Playing Hard To Get

“So, you hardly like Charleston. Why do you even care?”

The numbing mix of French techno and hip-hop was replaced by a disco track, and the man and woman began to sway side to side together, just a few beats slower than the song. The woman’s torso snaked into his. He slid his hand around her neck forcefully. In a second her neck went from pale to pink.

“Damn!” Tasha purred, feeling tingles at the back of her own neck.

“I know! Damn!” Ignorant to the tango beside them at the bar, Tamia thought Tasha was talking to her. “I don’t know what happened. I do like Charleston. He’s all right. He can be demanding. He’s definitely a snob. But he’s also sophisticated and successful. He has everything a woman could want.”

“Yeah, but is that the everything this woman wants?” Turned on a bit, Tasha was swaying back and forth with the couple. Tamia felt her motion and she was swaying too.

“I’m thirty-two!” Tamia hollered suddenly, snapping herself and Tasha out of the bop. Tasha looked at her. “I know I shouldn’t think about it like this, but I’m thirty-two. And I’m not married, you know?”

Tasha was silent.

“No, you don’t. You’re married. You’ve been, like, married forever, so you don’t understand what it’s like….”

“What what’s like?”

“This! This!” Tamia held her open hands out over the bar like a map of her life was on her palms. “My life. I try so hard not to care. Not to think about it. Just to focus on my career. On my goals. And I’m almost there. Almost where I want to be. But I’m getting old and I guess I just don’t want to lose track and wake up one day at forty and be successful…and single.” She paused and looked at Tasha. “What if all the good men are already gone by then? What if they’re already gone now?”

“So, you thought Charleston was that good man?” Tasha rolled her eyes. Charleston was no devil, but he was no angel. She’d seen him in the box at most of the Knicks games before he and Tamia started dating. Models and video vixens climbed all over him like ants on a picnic blanket dipped in sugar water. They laughed easily at his corny jokes, happily lit his cigars, and squealed pleasantly when he tapped them on their bulbous backsides to show his appreciation. Usually this kind of treatment was reserved for visiting players and owners, but the inquiring gold diggers had long ago appraised his worth. They knew what he was, and he knew what they wanted. The champagne flutes remained filled and Tasha never once saw him walk out of the box, not even to the bathroom, alone.

“No, Charleston is who he is,” Tamia said. “And I know there’s a barrel of women waiting for me to kick the bucket so they can be with him.”

“You got that right.”

“But I know he loves me. And I guess I was thinking in the back of my mind that maybe once I got to where I wanted to be and he was ready, we’d get married. But hearing that he doesn’t even want that!—I just feel like maybe I’ve been wasting my time.”

“Ms. Lovebird, stop being your neurotic self. You think too much,” Tasha said, using the 3T name Tamia was given in college. “You haven’t wasted your time. The fool hooked you up with that spot at the Towers and the sex is good.” She looked at Tamia for approval on her last point.

“Yeah.” Tamia nodded, noticing that her wine was wearing off. “It’s good.”

“Right. So, beggars can’t be choosers. If that was the case we’d all be happy at home.” Tasha sighed. “Just get what you got and keep it moving.”

“That’s the whole thing,” Tamia said. “There aren’t a whole bunch of black, single millionaires running around Manhattan, if you haven’t noticed. Not any that want to get married.”

“Good point.”

“What?” Tamia frowned. “You’re not supposed to agree with me. You’re supposed to be cheering me up!”

“I’m just saying, beyond the ball players, businessmen, bad rappers, and trust-fund babies, all of which I already know, you’re left with gay dudes, grandpas, and guilty divorcés.”

Tamia didn’t know if she should nod or shake her head in agreement, so she just sat there, feeling the weight of her friend’s words.

“The worst thing,” Tamia said, remembering the heavy jewel hanging from Ava’s finger, “is that the ones that are getting married are looking for models and girls that are half their age. How am I supposed to compete with that? And work on my career? Doesn’t that count for something? Why can’t a man who wants to get married just look for something sturdy and dependable and sweet?”

“Because they call those women grandmothers.” Tasha looked toward the end of the bar again to see that the couple was gone now and only the man’s empty wineglass remained on the bar. She chucked a piece of chocolate into her mouth, considering what they must be doing wherever they’d gone.

“So, what’s up with you? How were you able to get out of Jersey so late at—”

“Troy?” Tasha happily cut Tamia off. She’d always been the kind of friend who preferred hearing rather than sharing dish. And she’d just seen a woman who looked like Troy walking toward the front door, only she thought it couldn’t be her, because they weren’t at a church and the woman wasn’t carrying a pail of holy water.

“Troy?” Tamia repeated when the woman walked inside and they both saw that it was indeed her.

Before Troy could get out her prayer shawl, prayer list, prayer oil, and prayer handbook to head to her prayer closet to loosen the grip of the day’s sins, a determined Kyle had been standing in the doorway of their bedroom holding her shoes, purse, and cell phone. He’d seen Tamia’s frantic text inviting his wife into the city for a drink, and while it just might have been the first time in the history of all of mankind that a husband insisted that his wife get out of the house and have some fun, there he was, shuffling Troy and all of her reasons not to meet her girls to the front door. “It sounds pretty serious. They need you,” he was saying as he stuffed Troy into a cab, but really he was thinking that she (and, in a way, he) needed them. Maybe Troy would come back tipsy and forget her Bib

le at the door. Maybe. He’d be sure to shower and get out his coconut body oil…just in case.

“Well, for someone who didn’t expect to come out, your ass sure looks fabsie,”10 Tasha said after Troy told the other Ts of her forced departure. “Is that a Tory Burch?”