Playing Hard To Get (7 page)

“Then you’ll get all the nigger cases from now until infinity. And everyone will say it’s a good thing, great, you’re doing service for your people, but the only place that can lead to is an office somewhere in Brooklyn. Six figures tops. You’ll go from making headlines to hoping some community rag will give you ad space.”

Tamia’s mouth was hanging open. Everything she’d worked for, everything she’d sacrificed was ablaze in a tinker house in her mind.

“I knew this was a trap. I have to get out of it!”

“No way out, babe. You override Phaedra and they’ll say you’re not a team player.”

“So what would you do?”

“I’d take the loss and work my way back up. Pray for the best.” Charleston shrugged. He felt his phone vibrating in his pocket.

“You’re saying lose the case? On purpose?”

“No, babe. I’m saying survive.”

“Oh no,” Tamia said, still processing Charleston’s words as he started to walk again. “I just wish I knew why she’s all over me like this.”

“Buck up, grasshopper,” Charleston said, navigating toward Nathaniel, who was standing up and waving toward them. “Don’t let crazy Phae get you down.”

“Did you just call her Phae?”



After feeding, clothing, and forcing to sleep her two little daughters, who seemed to want to have nothing to do with her and everything to do with their father, Tasha slid on her cutest boy shorts and sauntered, ever so casually, between her husband and his laser focus on
Sportscenter.
After the fight in the car, and a wordless dinner, she didn’t want to come on too strong, but certainly wanted to get it on. The little shorts, hot pink and so tight they almost looked like swimming bottoms, were the perfect mix of “I’m just walking around doing housework” and “come and get it!” She really just wanted his attention, and even if he was still upset about the fight earlier, she knew he had to be missing her attention just the same.

She was hoping for a night of mind-erasing sex that could release her from the tension that was burying her, and decided that maybe it would be better not to tell Lionel, who began palming her backside as soon as she walked by, about the little platinum hair she’d plucked. There was no sense talking about getting old with the one person she wanted to see her as young, vivacious, and supple. Yes, he’d seen the stretch marks and hardened nipples that were delivered with the babies, and lifted without a word the little sack that formed atop her once taut abs, which, contrary to what any personal trainer told her, wouldn’t return with any amount of crunches or sit-ups. But even with all of this, he was still grabbing at her and whispering things like “You trying to walk past Big Daddy with those shorts on?” as if they weren’t married and two children in. And Tasha never wanted that to change.

Sucking in her sack and poking out her back, she responded nonchalantly, “Who, me? I’m just cleaning up.” She giggled but still found her way to bend over his knee. It wasn’t the most appropriate position to send up a prayer of thanks, but she did, and vowed to hide away what she was thinking, so she could feel something better. And she might have been able to keep this up had Lionel been able to keep himself up. Five minutes into the lovemaking, Big Daddy wasn’t so big anymore.



Tasha wasn’t the only 3T who was hiding something. On the fourth floor of her Harlem habitat, Troy was on her knees, stacking a brand-new pair of $1,500 silver Jimmy Choo water-snake pumps behind an older brand-new pair of $1,500 black Jimmy Choo water-snake pumps. Natural black curls sticking to her sweaty forehead, she was moving fast like she was hiding someone else’s Christmas present, but Kyle was the only someone else who lived in the brownstone, and he had no clue who Jimmy Choo was or that his wife had over $50K worth of his shoes. And that wasn’t the only thing stuffed in the back of Troy’s closet.

“What are you doing?” Kyle asked, walking into the room and seeing Troy’s backside and feet poking out of the closet. He’d heard rustling, what sounded like little squirrels burrowing in the walls, as he walked up the stairs.

“What?” Troy’s response was fast and breathy. Something slammed and in a second she was on her feet with the closet door closed.

Kyle bent toward her to look at the door before repeating his question.

“I was just praying.”

“In the closet?”

“Yeah…” Troy turned and looked at the closet coyly. “Praying for my clothes.” She was trying to sound confident to stop Kyle from going over and opening the closet door. She felt bad, though, and reminded herself that she would need to say two prayers before bed now—one for buying the shoes (and the scarf and purse she’d already hid) and another for lying to her husband. Nervous, Troy laughed and went over to kiss Kyle on the cheek. She wouldn’t and couldn’t tell him all she had within that covered sliver of space. In fact, she didn’t know how. The pretty little things she’d been pushing and pressing in there had come from so many places she’d loved long before she even met Kyle and she wouldn’t know where to start. There was only “why?” And even that escaped Troy’s knowledge.

“Oh, you’re kissing me now?” Kyle said, his voice quickly turning from concern to passion. He slid his arms around Troy’s waist, grabbing her buttocks. After they’d gotten married and Troy stopped working, she’d put on an extra ten pounds that he loved. A Southern gent, he liked the feeling of really holding his woman and knowing she wouldn’t back away. But she did.

When Troy felt Kyle’s penis hardening on her navel, she remembered the silver ring, the incubus, and the succubus, and jumped back.

“What did you come up here for? I thought you were in your study, memorizing your sermon for next week.” Troy wasn’t really sure about this, but that was usually where Kyle was, and that was usually what he was doing. The sturdy penis and thoughts of the sex demons who Troy believed were no doubt running free in her bedroom at that very moment made her want to be alone again so she could look at her pretty things.

“Oh,” Kyle said, slapping himself on the forehead playfully. “I almost forgot. Lucy’s downstairs.”

“Lucy?” Troy repeated, with the ridiculous prospect of Kyle’s claim laced in her tone.

“Yeah, your crazy grandmother, with her crazy dog.” Kyle didn’t usually label people in such a way, but Lucy and her toothless dog kept his temperance teetering.

“She’s downstairs?” Troy jetted to the window and there it was, Lucy’s antique white Rolls stopped in front of the brownstone, taking up half the street. Paul, her driver, was leaning against the door. “But she never comes here. She never comes to…Harlem.”

Troy was pushing her hair back and pulling off her clothes. A new top and jeans; no, a dress; no, a purple silken lounge set was on the bed and then on her—that quickly.

“Is the house clean?” she asked.

“Clean?” Kyle replied. “It’s always clean. You know we—”

“Is it
really
clean? You know what I mean!”

The newlyweds looked at each other to find understanding. As they grew older, this would turn into a telepathic ability to know what the other was thinking, but now the new groom was just too slow. Before he could remind his wife that they hadn’t dusted in a few weeks, there was a call from the bottom of the steps. It was purposefully weak and highly dramatic, little more than a whisper with a Southern drawl, from a woman who hadn’t lived a day in the South.

“Troy Helene, darling, you really must dust this…home. Ms. Pearl is liable to get a sickness in here…typhoid…or…swine flu.” Her voice dragged and it was clear she was looking at things, frowning and certainly not touching. “Hell,
I
might get a sickness in here.”



Throughout dinner, Charleston and Nathaniel kept the women laughing and the stories coming. Leaning back carefree and as pompous as princes, they’d loosened their Zenga ties and shoved platinum and mother-of-pearl cuff links into their pockets. They’d commandeered the most expensive bottle of scotch from the bar and took turns demanding ownership of the tab. How important they were and how much money they had was apparent to anyone walking past the table. It was black yuppie heaven and these two were singing like angels in the choir.

“Honestly, though, I told him, and I swear this is what I told that white boy, ‘I don’t care how many units this shit moves, I have the money,’” Nathaniel said coolly as he continued a rant about how he was about to be the next big thing in jazz and the world had better watch out for him. According to Charleston, Nathaniel, who was apparently a saxophone player, hadn’t even played in the band in college. But this was his new thing. He was an artist, a jazz musician, and he’d poured his entire self into it—even picking up a few drug habits to prove his dedication. “I want the fame,” he went on. “Just get me on the networks!” Nathaniel laughed a little louder than his joke called for. He was drunk and Tamia had noticed two dinner dates ago that when he got drunk he got louder and more obnoxious. While Nathaniel was what the 3Ts called a beach ball,
⁹
he had the nerve to be handsome anyway. His brown skin was without defect. And like Charleston, he had perfect teeth and his grooming was impeccable. When Tamia met him at some rapper’s film premiere in Chelsea, and the two shook hands for the first and last time (it was more traditional to hug and trade dry kisses), she’d noticed how soft and moist his palms were. Like a newborn baby’s, they felt as if he’d just walked right out of a hospital nursery that very day. He then whispered in her ear that she should only call him by his full name—not Nate or Nathan. He claimed he was the fifth Nathaniel Cecil in a line of Burris men that predated the Civil War and it would be a shame to dishonor this history, but really it was just because he liked the way the formal version sounded. “Nathaniel” was the perfect accessory. It matched his ascots, argyle sweaters, and penny loafers.

“You’re so funny, sweetie,” chimed Ava, who was smiling beside Nathaniel. Thus far, Tamia had met three of his women, but Ava seemed to be sticking around. She was as skinny and dainty as a dove feather. Her skin was the color of the inside of a banana peel and there was not a trace of a crinkle in a strand of her shoulder-length auburn hair. It took Tamia hours of painstaking pressing and perming to get hers right, and she envied just looking at Ava’s slick roots.
She must be mixed,
Tamia thought,
mixed with something somewhere in her family.

Charleston said Ava was a model, but Tamia thought she hadn’t even sounded that smart. Not a day over twenty-three, she mostly agreed with what Nathaniel had to say and laughed at his jokes before he’d reached the punch line.

“I told that white boy he can keep my check. Shit, set them on fire if he wants,” Nathaniel went on.

“Man, you’re just talking shit now, just like at school when we pledged K-A-Psi. You know you didn’t say that,” Charleston insisted. “And if you don’t want the $50 you’re gonna make selling iTunes to me and your mama, you can send it to me. I can use it to get a haircut.” Charleston rolled his hand over his head and shimmied dapperly.

“How about I cut out the middleman and just send the check directly to your mama? Pay my child support,” Nathaniel jabbed and they all laughed. Unlike Charleston, he’d come from big money. His great-grandfather once sold insurance in Brooklyn, and when the business went belly up during the Depression, he spent his life savings on a dilapidated building in Greenwich Village. Only it was the ’30s then and everyone thought he was crazy. The Village wasn’t the big hot spot just yet. Drugs were everywhere and in just thirty years hippies would be sleeping in the streets. However, after fixing up and renting out units in the property for five decades, his son sold it and purchased another dilapidated building in midtown during the recession in the ’80s. The salesman said he would need at least $5 million to fix it up in order to make any profit from renting office space. Nathaniel’s grandfather spent $1 million and turned it into an indoor parking facility. Now Nathaniel’s father was selling the spots for $275K a piece. The family would keep 50 percent to stay in control.

Tamia was adding up how much Nathaniel’s family was making off of all the spots when she felt the table vibrating beneath her right elbow. She looked down to see that Charleston’s phone was aglow and before he snatched it from the table and excused himself, she saw as clear as black lettering on a white sheet of paper the word “Phae.” Before it made any sense and registered in her head in a way that would make it possible to recall when she later realized that he’d stopped paying her mortgage, Charleston was gone from the table and Tamia was looking over her shoulder.

As she listened to more about the CD and even more about Nathaniel’s pending fame, time seemed to be standing still and moving fast as hell at the same time. Forever, that’s how long it felt that Charleston had been away from the table. And Tamia was fighting hard with herself not to care when Ava came up with a thought of her own.

“Where’s Charleston?” Ava asked. “He’s been gone for a long time.”

Tamia took the last sip of the third glass of wine she’d ordered to escape tasting the leathery scotch and was about to get up to see what was taking Charleston so long when he suddenly reappeared and slid back into his seat. As poised as a politician, he put his hand on Tamia’s knee and kissed her on the cheek.

“Sorry that took so long. It was the office,” he said in a way that left absolutely no space for Tamia to ever quiz him about what she’d seen on the phone.



“Why am I in Harlem, Troy Helene?” Lucy asked.

Troy stared at her grandmother from across the mahogany table in the center of her sitting room. She didn’t know why Lucy had ended up in Harlem, in her sitting room, in the Queen Anne armchair she’d purchased as a wedding gift. Ms. Pearl, Lucy’s blind, deaf, and toothless bichon frise, whose once puffy white coat was now a thin, dull silver, was being stroked on Lucy’s lap as she looked on with equal disgust at Troy. A two-time Westminster Best in Show, Lucy’d had the dog for as long as Troy had been alive and the two went everywhere together. Now there was a family joke that the next destination might be the pearly gates. Lucy had already purchased a plot beside hers for the dog; on the other side was Lucy’s dead, rich, white husband.