Free A Taste of Sin by Fiona Zedde

Dez called Derrick to check up on their mother, but he was his usual charming self and told her to call Claudia herself. But her mother beat her to the punch. Dez heard the message as she stepped out of the shower, dripping water all over the hardwoods.
    “Hello, love. We didn’t get to finish our talk the other night. I’d like to. Call me or come over to the house.” The machine beeped as she hung up.
    But she didn’t feel up to talking with Claudia just then, so she dried off and pressed the PLAY button again and again until it was time for her to leave the house.

Chapter 9
     
    D ez walked through the automatic doors of the neon-lit supermarket. The cool air, unbelievably a few degrees below the chill air outside, washed over her face as she stepped past the threshold. She wanted to be able to invite her mother over to her house for dinner, to sit her down and have a civilized, grown-up conversation. She didn’t want to be sniveling and whiny and all the other ten million things that she despised about the way she’d acted in the past. But for that dinner, Dez needed food.
    At ten past midnight, the market was nearly empty. The security guard and the bored cashiers glanced up and past her as she walked by. She nodded a greeting to the thickly muscled woman with her rent-a-cop gun strapped high on her waist, then took out her long grocery list. Dez didn’t have a clue what she would make when she invited Claudia over for dinner, only that it would be good and plentiful, a meal that would remind her mother of better times. She unhooked a shopping cart from the long string by the door and pushed it down the nearest aisle.
    Years ago, when she and her brother were young, their lives seemed to revolve around food. Between grading papers and putting together lesson plans, Claudia always made time for food-gathering field trips. Most times, she took the twins to the farmer’s market on the outskirts of Miami. The scent of their childhood was of crisp apples, luscious red tomatoes, water-veined celery, and the sweet ripeness of mangoes, Jamaican June plums, and the thick almost-smell of egg-plants. Their days together were measured by the meals they prepared side by side—Claudia in the middle and Derrick and Dez like animated parentheses, laughing and tasting, creating meals that were invariably delicious, flavored as they were by their shared joy.
    It was only when at thirteen Dez discovered girls that her interest in food and her mother waned. Then she and her brother started fighting—over girls, space, and anything else they could think of. Dez lingered over the barrel of jasmine rice, inhaling its faint popcornlike scent and the lingering flavor of her childhood memories. As she reached down for more rice, her cell phone rang.
    “Yes?” She deftly emptied the metal scoop into the two-pound capacity plastic bag while balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder.
    “Hi, there,” a low female voice purred in her ear. “Is this a bad time?”
    Who is this? “Not at all,” Dez flipped through her mental Rolodex for a name to match with the voice but came up empty. “I’m just doing a little shopping.”
    “Good. You said whenever I felt like doing lunch, or any sort of meal, to give you a call, so . . .”
    “Ah, you’re asking me out. I like that.” Something suddenly clicked in her brain. And I definitely remember you, Miss Victoria of the tasty cleavage and a mouth I would love to come all over.
    “Are you free next Friday night?”
    “I think so.” Dez was actually sure of it. “What do you have in mind? Something kinky, I hope.”
    Victoria laughed, a husky vibration that made Dez want to reach through the phone and start her meal right now.
    “Not quite, at least not yet. Just dinner.” A pause. “How about my place? Eight o’clock?”
    “Sounds good to me.”
    “Great. Dress casual. Here’s the address.”
    She dug out a pen from her inside jacket pocket and scrawled Victoria’s