A Taste Of Sin

by Fiona Zedde

  They spent the rest of the night together, wringing the rest of their X trip for all the fun that it was worth. Neither of them advertised their lust-affair, but they didn’t hide it either. One day they were passing acquaintances and the next day they were fucking each other like nymphos on speed. With Ruben she’d felt renewed. Her period of self-denial was over and she reveled in her obsession and love for him. They made after-graduation plans, then left. Together.

  Now, two plus years later, she was alone. Dez blinked away the sting of old memories and forced herself to focus on the road ahead.

  Chapter 10

  Dez was good at pushing aside her emotions. By the time Claudia knocked at her door a few nights later, the unexpected reunion with Ruben and Caitlyn was barely a ripple in her calm sea. Dez was able to smile her thanks for the bottle of wine and even laugh at her mother’s Alaskan wilderness gear of goose-down jacket and gloves in the sixty-degree chill.

  “Come in.” She waved Claudia inside and closed the door on the cool night air. The house was warm and fragrant with the scent of cinnamon and apples, the steaming hot toddy Dez had prepared for her mother to ward off any lingering cold from her short drive. She took Claudia’s outer layers and led her to the kitchen.

  “I don’t want to mess this up like I’ve done everything else.” Dez stood with her back to the counter, her hands moving restlessly over the cool marble behind her. “I haven’t made dinner yet because I wanted us to cook together. Make it like it was before Aunt Paul died.”

  Claudia sat on the bar stool with her toddy clasped between her palms. “You don’t have to reach into the past for me, Dez. I’m right here. Sometimes things are just a little different now, that’s all.”

  “They’re not a little different, Mama. Even I can tell that. I feel like I’ve lost you already.”

  “No. No, you haven’t.” Claudia put aside her drink and reached for her daughter, grasped the cold hands in hers and squeezed. “Stop being dramatic. I’ll be here for you as long as I’m on this earth, no matter how things may seem or how far we are away from each other. I know I made a mistake by not telling you I was sick. I thought I was doing the right thing, but that was obviously wrong. Please don’t be angry.” When Dez didn’t say anything, Claudia stood up and tugged her toward the refrigerator. “Come, let’s go make dinner.”

  They made Claudia’s favorite winter food—sage-spiced quiche with Italian sausage and red pepper flakes and a pot of pumpkin soup. Dez insisted on having bread with the meal and rummaged around for the bread maker. While her mother took out and measured the ingredients for the honey wheat bread, she turned on the oven and broke the eggs for the quiche.

  “This is a nice bread maker, love. I didn’t know you liked to make your own.”

  “I don’t. But I knew that you would come over one day.”

  It was the best invitation for a closer relationship that Dez could offer. The last two years before she’d left for college, she and her mother had been distant, cooking together only on the requisite holidays, and even then the rapport had been different, off somehow. More dead space had inexplicably sprung up between them while Dez’s mind was on her aunt more and more, wondering if she could have done anything to keep Aunt Paul around for just a while longer and hating that her only confidante was gone. She took Claudia for granted, assuming that she would always be there yet would never understand her as well as her dyke aunt had. Their last conversation before Dez left was simple.

  “I have to go,” she had said. Then left. No promises to write or call, no certainty of when she would return to Miami. Claudia seemed to accept it. Although a single look that spasmed across her face said something. Dez did not take the time to find out what. She had a ride to catch, but more importantly there was that history of silence between her and Claudia that was too hard to breach. Over the two years, her mother had written to her, scented letters filled with the minutiae of her days, delicate tendrils of connection that Dez hadn’t been able to return, but had cherished nonetheless.

  Still, in this new kitchen, over the milk, eggs, and wheat and yeast, they managed to talk. Dez finally found out when her mother knew about the cancer—during a routine exam eight months ago—and how she was going about taking care of herself. Dez’s stomach turned over at her mother’s matter-of-fact description of her illness and her chances for survival.

  “My chances are good. We caught it at stage one,” Claudia said as she poured the dough in the bread maker and set the timer. “Dr. Charles scooped out all she could during the last operation. She did some tests at my last visit so I have to go and see her in a few days to get the results.”

  Scooped out? Dez’s insides quivered with the beginnings of nausea. But she wanted to know more. This wasn’t something that anyone should go through alone.

  “Can I come with you?”

  Dez settled the liquid ingredients of the quiche into its store-bought crust and ignored her mother’s look of surprise. “I won’t get in the way. Promise.”

  “I know you won’t,” Claudia said. Her gaze was considering. “Okay, you can come.”

  “Thank you.” Dez looked up. “What should I bring?”

  “Just yourself.”

  “Okay.” A blast of heat flashed over her face when she opened the preheated oven and set the quiche inside. “I promise not to cry and act like a complete baby in front of your doctor.”

  “She’s used to that kind of thing. Your father almost broke down when he found out.”

  Her tentative smile disappeared. “Daddy knows?”

  “Warrick was the first person I told.” Claudia’s smile was wistful. “He came in with me for the operation, although, obviously, he didn’t have to. Everything went fine and he was really great. It was almost like old times.”

  “Then he went back home to his wife,” Dez sneered.

  “Don’t be unkind, Desiree. He was my friend before we were ever lovers. Just because we didn’t work out doesn’t mean that our friendship is over.”

  Words of protest crowded onto Dez’s tongue, incidents of Warrick being a complete asshole to everyone in the family, especially his wife. Then there was that whole abandonment thing. “I’m glad he was there for you, Mama.” Water gushed in the sink as she turned on the tap to wash her hands. “But what about Eden, or any of those other women you hang out with these days?”

  “Your father was my choice, Desiree. He was the right one.”

  Properly chastened, she backed off. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Just accept the things that I need. And realize that I need you, too.” Claudia bumped her daughter’s hip with her own. “Although I have been a stupid old woman for not showing you that.”

  Dez smiled. “Well, you may be stupid, but you’re certainly not old. Now Warrick, he’s got a face like—”

  Claudia poked her in the belly. “I can see where this is going, so let’s just stop it right here.”

  “I’m just kidding. The old lady can’t take a joke?” Claudia came after her with a bony elbow again. Still laughing, Dez easily dodged her and slipped past to the other side of the oversize kitchen. Their evening went by quickly. Dez forced herself to pay attention to every detail of their time together—her mother’s laughter, the new lines at the corner of her mouth, the sometimes fragile way she held herself, like a moth waiting to fly off for a new light source. She had not always been so delicate. Perhaps it was because Dez knew of the illness and was seeing things for the first time that had always been there. She could be oblivious at times.

  They sat at the dinner table surrounded by soft music and candlelight, like old friends, sharing bits of their lives previously held separate. When Claudia revealed that Warrick had been her first lover, Dez held up her hands in surrender.

  “That, my darling mother, might be too much information.”

  Claudia laughed. “Stop being such a prude.”

  “I’m sure you don’t want to know everything about me, Mama.”

>   “Of course I do. It feels like it’s been years since you and I had a real conversation. I want to know everything you’ve done and been and seen and felt since you were fourteen.”

  “Fourteen!” Dez laughed. “I’ll have you know I was sharing plenty with you after that.”

  “Right. Your feelings about being treated like a child you mean—at high decibels.”

  Dez quieted. “Did I? Was I that bad? Why didn’t you slap my face or something?”

  “Your father believes in that kind of punishment. I don’t.

  There are other ways to discipline a child.”

  Dez remembered her mother refusing to speak with her until she calmed down. Those brown eyes going flat and cold had been more effective than any beating her father ever gave her. “No kidding.”

  “But really, love. Tell me. I want to know you again. Tell me everything.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t.”

  Dez glanced down at her hands then back at Claudia. Her mother’s eyes burned with a warm fire, the long elegant hands—so much thinner now—loosely clasped around her wineglass. Light from the candles winked around them, reflecting in the diamond studs in Claudia’s ears as she cocked her head to one side. She smiled.

  “I hated you for being weak,” Dez said. “Warrick just threw us away, all three of us, and you folded. You let him walk all over us.” Her mother shook her head quickly in denial, and her mouth opened, but she said nothing. “Whenever he talked shit about Aunt Paul, you never called him on it. Not once. I thought part of it was because she was only your half sister. When I grew older that wasn’t even an excuse anymore. And later that made me feel ashamed about being gay. I felt that you loved me less somehow.”

  Now Claudia did interrupt, shaking her head more violently. “I never loved you any less. Nor Paulette. She was my little sister. She was the one who forced me to see that there was more to life than just sacrifice and preparing eight course meals. Whenever Warrick said those things about her, I told him to stop. I usually took him aside so you and Derrick wouldn’t see us arguing. It never did any good, but I told him that it wasn’t okay. He got worse about it when you told us you were gay, too. He felt that it was somehow Paulette’s fault that he lost his little girl. Warrick has issues of his own, separate from us that make him the way he is. I’m not making excuses for him or for myself, that’s just how it is.”

  Dez nodded. She could tell her mother was trying her best to react logically to all this instead of with her emotions. The strain showed on her face. “I can understand some of that now, but before, I couldn’t. When Aunt Paul died, I felt, suddenly, completely alone. I knew you were there, and I knew Rémi was there, and”—she laughed ruefully—“I guess that was it.” She laughed again. “Anyway, I felt like my whole world became different overnight. I went on to college because I promised her I would. I went off with Ruben because he made me feel something else besides pain and loss and loneliness, which is pretty ironic right now, but that’s a subject for another time.”

  “No, sweetheart. Tell me now. Everything, remember?”

  Dez sighed and pressed her fist to her mouth. She blinked down at the table. Emotions are very scary things, she thought for the millionth time in her life. I’m never ready for them. The fire and flood of her relationship with Ruben had left her in ashes. With the news of her mother’s illness coming so close to his leaving, she hadn’t really made the time to feel what he’d done to her. She poked at the remnants of it, and it still burned.

  “On my worst days, I feel like since I was fourteen, my life has been hell. I came out, and my father, the person I’d relied on before to protect and love me no matter what, shut every door in my face. Then your marriage was gone barely a year later. Before I could even think about being a well-adjusted adult, Aunt Paul left me, and I fell in love with a gay man who opened me up and broke me down emotionally only to dump me for another woman.” Dez rubbed her hand over her eyes and cursed softly. Her insides hummed with pain, but it felt good to get it all out. “And last, but certainly not the least of it, my mother had or has cancer. The injury on top of injury is that you never told me, but you told my brother and my father and God knows who else.”

  “Sweetheart . . .” Her mother’s voice broke. “My sweetheart.”

  “I know that my life isn’t just misery. I know that. But sometimes, I feel it all come down on me at once. And it’s too much.”

  Dez’s throat ached from talking and her voice was a bare rasp that Claudia had to lean closer to hear. She finally looked up to see her mother’s quiet tears. Her lashes swept down against the suddenly unbearable glare of the candlelight.

  “I did ask if you were sure,” she said.

  Claudia’s hands reached across the table and cupped hers. “I’m still sure.”

  Chapter 11

  Claudia was here, but for how long? The question haunted Dez long after their dinner plates had been cleaned and put away. Still, she tried to run away from it. When Dez was younger, people used to ask how it was that she managed to stay so even-tempered—they would never go as far as to say “cheerful”—all the time. When her parents were going through their divorce and she told someone about it, they thought she was joking. After her aunt died, no one could have known how devastated she was. Truth was that she just didn’t think about it. She banished it all from her mind like a bad dream. Voluntary amnesia. These days there weren’t many people around to see her smiles, or lack of them. Dez threw herself into sex or food or other sensual pleasures the way some did drugs. With thoughts of Claudia and her illness and Ruben creeping back to her, Dez escaped the house after giving Rémi a call. Drinks? At their favorite straight bar? Why not? Rémi was always up for just about anything.

  Dez sat on her bike outside the bar, smoking a cigarette and waiting for her best friend to show. The night’s entertainment seemed promising. Women walked past her, darting their eyes over her even as they clutched the hand of the men by their side. Dez’s tank top stretched taut over her chest, cleaving to the tight body, the small high breasts, and flat stomach. Worn blue jeans, a thick leather belt, and Timber-lands completed a package that Dez knew was fuckworthy. She didn’t have to see the want in these women’s eyes to know that. But it didn’t hurt.

  “When you’re done posing, you want to come with me into the bar?” Rémi rode up on her bike, the laughter rich in her voice even under the dark helmet. She wore all black today. And spurs on her motorcycle boots.

  Inside, they turned their helmets over to the bartender and parked themselves at the bar with two shots of tequila, a pitcher of beer, an ashtray, and a pack of cigarettes between them. The crowd was hot tonight—affluent, beautiful, a nice mix of races and cultures. A conversation in Spanish tickled her ear from halfway across the room and from somewhere else a hint of Jamaican patois rubbed up against Haitian-accented French. Rémi knocked back her tequila.

  “Nice.” Her glance traveled around the bar, taking in the view.

  It didn’t take long for the festivities to begin. A silver-bangled arm nudged Rémi’s, then the accompanying body did the same.

  “Excuse me,” the stranger said. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”

  Liar. The brown-skinned mami licked her gaze up and down Rémi’s body, taking her time at the highlights—breasts, hips, ass. She wasn’t bad either, with her curvaceous form poured into a Donna Karan the same luscious tone as her skin. But she had on too much makeup.

  “Please, excuse me,” Rémi said, moving neatly back and out of her way. Turning to ash her cigarette in the heavy silver disc in front of her friend, she turned to Dez. “I wonder what’s keeping Ricky. You can’t trust boyfriends for shit, huh?”

  The girl almost swallowed her tongue in surprise. She ordered a drink she probably didn’t even want and fled.

  “That wasn’t nice.”

  “What do you want me to do, give her a pity fuck just for trying?
” Rémi snorted and took a sip of her beer, balancing her cigarette between her fuck-fingers and the glass. “I didn’t see you offering your pretty little self in my place.”

  “It was you she wanted, not me.”

  “These days I’m not settling for just anything.”

  “When have you ever had to settle?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Smoke spiraled up from Rémi’s cigarette and she squinted against its bite. “Nowadays any pussy that comes to me has to be good pussy, or at least interesting pussy. It can’t just be any old shit.”

  “I still don’t know when the hell you’ve ever had to take just whatever.”

  “Two years is a long time, isn’t it?” Rémi put down her drink and looked at Dez. “There’s actually someone—”

  “Baby, you must be a model,” a voice interrupted. “That body of yours is just too fine.”

  Dez looked past Rémi to the guy with the midnight skin, beautiful teeth, and asshole leer.

  “You play ball?” he asked.

  Rémi turned to look at the two men. That was an original question. What else would two six-foot-tall black women do for a living or for fun?

  “We don’t play with balls.” Her amused eyes flickered over them, then turned away in dismissal.

  “You?”

  His friend eyed Dez and tried a leer of his own. Whenever they were out together and straight boys saw Rémi first they always asked if the women were models, trying to lure them into some vanity trap because of Rémi’s pretty skin, quiet self-confidence, and devil’s mouth. But when they saw Dez first, the lead-in was usually about basketball or some other height-required sport. Never mind that the two women were the same height.

  “No, thanks, I already got what I’m drinking,” Rémi said.