Free A Taste of Sin by Fiona Zedde Page A

name on her hand. “Go ahead.” Dez took the address down, then repeated it twice to be sure. She didn’t want to get lost on her way to this appointment.
    “See you then.”
    Dez closed the phone and smiled. Now she had two dinner dates to look forward to. As she reached up to put the phone back in her pocket, someone jostled her from behind. Her phone fell, breaking neatly in two pieces.
    “Shit!”
    “I’m sorry. Fuck, I didn’t see . . .”
    Dez looked up from retrieving the pieces of her phone as the voice trailed off. It took a moment for the red hair and pierced lip to register. The woman—Caitlyn—cursed again and ran her tongue across the silver ring encircling the center of her full lower lip. Dez stood up.
    “Cait, did you find those tomatoes I like?” Ruben appeared from the next aisle, pushing a cart already half-filled with groceries. He looked good. Dez stepped back as if that measly distance would lessen his effect on her. It didn’t. His body was as slim and hard as ever, gay boy muscles alive under his tight blue shirt. He had cut his hair, and now it lay in conservative, Anglo-looking waves against his head. The style only made his liquid eyes more noticeable. They became startled and soft when they noticed her and his dimples went back into hiding. He was still beautiful.
    Dez endured her stomach’s sickening plunge and the way the temperature of her hands suddenly dropped ten degrees. Fantastic. She gripped her shopping cart and swung it around, away from them. Her face felt tight and cold, but she forced herself not to run. Moving in a fog, Dez took her time picking a bag of black beans from its pyramid display, then after she was sure that it was the one she wanted, she put it in her cart and walked away.

     
    He followed her from inside the store. Not with his body, but with everything else. Otherwise, how could she explain the smell of him pressing close, the sound of his voice, the phantom feel of his hair between her fingers? It took her three tries to open the door. Dez loaded her groceries into the truck with shaking fingers, again measuring each movement. No one, not even Ruben, was going to make her rush. Even though she needed to be alone with the sudden memories of him, of them together. She left the shopping cart where she’d unpacked it and backed the truck out of the parking space. A pedestrian yelped behind her and barely jumped out of the way in time to avoid being hit. Damn Ruben.
    Long before she’d been to college, Dez had made her choice. It was going to be girls. Or at least that was what she thought. And then she’d seen the hot boy at orientation that first year at the University of Miami. He was all pretty mouth and round, tight ass—two things she normally only liked in girls. She’d been ashamed. And it took her three years to actually approach him, three years of watching him fool around with boys and sneer at the infatuated coeds. Shit, they were even in the queer students alliance together. But she still wanted him. She’d denied herself, sleeping with more women during those three years of confused longing than she had before or since.
    Then, it happened. One night at an impromptu, post-study-session boogie-run to one of the hottest new gay clubs in Miami, Dez got her boy. She and seven of her classmates had stumbled into the place, badly needing a distraction from school and the midterms only a few days away. Samantha Morris, one of the more adventurous girls in Dez’s lit class, passed out tabs of X to each of her stressed study-buddies; then they were off. Ten minutes into her high, Dez found herself staring at the club full of gyrating bodies, her own skin itching with the need to dance.
    “Come on.” Ruben rushed at her from behind and pulled her into the fray.
    His palm against hers felt electric and slick. They pushed into the crowd and she couldn’t help but prolong it, that delicious slide against foreign skin, the pumping push-pull of the