Games Women Play

by Zaire Crown

  The resort had its own nightclub, and going there was the only time the couple got a feel for how many other guests were actually staying on Peter Island. Tuesday had brought the two other dresses from the plane, and even though she still wished she had better shoes for it, she wore the blue Oscar de la Renta with the floral pattern—and without panties because that was just how she felt that night. The club played techno, pop, reggae, Latin reggaeton, but very little rap. Tuesday and Marcus still got their dance on and it only took a little bit of contact before he realized she was absolutely naked underneath that thin layer of Chinese silk.

  Tuesday was typically a cognac drinker, but down there it was all about rum and tequila. She wanted to be loose enough to put it on him later, but not sloppy drunk; yet, sometime during the night she crossed that line. Some of those tropical creeper drinks were made so fruity and delicious that it hid how much alcohol was in them. The bartender introduced her to something called a “zombie” and Tuesday liked it so much that she got three refills.

  All she remembered was waking up the next morning in the master bedroom back at their villa. Everything that happened past the club last night was a blank. She rolled out of bed, head pounding, stomach boiling, and still in last night’s dress. She shuffled off to the bathroom looking just like the name of the drink that caused her condition.

  While washing her hands, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and tried to figure how in the hell did she get big red stickers on her face. It wasn’t until she pulled them off and studied them did she realize they were actually rose petals. She looked at them confused, wondering why they were stuck to her face and arms. Had she stumbled around drunk and fallen into some rosebushes?

  It took a little time for her rum-soaked mind to connect the dots and realize that she’d spoiled what was supposed to be a special night. She came out the bathroom to see that the bed had been covered with petals and a couple dozen partially used candles had been set up around the room. He’d most likely had the staff set this up while they were still at the club but she got so fucked up that the surprise was ruined.

  So on top of all the regular hangover symptoms, she tacked on embarrassment and guilt.

  She searched for Marcus and found him out back swimming laps in the pool. On the deck next to it, a table held two breakfasts: one devoured with a second under a tin. She peeked at it but quickly covered it back because the mere sight of the omelet made her nauseous.

  She sat on the edge of the pool and dipped her legs into the water. When he caught sight of her, he swam over.

  “The dead has arisen,” he said, treading water in front of her shirtless.

  She covered her face with her hands for a second. “I’m so sorry about last night. I swear to God I can usually handle my liquor but I don’t know what the fuck they putting in this island shit. I woke up and saw the candles with the rose petals and just felt so bad.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Aww, the more I think about it, that was kind of a corny look anyway. Some ol’ high school prom night shit.”

  “Naw, that was a good look,” she assured him. “You went through all that trouble and my drunk ass fucked it up!”

  He calmed her with his smile. “Don’t even trip, it happens to the best of us. You gotta be careful, though, because they make that shit that sneak up on you.”

  “You ain’t never lied about that—I don’t remember shit past the first few drinks. Please tell me I ain’t do nothing to embarrass you last night.”

  He hopped out of the water and sat next to her on the pool’s edge. “Well, all it took was a couple dollars to make things right with that old white lady you swung on. We were just lucky nobody got hurt in that fire you started.”

  Tuesday bumped him with her elbow because she knew he was just playing.

  “Naw, you just kinda ran outta gas at the club, found a seat and passed out. And I only hurt my back a little bit when I carried you back to the villa.”

  She smacked her lips. “Oh, so now you tryin’ to say I’m fat?”

  “We call it thick when it’s in all the right places.”

  She looked serious. “I’m sorry for real, though. It was supposed to go down last night and I left you hangin’.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I did sneak and cop a few cheap feels while you were passed out.”

  She laughed. “The sad part is that you probably did!”

  He laughed. “The really sad part is that I’m not joking!”

  Tuesday moved in for a kiss but he backed away from it. “No offense, babe, but did you brush your teeth? You did spend a little time in the bathroom last night throwing your life away.”

  “Did I really throw up?” she asked, looking surprised and embarrassed again.

  Marcus confirmed it with a nod. “You made it to the toilet so you get points for that.”

  He kissed his two fingers and used them to touch her lips. “But you really should go hit yo grill, though!”

  There wasn’t much on the agenda for them that day other than a little tour that Marcus had set up. The docks were on the opposite side of the island, and when they got there, Tuesday saw the forty-two-foot powerboat that he arranged for them to have all that day. Marcus boasted that it was a single hull V-bottom XXX-47 GTX. Tuesday didn’t know what any of that meant but was impressed because it was long, sleek, and painted canary yellow with orange flames, making it look to her less like a boat than a Ferrari that had been adapted for the sea.

  It moved like one too. The craft was incredibly fast. Rather than cut through the water, it seemed to skip across the surface. As it zipped along spraying huge water wings and leaving a long trail of foamy wake, the engine even growled like an Italian supercar. Tuesday sat shotgun admiring how easily Marcus handled the beast.

  They raced over the Caribbean at full throttle while touring some of the lesser islands in the BVI. Some of them were a few hundred acres while others were as small as the housing plots on a residential street. Marcus explained to her that many of those small island properties were privately owned—like Peter Island—and a few were capped with stately mansions looking like beautiful floating estates.

  Dead Chest Island was the one closest to the resort, and that which Marcus gave the most attention. It was about seven hundred acres and they cruised around it three times in slow circles while he studied the coast with a pair of binoculars. When Tuesday asked him about his interest in the island, he tried to downplay it as just curiosity. Tuesday didn’t press him but to her he seemed to be doing more than just sightseeing.

  After spending a few hours zipping around on their tour of the islands, he took the boat a few miles off the coast and just killed the motor in the middle of the water. It was a calm day in the Caribbean with a cloudless sky and placid sea. They spread a quilt out over the long bow and lay out on the front of the craft feeling like the last two people left on Earth.

  Tuesday was reclining on her elbows, sunning herself in a purple two-piece while Marcus was next to her shirtless in long board shorts that were turquoise. Salsa music came from the radio in the cockpit. Conversation was minimal.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said, breaking a long reflective silence. When some of her hair got caught in the warm breeze and concealed her face, he tucked it behind her left ear. “And if I’m being too personal just let me know.”

  “Well, I’m actually kinda curious since you haven’t asked me a personal question since we met.”

  It was true that he hadn’t asked her a single personal question about Tabitha Green. It hadn’t been necessary for her to invent a fake family, friends, or backstory about her character because as secretive as he’d been concerning his own life, he’d been equally silent on the subject of hers.

  “You don’t even know what I do.” Her prepared line had been that Tabitha was a registered nurse on paid leave from Henry Ford Hospital after hurting her foot at work, but the topic had never come up.

  “You’re r
ight, I haven’t asked you a lot of questions about yourself. Do you think that makes me self-centered?”

  “Self-centered would be if you weren’t interested in my life and just spent the whole time talking about yours. But we both know that’s not the case, don’t we.”

  He smiled at her. “Maybe I just like for things to be a little mysterious.”

  “So for fun you’d fly off to the Caribbean with a woman you hardly know?”

  “I might not know all the details about your life but I do know pretty much everything I need to about you, Tabitha.” His smile remained but there was a sincerity in his eyes that made Tuesday ashamed he wasn’t even calling her by the right name.

  “Well, if you already know everything you need to, what was this personal thing you wanted to ask?”

  Marcus took on a serious expression. “What was his name?”

  “Whose name?” she asked, puzzled.

  “That one man you let into your heart. The one who hurt you and caused you to lock that door forever.”

  “You think you just got me so figured out. You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  “I know enough to see that I’m right and you’re still going through it. That’s why you’re trying to duck the question.”

  It was obvious that he’d picked up on her pain and she saw no reason to deny it. “His name was Adrian. I met him when I was nineteen and we were together for a long time.”

  “What happened?”

  Tuesday took a moment to decide how to answer that.

  “He left me,” she said after a long pause without bothering to elaborate.

  Marcus pressed the issue. “So what, he just busted up one day?”

  “Somethin’ like that.”

  He leaned in closer to her. “Do you ever see yourself loving somebody like that again?”

  Tuesday thought it might be better to lie but found herself answering truthfully. “No. Not like that, anyway. What I had with Adrian wasn’t perfect but it was real. I would love to have something like that again but not in the same way.”

  He nodded because he felt where she was coming from.

  “So what about you?” she asked, switching the focus to him. “What happened to that fiancée you didn’t want to talk about at Gaucho’s?”

  “Long story short: she cheated.”

  “Do you ever see yourself loving somebody like that again?”

  Marcus smiled because he then realized how stupid the question was when directed back to him. “No, not like that. But I could definitely see myself falling in love again.” He paused for a second then added, “With the right person.”

  “And can the right person be light-skinned and have gray-green eyes with a bangin’ body?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, but she would have to have a few other things going for her too. She would have to be smart. She would have to be a bossy-type bitch because I don’t respect weak women. She would have to be ambitious too; want something outta life for herself other than what I could give her. And no doubt she would have to be someone I could see being a good mother to Dani.”

  Tuesday felt he was describing her to a T until he made that last statement. As much as she liked Danielle, Tuesday couldn’t see herself doing parent-teacher conferences, bake sales, or whipping up to soccer practice in a minivan. She didn’t think it was a bad life, just not the life for her. She didn’t think she had it in her to be “Momma” and Lord knows her own mother didn’t provide a good example.

  Her mind drifted back to a childhood of being left home alone while her mother went out with one of the many men who were always introduced as “Uncle So-and-so”—when Tuesday was little she had more uncles than she could count and they never stayed around for long. Tuesday was so lost in this past that she momentarily forgot he was still talking and had to tune back in to him.

  “But most important, she would have to be straight-up with me.” He pierced her again with that direct stare that quickened her heart rate. “I hate a fake-ass bitch more than anything! Shit need to be one hundred with me all the time.” He used his hands to stress those two words. “Hurt me with the truth before you flatter me with a lie.”

  Again Tuesday felt so guilty that it made her shiver despite the temperature being above ninety degrees. It was one thing when she thought they were both pretending to be other people, but now that she was the only one being fake, it bothered her a little.

  Then she thought back to her conversation with Tushie and reminded herself to stay on game. She didn’t exactly see Marcus as a mark anymore, but she was in too deep now and had to play this thing out as Tabitha Green. Tuesday didn’t know how this was going to end, but just because he was good people she couldn’t start slipping and break Rule One.

  She met his gaze and trumped it with the intensity of her own stare. Tuesday needed her green eyes to sell the performance she was about to give.

  “The man who was the love of my life: a nigga I lied for, stole for, and probably would’ve killed for, just up and left me one day. But he didn’t move away or run off with another bitch, he left me in handcuffs.”

  “What kind of bit he doing?” Marcus asked with a tone that was not meant to be intrusive.

  “The worst kind. Life without parole.”

  He draped a consoling arm around her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s not yo fault, it’s his!” she spat with repressed anger that arose from nowhere. “The stupid muthafucka threw his life away over nothin’ and threw me away right along with it! I would honestly feel better if he had left me for another woman—at least that would make more sense.”

  Tuesday didn’t even realize she was crying until she felt him smooth the tears away with his thumbs. She had started out acting but had mistakenly tapped into a real emotion. Each time she was certain that she’d come to terms with A.D. being gone, she always found hurt resting on some deeper level.

  “It’s not your fault either,” he said in a warm, almost fatherly voice. “Sounds like you’re carrying a lot of guilt about what he did.”

  “I know it’s not my damn fault!” she snapped at him. “I did everything I was supposed to do. I got him a lawyer, I was at every court date, and after he got his time, I was there to see him every week and made sure he wanted for shit! I stood by that nigga’s side for twelve muthafuckin’ years when most bitches would’ve been outta there! Why in the fuck should I feel guilty about that?”

  Marcus rubbed her back in slow circles to calm her. He knew that she was just venting and that none of this hostility was directed toward him.

  Tuesday was looking off to the horizon, that place in the distance where the sky and sea were only separated by some invisible line. He turned her face so that she met his eyes again.

  “Guilt and anger go hand in hand,” he explained. “Life is a series of serious choices! It’s hard enough living with all the mistakes we make for ourselves, we can’t go carrying around other people’s fuck-ups too. We’re not built for all that. I know you pride yourself on being tough; but nobody’s that goddamned strong, nor should they have to be.” He pecked her on the forehead. “Baby girl, let that shit go before it kill you.”

  Tuesday tried to fight the rising tide of emotion swelling within her but broke down before she could get a handle on herself. She put her head upon his shoulder and began to sob hard. Yet this was no ordinary cry; the emotional dam she’d been constructing her entire life just crumbled under a torrent of tears. She wept about all the things that had been haunting her since childhood, plus a few ghosts she didn’t even know were there: A.D., her mother, the two pregnancies she aborted, a youth wasted in the club rather than in school, even Dresden’s abuse.

  Marcus didn’t know what it all meant and was wise enough not to ask. He just stroked her silky hair as she sobbed and shook. The only support he offered was his presence, allowing her tears to pour onto his shoulder and roll down his bare chest.

  Again, this was no ordinary cry. A lif
etime of accumulated regret seeped from her eyes in the form of tears, and with each one shed, Tuesday felt the breaking of an invisible shackle that had kept her tied down. The truly amazing thing was that this cry was so liberating that Tuesday instinctively knew that she would never weep about any of those things again. She felt like she was being cleansed of everything in her psyche that was noxious. For that reason she felt no shame about bawling like a baby in front of Marcus.

  After a couple minutes she was done, and Tuesday felt buoyant, somehow lighter. She understood the metaphor of a weight being lifted, but she honestly felt that if Marcus took his arm from around her, she would float up into the sky and be forever lost like a balloon.

  “Feel better?” he asked after she was finally able to look up at him.

  She was beaming a smile even though her face was still streaked with tears. “I feel like I just had an emotional enema!”

  He wiped her cheeks dry. “I could’ve done without the visual, but I’m glad you got it out of your system.”

  “And for yo information, you got it wrong about me, Mr. Know-it-all!” She rolled her eyes and pretended to be sassy. “Yeah, I have been hurt before but I didn’t lock that door forever. I’ve just been waiting for somebody who had the right key to open it.”

  His smile returned. “And is that somebody tall, dark-skinned, with a killer smile and six-pack abs?”

  She started to respond but he covered her mouth with his and silenced her with a kiss. It caught Tuesday by surprise but she quickly relented and invited in his tongue.

  The kiss escalated in passion until it was something hungry and animalistic. They didn’t break it even when he laid Tuesday on her back and crawled on top of her. His hands massaged her titties then rubbed her thick thighs. The feel of him growing hard beneath his shorts excited her so much that she began to push them down, not bothering to wait for Marcus to undress himself.