Playing Hard To Get Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought…. You’re actually at the breaking point. After six months, a man his age gets lazy. He thinks he doesn’t have to invest and looks at you crazy if you insist. We need to move fast. Swift. You’re gonna have to back up. Get some space. Give some space.”
    “True, true, and very true. I’ll have to do that,” Tamia agreed, taking the hat Tiara had pulled from her head. She ran her hand over Tiara’s smooth, nude scalp and smiled.
    “Oh, please put that hat back on her head,” Troy insisted. “That poor baby doesn’t have a single curl. She’ll get H1N1 in three seconds.”
    They all laughed as Tiara wrestled with Tamia for the hat.
    “When is little mama’s hair coming in?” Tamia asked. “Toni had a head of hair by now.”
    “Please, I don’t know,” Tasha answered, rolling her eyes playfully. “I’m about to get her a little baby weave or something. Like a bang.”
    “You will not!” Troy said, nearly falling over in the sand with Toni, she was laughing so hard.
    “It’s cold out here. I can’t have my baby’s scalp all naked.” Tasha snatched the hat and put it on Tiara’s head. “Maybe I could get my hands on one of Aunty Mia’s tracks.”
    “Whatever!” Tamia snapped. “You put a hand on one of my tracks and I’ll put my hands on both you and Tiara!…And this is Indian hair too!” She flipped her hair over her shoulder as Tasha and Troy giggled. “It costs half of my mortgage.”

2
     
    Perfection is easy to plan for, but impossible to achieve.
     
    A consummate planner, Tamia had yet to admit the latter part of this statement to herself or anyone else. She loved plans, lists, steps, details, earmarks, and fine points—objectives she could use to achieve any goal she set for herself. Sometimes those steps were easy, like vowing to beat Lydia Walker, the great-grandniece of Madame C.J. Walker, in a rowing competition when the girls attended camp together one summer at Cape Cod. And sometimes those steps were difficult, like vying for the number-one spot in her law school class at NYU. Paradoxically, Tamia was usually successful in achieving her plan, but the results were often far from perfect. After Tamia won the rowing competition, Lydia, who was once one of her closest friends, never spoke to her again. And her drive to be ranked number one in her law school class led to an abuse of sleep deprivation drugs and a weeklong stay in a hospital. Big and small, these imperfections faded quickly into the back of Tamia’s memory as she placed out front the success of her planning. Sure, there were some bumps, but she always emerged victorious.
    On a more recent list of perfect plans, Tamia had made a few promises to herself.
    First, when she made it—when she graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and was recruited by a top New York law firm, she’d never, ever set foot on a subway again.
    While, like most perfect plans, this was nearly impossible in a city as populated as New York, for Tamia, it was still worth the promise. To her, it was a matter of taste and principles. Tamia loved nice things. Clean things. Crisp Bloomingdale’s catalogs in the mail. A new Hermès scarf, folded and tucked into perfumed tissue paper. The opening hours at the Museum of Modern Art when the floors were freshly waxed and the halls were empty of echoes.
    To her, these things had promise and class. Beauty and elegance, all of the things she wanted and expected of herself—when she made it. Perfection.
    Now the subway, the aged underground railroad system that veined the city together, seemed the opposite of everything Tamia wanted in her perfect world. The onion man, who felt a need to keep his arm held high in the middle of the subway car, his hairy underarm exposed to everyone on a ride in the breezeless chamber. The toothless obese woman, begging for change to get something to eat. The wannabe rapper, who felt a need to rap louder than his already loud earphones. The near-dead