Playing Hard to Get by Grace Octavia

Author:Grace Octavia [Octavia, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, African American, General, Contemporary Women, Romance
ISBN: 9780758278692
Google: JyvqAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B009L82WLC
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2012-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

6

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

—Sigmund Freud

To the surprise of no one in the universe but the woman wearing the second $85,000 wedding ring he’d bought her, Lionel wasn’t considering moving his budding brood back to New York City and he wasn’t even willing to talk about it. Riding in the passenger’s seat on the way home from the airport after a terrible game that solidified his team’s exclusion from the NBA finals, he’d told Tasha no so many times she’d stopped counting.

“No. It doesn’t make any sense,” Lionel said after she mentioned that they could probably find something big and pretty and cheap in just a month or so. While getting good property in Manhattan was like getting a private phone call from Jesus, it was a recession and they had the kind of money that could at least get a Hispanic Realtor named “Hey-suess” on the line—Tasha had come up with this joke to break the ice. “Where are my kids?” Lionel asked. He hadn’t even chuckled about the “Hey-suess” line.

“With Milania.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you bring them to the damn airport?” Lionel looked at Tasha like she was crazy.

“Because I wanted to talk to you about this.”

“About fucking what?”

“About the move…”

“There’s nothing to fucking talk about.” Lionel held up his hands to show his puzzlement.

Tasha winced at every curse that came from his lips. Lionel wasn’t a violent man. He almost never even raised his voice. But when he was upset, he cursed like a drunken sailor on weekend leave. Dropping f-bombs was his way of dealing with aggravation. The only way Tasha could get his attention after that was to drop the subject or drop more bombs than him. And she was leaning toward the latter. It was a dramatic dance any married woman knew, and while Tasha wasn’t the best at it, she needed to at least be good. Good enough. Because what she wasn’t telling Lionel was that she’d already packed up half of their belongings, scheduled a moving van, and redirected the mail.

She needed bombs. Canons. Howitzers. Heavy artillery.

“Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it! Fuck it! Just fuck it!” She hollered, banging on the steering wheel as the car jerked from left to right in the traffic on the freeway. Lionel lowered his hands and looked at her. “You know what? I was just trying to do something for this family—for our children. Get them out of this godforsaken hick-ass state and into some motherfucking culture. But just forget it. Fucking forget it! Shit! Fuck me for even trying to be a good mother.”

If any of their grandmothers were alive, bars of Ivory soap would be poking out of both of the LaRoches’ mouths, but in this situation clean language was the mouthwash of losers.

“Pull this motherfucker over!” Lionel shouted, pulling the steering wheel so

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