Tattoo by Fiona Zedde

Author:Fiona Zedde [Zedde, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hills Publishing

Bliss, now available.

Femme Like Her Excerpt

Nailah has certain rules. She only dates studs, gets her therapy from racing her Camaro, and always leaves exes in the past where they belong. But when one ex—her only femme mistake—comes back into her life bringing passion and an explosive secret, can Nailah throw out her rulebook to have a real chance at love?

As soon as I set foot inside the crowded seafood restaurant, I hear Pauline’s shout above the low roar of other voices. “Nailah! Hey!”

She’s short but I see her right away, flapping her hand at me from a window booth, the top half of her covered in her latest Hawaiian shirt, this one blue with bright red tropical flowers. I wave back, smiling, game face on.

I’m tired today, and it’s from more than just my mentally exhausting day job.

“It took you long enough to get here,” she says in her gravelly voice when I sit across from her, sliding my briefcase to the corner of the booth. I should’ve left the damn thing in the car, but my brain was too tired to make much sense of anything.

“Traffic.” I lean back in the chair and take what feels like my first deep breath all day. “When you said meet you at your favorite crab spot, I didn’t realize you meant one the next state over.”

A slight exaggeration, but really, why do all her favorite places to eat have to be forty miles outside the city limits?

“Glad you finally made it.” Pauline shoves a little plate of sliced lemons toward me. She knows I like a million of them in my iced tea. “I was about to get started without you.”

“You didn’t?”

She’s got a nearly empty basket of hush puppies in front of her along with a pitcher of iced tea, also half gone. “The crab legs, girl,” Pauline says with a shake of her head, like I’m slow. “That’s the whole point.”

“Right.”

The waitress must have been keeping her eye on Pauline’s table, because I’ve barely reached for the empty glass on the table to pour myself some of that iced tea when the young girl appears.

“Yay, you’re here! Pauline here was getting restless without you.” The waitress is young and pretty, with bouncy hair and a thick Atlanta drawl. She waggles her eyebrows at Pauline, who grins back wide enough to show the new gold over her canine teeth.

My friend is the waitress whisperer. Even when she’s not trying to seduce them, she still manages to make them like her.

“What can I get you?” The girl’s notebook appears, pencil poised just over it, her attentive smile on me.

After Pauline and I order, the girl bounces off with a sassy twist of her backside, which Pauline takes the time to thoroughly appreciate.

“You look like shit,” she says once we’re alone. “You sure you just don’t want to quit that job before they fire you?”

“It would be a layoff,” I say automatically, although I’m not fooling anybody but myself.

My company has been dragging out the pending layoff of my department for months.

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