonah told him calmly. “That’s why you’re over there in Dubai. You have a right to live it, and no one is stopping you.”
    “Yeah, while being
spied
on,” he countered. “So, what else did you swap? My luggage? My wallet? What?”
    Jonah paused in silence. “So … are you gonna act like a kid or a grown-up if I tell you?”
    Gary could hear the sarcasm in her voice and imagine her mischievous grin without even seeing it. He said, “You know what? I don’t even want to know anymore. You have a job to do, and I have a life to live.” And he hung up the phone on her.
    Then he said, “I guess you can hear me now too, right? And you know what floor I’m on. Well, what if I just left this phone right here in the room?”
    He tossed the cell on the bed, while having a full tantrum.
    Then he thought about his wallet. He couldn’t leave that inside the room. And what about his shoes? Or his belt buckle? Jonah could have bugged and swapped anything.
    Gary stopped and shook his head, realizing how unreasonable he was acting. But he loved his freedom, so to be traced everywhere he went as a grown man, and without him knowing about it, was hard to stomach.
    “I don’t believe this. I’m not a damn kid,” he snapped. He imagined that Jonah could still hear him. Then he thought about his overreaction. He hadn’t snapped out like that in years.
    Shit, I am acting like a kid,
he thought. He expected Jonah to call him back soon, but she didn’t. So he called her back.
    “Okay, I apologize for overreacting, but this is just weird.”
    “And what part of our relationship has been normal?” she asked him. “You’ll just have to get used to it. That’s why I told you. I didn’t want you to be blindsided. And if it’ll make you feel any better, I will never listen in on your private conversations. That’s not what it’s there for. It’s only an emergency mechanism. And you should be glad that you have it.”
    “But what if someone steals it or I misplace it or something? I don’t want anyone overreacting.”
    Jonah calmly told him, “If someone steals that phone, we can call it and signal for it with a very loud and irritating alarm, and then tell them to return it to the nearest lost-and-found before it explodes in their hand.”
    Gary looked at the cell phone again and panicked. “Oh shit, it can do that? I could have been arrested on the plane with this