Playing Hard To Get Read online

  “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.

  

  After two phone calls and a triple-flight1 of calming Merlot later, Tasha’s brave little witnesses were joined by two more mourners—Tamia and Troy.

  The three best friends, who’d met and started their 3T sisterhood when they were undergrads at Howard University, stood hunched over in a half circle at the basin in Tasha’s bathroom. Before them was a single spiked, white hair that Tasha forbid anyone in the room to call gray.

  “So you just saw it?” Tamia asked so seriously anyone who walked in would think they were looking at a dead body. And it could’ve been. All Tasha had said when she’d called was that it was a Code 3T2 at her house—that could’ve meant the house was on fire, or she was about to set fire to it. Either way, her girls had to get there quickly.

  “Yes, it was just there,” Tasha whispered for no reason above dread. “Just there. Just…just sticking out from all the rest of the hairs.”

  “It is pointy,” Troy said, squinting and moving closer to the hair in a way that only a best friend would do for another best friend as horrified as Tasha. This, in fact, could be said about the entire scene.

  “Who cares about it being pointy, Troy? I don’t want it to be here at all, period,” Tasha said. “Why is God doing this to me?”

  “God has nothing to do with this,” Troy said. “And don’t use his name in vain.”
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  “What? God has everything to do with this,” Tasha pointed out. “He put the damn hair there. He can take it away.”

  “What? See, you need Jesus. I’m going to have my women’s group at the church pray for you.” From her pocket, Troy produced a little prayer pad she used to record all of the negative things and thoughts she encountered throughout each day.

  “Well, get it right and make sure you tell them to pray that I never get another one of those fuckers.”

  “Tasha, give Troy a break,” Tamia jumped in. “I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t come to pick me up and there isn’t much we can say about this…this gray—”

  “What did you say?”

  “I mean,” Tamia corrected herself, “as you described it, ‘platinum’-colored hair anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, y’all.” Tasha’s voice cracked and then the merlot-influenced tears came. “It’s just that it came from out of nowhere.” She stood up and walked to a red velvet chaise that was certainly luxurious, yet oddly placed in the middle of the bathroom floor. “And it’s so long. Look at it!” The girlfriends’ eyes shot from Tasha and back at the devilish hair. “I’m like, how long had this been happening to me and I didn’t know? It was growing and I never noticed. It’s like it wasn’t there yesterday and today it’s everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?” Troy asked, pulling the prayer pad back out of her pocket.

  “No, not like that. Well, I don’t know. After I plucked that one, I was afraid to look.” Tasha looked at her friends expectantly.

  “I am soooo not looking at your vagina, Tasha,” Tamia said bluntly before taking a sip of the glass of Malbec she’d poured to survive the occasion. “There are limits to this friendship. And I do believe this little pilgrimage to look at a platinum hair is enough.”

  

  Time and situations like this one had changed the three women in the bathroom with the platinum hair. For the 3Ts were once the party girls. The “It” girls. New York’s finest, with the city of all cities at their disposal. When they graduated from Howard and left DC in an agreement to make it in Manhattan, the twenty-somethings’ historical lineage put them at the top of the city’s “to know” and “can get in” lists. A little something Troy’s elitist, half white grandmother “best blood”3 meant that without even trying, the pretty girls were in and it.

  Troy had grown up on the Upper West Side with passed-down Manhattan wealth on her mother’s side and a fairy tale Harlem history filled with actresses, secret societies, and front-row seats—even at church—on her father’s side.

  Tamia’s last name was gold in the big city even before she started NYU Law with Troy. A Dinkins, she shared powerful blood with the city’s first black mayor. And while her Prince George’s County upbringing meant that few NYC insiders knew Tamia directly, they all accepted her like an old friend once they realized who she was.

  Hailing from LaLa Land in the West was the third T, Tasha, who was both enjoying and hating the first-generation affluence and recognition her mother’s fame as a soap opera star afforded her. In Hollywood, Porsche St. Simon’s name alone meant that Tasha could play in the homes of Hollywood A-listers and half-eat meals at exclusive restaurants that had reservations set for months. But little of this mattered when Tasha ran away from her mother and ended up trying to make a name for herself, first at Howard and then in New York City. While the crowd was impressed, Porsche’s mark had been in Hollywood, so they weren’t moved. It was purely a black industry thing. But all that changed when Tasha caught (out of her own admission) and made a covenant with Lionel LaRoche, a starting player with the New York Knicks, just months after getting to New York. Then she found herself back on top of the scene and never once had to ask for what was given to her. VIP entrance and invitations to birthday parties for celebrities she’d never met—they all wanted Tasha there, and she, arm-in-arm with her two besties,4 seldom let them down.

  It was fun. The bright lights of the New York night shined on the 3Ts as they chased their dreams, fell in love with dreamy men, and dreamed of how life could be more fantastic than the ones they now enjoyed. It was better than the best of times in their lives and what made it that way, for sure, was that they were there for each other.

  In the big city, the 3Ts found a little love in a group of women that was inspired by honesty, tolerance, support, and lots and lots of tears. They had rules and regulations they’d organized to help each other along the way. Kind of signposts each T used to stay out of the dark—how to survive a breakup, how to tell if a man is lying, how to help a friend in need, how to take someone’s man (Troy had used that one and failed miserably, but in the end, she found the man she needed). Hell, they even had their own signature drink and an astrological 3T wine mood chart. While other people said the 3T rules and regulations were silly and even childish, the Ts lived by them.

  Nowadays, it seemed the sisterhood and scraps of paper recording rules and regulations were all the 3Ts had to remind themselves of their marvelous Manhattan moments. The parties. The best tables. The lists of hunky NY bachelors. The sushi nights. The shopping sprees at Saks, yielding $3,000 boyfriends.5 All gone (well, maybe not the boyfriends). All history to them now. They hadn’t gotten old; they’d simply gotten grown. The new Christian Louboutin heels hurt their feet and they couldn’t dance until dawn anymore. The music seemed louder everywhere they went. Mortgages ate up money that was once spent on bottle service. And their once slender frames were now covered with baby bump–hiding blazers for Tasha, professional blazers for Tamia, and “Blessed is the name of Jesus” blazers for Troy.

  Smart Sipping: The 3T Astrological Wine Mood Chart

  You like red today and white tomorrow. Then you want it sparkling or blush…maybe even a fruity/country mix over ice. It might seem like you’re a wine-drinking schizophrenic who can’t make up her mind about her favorite glass of bottled decision making, or the two guys she’s been dating who drove her to drink in the first place; however, expert(ish) barroom studies show that it’s not you who’s confused. Your sign and mood actually dictate what kind of wine you might need or desire. A fiery Leo might require a glass of Grenache to get and stay in the mood for love, while a wild child Cancer would enjoy a sparkling champagne cocktail while in bed with her lover.

  Do some more smart sipping to protect your mood…or create one. *Remember that good wine is best enjoyed with great friends and without automobiles.

  

  Earth Signs: Including Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn, these land-loving ladies are practical taskmasters who seldom fold.

  Happy—Fruity (plum) wine will break the ice and get her right.

  Horny—Break her tough exterior with a mellowing Merlot.

  Sad—Malbec’s peppery tones will help her unlock those secrets.

  Sexy—White Zinfandel is sweet enough to get the groove back.

  

  Water Signs: Like rivers, Pisces, Scorpio, and Cancer embrace everything they touch. They’re sensitive and emotional.

  Happy—Rousanne’s wild flowers will birth the poet within.

  Horny—The honey oozing in Chenin Blanc is sure to hypnotize.

  Sad—Red Nebbiolo will calm the sensitive sign.

  Sexy—Pinot Noir is deep and dark enough to capture her sexy.

  

  Fire Signs: Strong and full of confidence, Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius are usually hard to miss—they’re running things.

  Happy—Riesling is sweet enough to bring a smile to her face.

  Horny—Stoke her burning fire with a spicy cabernet sauvignon.

  Sad—Merlot will shake the blues away.

  Sexy—Grenache’s complex bouquet will have her tongue-tied.

  

  Air Signs: Aquarius, Libra, and Gemini girls are known for being the life of the party. They love fun and new ideas.

  Happy—Moscato will keep the party girl on tabletops.

  Horny—Merlot is sure to turn this tough chick into a tigress.
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br />   Sad—Control emotions, sipping nonalcoholic cabernet.

  Sexy—Rice wine/sake is the perfect aphrodisiac.

  

  “What’s happening to me?” Tasha asked.

  “What do you mean?” Tamia asked, holding Tiara to her chest as the baby napped. She hadn’t yet decided if she wanted children but loved the weight and heat she felt when carrying Tasha’s girls in her arms. The feeling of being needed in such an innocent way by another living thing was comforting in a way that beat a full day of massages at any parlor in the city. Tasha’s early emergency kept the 3Ts together until sunrise, and now they were sitting on a bench beside the sandbox at the private playground in Tasha’s neighborhood. While it was March and cold northern temperatures still dominated the forecast, the high sun and crisp air made for an unusually warm day at the park. Nanny-driven Mercedes-Benz station wagons and Bentley coupes with drivers who looked like Barbie dolls whizzed by. These were common sightings in Alpine, the most expensive neighborhood in the entire country, which had in its zip code Mary J. Blige, P. Diddy, and Stevie Wonder.

  “Life is happening to you, Tasha,” Troy said, getting up from the bench and sitting in the sandbox beside Toni.

  “Nuh-uh, speak for yourself,” Tasha said. “This is some life, but not mine. Not the one I ordered. I mean, I was supposed to be…” Tasha stopped. In her mind’s eye, and with the brazen, savvy, and edgy reputation for busting balls she’d garnered, she was expected to be the “take no prisoners” go-getter of the group. The renegade. The game-changer. Now all she was doing was changing diapers and driving to the mall to buy another outfit to stuff into the girls’ closet.

  “Life isn’t about where you thought you’d be,” Troy announced prophetically. “It’s about where you are. If you’d asked me a few years ago where I’d be, I’d say I was going to be Mrs. Julian James. A doctor’s wife, who had her own law firm. I would be vacationing in the Hamptons with him and my two children—”