Playing Hard To Get (2 page)

But really that didn’t matter. Men like Charleston seldom carried their good looks on their shoulders. They had everything they needed to be considered “handsome, striking, and especially sexy” in their pockets. A self-made millionaire, Charleston started his good looks when he won his first medical malpractice lawsuit, right out of Dartmouth Law. His clients, five transplant patients who’d contracted HIV due to receiving infected organs from the same untested donor, were awarded $25 million each. His cut was 30 percent.

“Is that a pad?” Charleston asked, stilling grinding into Tamia. “You have your period?”

“Yeah.” Tamia thought she sounded convincing…at least confident. “I guess we can’t…we can’t have sex.” She raised her eyebrows matter-of-factly and shrugged her shoulders, ready for Charleston to get his 225-pound, overly exercised body off of hers.

“That’s weird—I could’ve sworn you had it two weeks ago.”

Tamia was silent. Saying anything wrong here could get her into trouble two weeks later when she really did get her period.

“Well, what day is it?” he asked.

“What?” She was sure he couldn’t mean what she already knew he did.

“Is it the first day? Because we had sex two days ago.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Are you bleeding heavily or lightly?” Charleston tried to maneuver his hand into the top of her night pants, but Tamia flicked it away. “Let me check.”

“Yuck,” she protested, pulling away from him. “I don’t do that. We’ve never had sex on my period.”

“Stop being such a prude. Some women love having sex on their period,” Charleston said, looking down at his penis. “We can put a towel down.”

“Let’s
not
do that and say we did.” Tamia pulled away from him and groaned, finding her way to her side of the bed as he sat with a surprised look. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was he that desperate that he’d put his hand on her pad? Yeah, she’d had sex while on her period before, but things had changed since she was young and horny, living in a boxy walk-up in Alphabet City as she starved her way through NYU Law and dreamed of the life she now had. Now they were lying on $400 white Egyptian cotton sheets and the concierge would be there to pick up the laundry in the morning. She was one of seven black owners in the entire building and four were basketball players. The last thing she needed was the cleaners talking about how they’d found blood on her sheets. Tamia sucked her teeth at the thought before reminding herself that there would be no blood on the sheets. She didn’t really have her period. Her performance was so convincing, she’d convinced herself.

Now she wanted nothing more than to ask Charleston to leave. In five minutes, he’d managed to run past the finish line in a race to get on her nerves. But then she remembered one important detail that kept her from completely losing herself in a rage—this important detail was what she’d remember sixty days later when she was standing bald and draped in a sari with a delinquent notice from the bank in her hand. Charleston, in all of his doggedness, had been paying her $10,000 monthly mortgage.



After years of countless “nos,” rejected young boys with rock-hard penises eventually became rejected grown men with rock-hard penises. And most of these men, Charleston and his well-accounted-for ego excluded, learned to take this denial of sex with a shrug and walk to a private place where he and his private part could find icy water or Vaseline and a
Playboy
magazine.

Somehow, this kind of acceptance never found Reverend Dr. Kyle Hall. Maybe it was because the Morehouse alum and third-generation preacher had been a virgin when he’d met his bride at a country club just three years earlier and had never really suffered sexual rejection like most of his comrades. Maybe it was because the thirty-two-year-old had grown to love every consuming aspect of the deed he’d successfully sequestered himself from for so long. Maybe it was because Kyle’s brown skin and markedly handsome features drew looks and silent promises of adventure from nearly all of the saved women he’d come across each day. Regardless, of all of these “maybes,” Kyle thought, lying in bed as he touched his still-rigid penis and watched Troy sleep in the same stately position he’d found her in when he’d come out of the bathroom naked, the “maybe” that mattered the most was that he was madly attracted to his wife. While it hadn’t been that long since they’d been together, most people would be surprised that the feeling he’d felt when a puffy-eyed and newly single Troy marched into the dining room at the country club where he was sharing lunch with her parents, had never left him. Her smooth, supple skin haunted him when they were apart for only hours. Her eyes, almond and darting like a doe’s, were visible in his mind, calling him into her, even when she was saying no.

And just as he had so many nights before, Kyle heard Troy say no to him and his hairless, coconut-candied body again. And it hurt just as much as it had the first time she’d turned him down. Seemingly ignoring his nudity as he got into the bed beside her, Troy asked if he would pray with her and before the young reverend could answer, she started a loud and long prayer thanking God for his only “
forgotten
son.” Kyle didn’t have the energy to correct his wife. Instead, his mind was focused on the fact that he wasn’t getting any sex. He kept thinking, if only he could get her to feel this thing he’d had in him—what made him shave his entire body and pour coconut oil to be licked and rubbed off all before he’d even thought of bedtime prayer—he’d be fine. But when he reached for Troy with his one free hand, risking another sexual denial, it was made rather clear that she wasn’t feeling anything. The Bible that was hiding her vagina fell to the floor after a sleeping Troy grunted at Kyle’s touch. She turned her torso toward the window and started a deep, mannish snore that wouldn’t stop for another three hours when Troy awoke, sweating and searching for her Bible, so she could escape to the prayer closet to pray the incubus and succubus demons away.

This was because, like her awake husband, Troy had sex on the brain. And while she’d struggled so hard to hide it when she was awake, at rest and between clouded thoughts and montages of the past, Troy was captive to her desires.

“Oh, Reverend, you give it to me so good,” Troy whispered into Kyle’s ear as he sat back in the big black leather chair behind his desk at the church. In reality, the chair sat on all fours, but in the dream, it swiveled around in circles as she plopped down harder and harder in her husband’s lap. Papers went flying. The phone was ringing. Knocks shook the door. Troy and Kyle didn’t stop. “Oh, Reverend! Oh, Reverend!”

Without transition, the sexy scene went from the magically swiveling chair to the long brown couch where Kyle counseled most of the worshippers at the Harlem sanctuary he headed. There, a naked Troy sat center, her legs just inches apart, her husband seated on the floor in front of her. While he never wore a priest’s white collar, now it sat crisp and immaculate at his neck. The rest of him was naked and quite hairy.

“I know this is what you like, Sister Troy,” Kyle said, pushing her legs open. “I’m gonna make you scream. I’m gonna make you praise the Lord.”

He lined her thighs with primitive bites and then snapped his neck back at her middle. He licked and pulled. Troy’s body was a bubble being blown to its limits. A wave of pleasure so strong it stiffened her spine forced her legs together taut around the holy man’s neck. She grabbed his head and pulled it closer to her.

“Wait, baby!” he said, pulling back. “I can’t breathe!” But the waves were still tossing and at the moment adrenaline simply made Troy stronger than Kyle.

“Yes,” she moaned. “Do it! Do it!” She pushed and pushed. Her legs closed and closed. And soon, she couldn’t hear Kyle’s muffled protests anymore. But it was no care. Pleasure was pouring. And then it happened.

Kyle’s head popped off
again.

Like a Ken doll’s extracted in fun by a maniacal six-year-old girl, it came loose from his body with a snap from Troy’s legs and rolled across the floor.

Troy watched with her mouth open.

“You did this to me,” Kyle’s decapitated head said, prosecuting Troy. “You did this.”

“I’m sorry, Reverend,” Troy cried. “I didn’t know…I didn’t know my legs were so powerful!” She looked down and suddenly her soft lower limbs were as firm and muscular as Serena Williams’s.

“Get the Bible and let’s pray for your soul. Let’s pray!”

Just then, Kyle’s rolling head began to riddle passages from the Bible—“And it was good, and Jesus said unto them, a time to sow, the valley of the shadow of death. Pray. Pray. Pray. Our Father, who art in heaven…”—so quick and so fast that Troy began to sweat, trying to find the pages to keep up.

And then, in a terror, she woke up and reached for her Bible.

“You all right?” Kyle, who’d been awake and watching her back the entire time, asked after reaching for Troy again.

“Don’t touch me!” Troy was frantic. She found the Bible on the floor and jumped out of the bed. “I need to pray. Right now. I’ll be downstairs.”



Both of the little girls Tasha gave birth to were crying now. It was 3 a.m. and the four-month-old brown one with the dimples like her father was ready for a bottle and the two-year-old with the attitude of her soap opera–star grandmother was awake just because she liked the scene of her mother in a panic.

Toni, which was the name the dubious two-year-old had learned to answer to, was standing in her white, oval-shaped crib, wiping tears from her eyes as she wailed senselessly and watched her mother scramble to get a bottle to the screaming ball in the other crib, the one she’d heard the tall man with the deep voice call Tiara.

“Oh, Mommy’s baby,” Tasha sang to Tiara to calm her. Only to Toni, who’d been waking up to watch Tasha’s attempts since she was as little as the brown ball, it was clear that the song was little more than a performance to get them to go back to sleep.

Naked and with her short hair running in every direction the pillow in the other room had sent it when she’d finally gone to sleep after her call with Lionel had been dropped, Tasha slid the milk bottle she’d just retrieved from the warmer into Tiara’s mouth.

With the warm bottle, Tiara quickly quieted, but after two sucks, what was previously a cry was now a holler.

“What?” Tasha tried. “What, baby? The milk? It’s too hot? Shit! I forgot to check it.” She dropped the bottle and pulled little Tiara to her shoulder to soothe her. “Mommy’s so sorry…so sorry. I’m just sooo tired and sooo horny. I’m dying here, girls.” It was nights like this that made her wonder why she’d never added a nanny to her staff at the mansion. “Could she really get back at her mother by doing all of this on her own?” might’ve been an intelligent question, but Tasha wasn’t yet ready to admit that that was what this was all about.

Screaming now, Tiara, who could hardly see past her hunger, looked over at the other crib to see her roommate jumping in her crib. Tears speckled the bigger one’s face, but had Tiara been able to recognize a hidden smile, she’d notice that one was there.

“What’s wrong with you, Toni?” Tasha turned around. “I need to feed your sister. Can’t you see Mommy’s busy? You’re supposed to be asleep.”



An hour later, the echoes throughout the overly decorated, eight thousand–square-foot mansion had quieted and Tasha, who’d already had two glasses of red wine at the wet bar in the master suite, was sitting on the toilet, thinking of how she would urinate if she had the energy.

Her eyes closed, she was sure this was the most comfortable she’d ever been in her life. Right there on the toilet, she was in a quiet, movement-free bliss that began at her toes, which were being warmed by the heated marble floors, and ended at her middle, which was just as warm.

“Oh, God, please don’t let them wake up again. Please,” she prayed more honestly than she had in her entire lifetime. “I just want…I just want some rest. Some rest and some…I want my husband back.” Her erratic thoughts then went to her husband. In counseling, a few months after Toni was born and Tasha had been placed on antidepressants to control the crying she did whenever she was alone in the car with the crying baby with the smart eyes, Tasha had promised never to be angry with Lionel for not being there. Basketball was his life. It was her life. It was how they could afford the $5,000 heated toilet she was enjoying so much. He was a good husband who tried his best and if he could, she knew he’d be right there with her. He loved her. There was no question about that. So she had no reason to feel so alone.

The urine finally came and Tasha eased deeper into relaxation as it trickled from her. She sighed and thought of how much she’d enjoy going back to bed.

“If I can’t get sex, I might as well get some sleep,” she said aloud as she reached for the toilet paper.

She wiped herself and looked down to make sure that the paper fell into the expensive latrine. Though the wine was making her eyelids heavy, she could see that the inside of the bowl and the paper weren’t the only white things in the pyramid her thighs made on the seat. There was something else. Something pointy. Out of place. New, yet old.

“What?” Tasha spat, reaching for the thing. “What the hell?” She pulled at it with two fingers. She rationalized that maybe it was lint. A piece of fiber she’d picked up in the bed or maybe it had fallen off of Tiara’s nightsuit. She pulled it, not with any strength, because she was sure the thing would fall away, but when it didn’t, she let it go and shook her hands at it like it was a car coming at her at 80 mph.

“Gray…a gray…? No!”

Tasha’s thirty-two-year-old cry was so loud it not only woke the little girls in her home but also many more for dozens of blocks in their exclusive subdivision. Only not one cried or whimpered or winced. From the little ball, Tiara, to Toni, who’d take the vision just as poorly as her mother thirty years later, the girls merely opened their eyes and stared into space, feeling in Tasha’s voice the inescapable physical and heartbreaking burden time would place on their bodies.