Playing Hard To Get

“Don’t talk about her like that!”

“Don’t yell at me,” Tasha said. “You’re the one all calling me out here to confront me about your little cheating…I don’t know what to call her.”

Hearing this, Venus began to cry again.

“Look, Venus”—Tasha exhaled—“you’re a good…I mean decent…I mean child of God. And you and your little—”

Venus looked at Tasha.

“—Lynn are probably giving every lesbian in the world a bad name.”

“We’re not lesbians. We’re polyamorous.”

“I don’t know what that means and I don’t want to know.” Tasha threw her hands up. “But what I was saying was that you two probably need to sit down and have a conversation and decide what you’re going to do. Which probably needs to be breaking up.”

“You really think so?”

“Venus, you’re having a girl who’s ten years younger than you followed around the city by a detective. Yes, it’s time for you to break up—for all three of you to break up…and you might want to break up with Bobby too.”

“When a man loves a woman… / She can do no wrong / Turn his back on his best friend / If he put her down.”

The lyrics of this old Percy Sledge song were alive and kicking in a certain brownstone of a Harlem pastor and his wife. While anyone listening to their story might want Troy’s telling of her troubles to her husband to be a little more difficult, a little more strenuous, that just wasn’t Kyle’s way with this woman. He knew how and what she was—probably better than she did—and as she went over everything she’d been thinking, pulled every pair of shoes from her closet, and cried every tear she had in her body, he just kept thinking that finally she was figuring out what he’d been trying to tell her all along. That the only person she could be, that she needed to be, was herself. And the more she tried to be someone else, the more dangerous their life together would be.

Yes, he was upset with her for the thing with the money and knew that he would need to smooth this over with many people for many months, and he was sad that there was an obvious lack of communication between him and his bride, but a gift he’d been born with, a gift he’d used to become one of the best preachers, was the gift of knowing a liar from a lost person and a lost person from someone wanting to be found. He worked with these kinds of people day and night and sometimes it meant the difference between saving a soul and saving time. And while in his wife, when he’d left her that very morning, he’d seen the eyes of someone who was lost, sitting beside her on the bed, with shoes and scarves and dresses with tags still attached, he saw the eyes of the latter. Troy was being found.

“I’m not perfect either,” Kyle said, comforting Troy. “And I don’t ever want to be that. To pretend to be that. It’s dangerous. Yes, you’ve let me down. But the only way Myrtle could even believe that she could come between us is if she thought I might let you down. If she saw a crack she could dig at. If she thought I wouldn’t fight for you. That I wouldn’t pick you up.”

“Would you?” Troy asked her groom, still crying. “Could you still fight for me even after I’ve done such stupid things?”

“You know that, baby,” Kyle said seriously. “You don’t even have to ask.”

The doorbell the two had installed themselves rang and bells chimed throughout the house.

“You want to answer that?” Troy asked Kyle.

“Let’s answer her together.”

Kyle and Troy walked to the front door, the shorter, softer one behind the taller, masculine one, but then they opened the door and when Myrtle looked inside, they were side by side, his arm over her shoulder.

“I thought maybe you two weren’t home,” Myrtle said, looking at Troy, confused. She tapped the envelope she was holding and looked up at the pastor.

“Oh, we were just about to sit down to some Chinese food my wife ordered,” Kyle said.

“Oh.” Myrtle tried to look unmoved. “Well, Troy agreed that I could come by so we could tell you something. Right, Troy?” She looked at Troy.

“Now, I sure did agree to that.” Troy nodded matter-of-factly.

“So, maybe I should come in so we can get started.” She tapped the folder again before trying to push her way into the door.

“Hold up,” Kyle said, standing firm and still holding on to his woman. “Baby, do you still agree to needing Myrtle here for our meeting?”

Troy looked from Kyle to Myrtle.

“Nahhhh,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, then, I guess we’re done here. See you at church!”

Kyle tried to pull back from the door, but Myrtle stuck her foot inside.