“Charleston,” she said, looking up from the red ink everywhere. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Moi? I’m surprised you remember who I am.”
“Please.” She smiled. “Have a seat.”
“Oh, I get a seat, too?” Charleston looked around as if he hadn’t been in there just days ago, making love to her during a late work session.
“Don’t be so silly,” Tamia said.
“You don’t return a brother’s calls for two days and I’m silly? I think most people call that observant.”
“I’ve just been busy. I told you I need to get more serious about work and focus. You’ve been where I’m at. Why can’t you understand?”
“I do understand. But I’m a man of action. I want what I want and right now I want you.”
He leaned into the desk and looked down Tamia’s torso.
“Do you ever take a day off?” Tamia laughed at his flirting. While his directness could turn to pushiness in seconds, it was Charleston’s fire that added to his attraction. He wasn’t shy about his desires and that only multiplied his power over people.
“Look,” Tamia started, unconsciously stroking her earlobe, “I need to get back to this briefing before my meeting with the Lucas team. You know how Pelst can be.”
Mrs. Phaedra Pelst was another partner at the firm. She headed most of the low-maintenance, high-profile civil rights cases. The six-foot blonde was known throughout the city for her bombshell beauty and killer courtroom antics. What wasn’t known was her uncontrollable craving for bedding bald black men—one of whom was Charleston, who’d stopped sleeping with her when she implied she might want to leave her non-bald and non-black husband for him.
“Good old Phaedra
and her briefing notes. Let me have a look,” Charleston suggested. He’d yet to tell Tamia or anyone else about his bedroom business with Phaedra.
“No,” Tamia insisted. “I can’t let you do that. Pelst is my problem and I have to deal with her all on my own.”
“So you’re kicking me out?” Charleston winked and grinned at Tamia, changing the mood.
“See, do I come to your office with all of this drama?”
“Hell, no,” he said, getting up unflappably and straightening his tie. “You’d never get past my assistant.”
Tamia playfully averted her eyes as he made his way to the door.
“I’ll see you after work?” Charleston asked.
“Yes,” Tamia agreed. “And thanks for thinking of me this morning.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn’t leave you to your own devices in the big city. It’s a jungle out there, baby.”
?
The Empire City, Gotham, the City that Never Sleeps, the Capital of the World, the City So Nice They Named It Twice…
It didn’t matter what the rest of the world chose to call New York City. To the Virtuous Women of First Baptist it would always be known as the Big Apple. For these “serious sisters in Christ,” the moniker had nothing to do with its innocent 1920s African American origins in the Chicago Defender, and everything to do with its most obvious connections to the sinful temptations they were trying to escape outside the doors of their Harlem sanctuary. For, like Tamia, they too were trying to shore up perfection in this lifetime.
And while the crossed legs and pursed lips around the table at the weekly Bible study would imply that their agreed avoidance of all things sinful in the city was to protect their own innocence, they’d all been there. They’d all done that. And most had their “I Love NY” T-shirts to prove it.
Now this was something that even the most discerning eye couldn’t see. For 150 years, First Baptist had been the church home to uptown’s most distinguished and dignified stakeholders. While other members came and went, the inner circle was a small conglomerate of “I’s”—inheritors, investors, and insiders. Going all the way back before worshippers at Convent and Abyssinia, and even those blacks with more bourgeois aspirations who’d traveled downtown to find their God in the pews at the Methodist and Catholic churches, First Baptist’s original members were some of New York’s first Ivy League graduates, lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, politicians, and big-business proprietors. Slick and savvy, they believed in and portrayed an image that was far from reproach and close to godliness.
More than two centuries later, the Virtuous Women were a stagnant emblem of this persona. Only, like their predecessors, it was more pomp than particularly true.
“I told Richard that no Christian man would ask his wife to do such a thing,” Sister Oliver went on. She was in the middle of a tearful testimony about her husband’s recent desire for oral pleasure.
“No,” a chorus of condemnation surfaced around the table of twenty-three women.