Playing Hard to Get

by Grace Octavia

Genres: African American Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Widely hailed for her witty, sophisticated fiction, Essence best-selling author Grace Octavia presents readers with an insightful romance starring the 3Ts: Tamia, Troy, and Tasha - New York City's hottest "It Girls." Attorney Tamia has a successful career and a promising relationship with her millionaire boyfriend - but when she meets another man, she questions everything about her life. Meanwhile, shocking secrets turn Troy's life as a pastor's wife upside down. And Tasha soon loses control as she discovers the drawbacks of her undeniable desirability.

Release date: October 24, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

And on this luxurious, $5 million stage, nestled on the twenty-second floor of the desirous address of One Central Park West, known to the world as Trump Towers, is an astute and determined player, a woman who, it would seem to anyone watching, was preparing for the role of her life.

No, she wasn’t making good on girlhood dreams of winning an Oscar or Emmy. Nonetheless, her starring role was just as riveting, just as compelling. Simply put, the angelically divine black beauty was attempting what other tired women had been trying to do at every other place in the world for as long as time existed—go to bed without having sex.

So, in the privacy of her bathroom, beneath a $10,000 Kalco chandelier that cast a sinister light over her freshly permed and then pressed hair, Tamia Dinkins slid an unnecessarily thick, overnight, extra-long, winged, and superabsorbent pad into the crotch of her aqua lace panties.

“Urggh,” she groaned at the prehistoric, uncomfortable weight and width of the thing between her thighs. It was so ridiculous and Tamia wondered how she ever, ever concealed these things beneath her acid-washed jeans and EnVogue-tight miniskirts when she’d gotten her period in junior high school. Happily, because of nature and the intelligent folks at Playtex, she’d outgrown these little mattresses now; however, that didn’t stop her from putting one on. Charleston, her ongoing leading male for the past six months, was in the bedroom. He’d been out there waiting nearly every night for two months, and quite frankly, Tamia was tired of how comfortable Charleston seemed to be getting with coming to her place, having acrobatic sex, slipping into a coma, and waking in the morning only to leave and return hours later to do it all again. And while the leading lady kept telling herself that she needed time and space to think about things with Charleston and where they were going, really she just wanted a night alone. She’d watch some tacky old R&B music videos, have a glass of overpriced Chardonnay, and think about nothing until the morning.

“Babe, what are you doing in there?” Tamia heard Charleston excitedly calling from the bedroom. He was probably already naked, his arms and legs spread out on her silk bedspread like a honeydusted cobweb.

“I’m coming,” she said. She hoped he’d noticed the Midol tablets she’d conveniently left on the nightstand.

On another stage, not too far from the last, in the pricey and historic Hamilton Heights enclave in Harlem, Tamia’s best friend was preparing for a less than convincing performance to achieve the same goal. Somewhere between Friday-night Bible study and walking into her refurbished brownstone, First Lady Troy Helene Hall decided that her husband, the good Reverend Dr. Kyle Hall, who’d come into her life like a prince in a fairy tale, wasn’t getting any either. In fact, it had now been exactly a month since Troy and Kyle had shared more than prayers in their antique Thomas Day bed. And even then, it had been a Valentine’s Day “treat” (Troy actually said this).

Trying her best to escape a diva past filled with enough Chanel and Lauren to solidify her top ranking among any circle of purified BAPs, a newly sanctified and debatably saved Troy prided herself on being less dubious and creative in her method of withholding sex than Tamia. She knew about the old “I’m on my period” maxi pad trick but thought no good Christian wife had any business lying to her husband like that. She thought that if she didn’t want to have sex, she didn’t have to have sex. It was that simple.

“No sex,” Troy rehearsed telling Kyle as she laid in bed, dressed in a white cotton smock that, combined with her smooth fawn skin and flaxen hair, made her look like an eighteenth-century house girl. Worse, beneath the frock, she had on the biggest, most raggedy, stretched-out, and faded panties she could find in the back of her drawer.

Her knees tight and her hands crossed above a Bible that rested atop her vagina, Troy waited in bed for Kyle to come out of the bathroom so they could pray and go to sleep in peace. But when the reverend did open the bathroom door, Troy wished she’d had on that superabsorbent maxi pad. Standing inside of the crowned rectangle that separated their underused bed from their underused spa tub, was her husband. Nude and oiled to a shine, he had a silver ring clasping his erect penis.

On the third stage, the player needed no pads or Bibles for her theatrical run, for it was a one-woman show. Alone in a California king-size bed that came to her Alpine, New Jersey, mansion with special measurements to provide a comfortable sleep for her superstar basketball-playing husband, Tasha LaRoche had only two props—a waterproof, neon green vibrator that rested in its normal place beside her in the bed and a cell phone she held to her ear.

“You’re so damn sexy, baby. I want you right now,” a stern yet mischievous voice insisted through the phone. It was her husband. Lionel was in Miami, getting ready to play the Heat the next night in a March matchup.

“Yeah, Daddy. I want you, too,” Tasha said with her voice as breathy and childlike as a porn star’s. Her nearly sable skin blushed with fever as she imagined her husband’s big, chocolate hands grabbing for her. Lionel knew how to handle a woman. He was forceful and demanding, yet still careful and comforting. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to get you on the bed and kiss every inch of your body, slowly, until you beg me to get on top of you.”

“Yes,” Tasha moaned, imagining her husband’s lips brushing against her breasts. Without opening her eyes, she reached for the other prop and pulled it to her. “I want you inside of me right now.”

“I’m coming, baby, but first I have to get you ready. I have to move my lips down below your navel—”

“Oh, yes, Lionel. Yes!” Tasha slid the vibrator between her legs and clicked. A swift pulse buzzed beneath the sheet.

“And then I’m going to—”

“Yes!” Tasha pushed the insides of her pelvis toward the little toy and waited to hear her husband’s next command. “What are you going to . . . ? Lionel? Hello?”

Silence.

After being tackled to her bed by a nude man with five moving limbs, Tamia thought that maybe Charleston had been on the wrestling team at Dartmouth. With her legs cocked back to her sides and his middle pushed hard into her, she wondered how and when he’d managed to manipulate her body in such a way. And she was still in her nightclothes.

Charleston was a decent-looking man. He had clear, brown skin and nice teeth. He kept his bald head shaved and his ears clean. His eyes weren’t crossed and he didn’t have shaving bumps (Tamia’s deal breakers). Presentable was a good word, Tamia thought the first time she saw him. He looked like someone any woman wouldn’t mind taking somewhere and claiming. However, even with this, there was nothing about Charleston that made him handsome or striking or especially sexy.

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.

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.”

“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 w. . .