Lia was still in the water, bent over, focused on something in her hand. She stood and grinned at us, lifting whatever it was she was holding. My heart jerked to a stop in my chest and then resumed beating in rapid staccato. Christ, she was gorgeous under ordinary circumstances, but standing in the water like that, soaking wet, her T-shirt and shorts stuck to her body showcasing every new curve, her deeply tanned skin practically glowing in the sunlight, she was stunning. I stared, unable to drag my eyes away, my chest pinching. She was so beautiful sometimes it hurt me to look at her.
“Look, it’s shaped like a heart,” she called. My brain felt fuzzy, and I had to focus on her words. With difficulty, I moved my eyes from her face to the thing she was holding in her hand. It appeared to be a piece of sea glass. I felt my lips tip up. Wasn’t it just like Lia to find a piece of glass in the shape of a heart? She was always finding shapes in clouds, assigning feelings to inanimate objects, noticing things no one else saw. As for me, I only noticed her. That had been the case for a while now, but suddenly, my feelings for her were not only an ache in my chest, but a very real ache in the region between my legs. I looked away. She was only fourteen and in some ways, I still thought of her as a kid. My feelings for her made me feel confused and slightly ashamed.
Cole was staring at her, too, his expression lazy, his eyes unabashedly roaming her body. “Hey Lia,” he called, “I thought I saw another piece of sea glass over by that big rock there.” He pointed behind her and she looked back, walking over to where he pointed and bending to look more closely at the water.
I glanced back at Cole and his mouth was curved into a satisfied smile as his eyes focused on her exposed backside, the rounded undersides of her ass cheeks barely showing at the edges of her shorts. I shoved at him and he laughed, shooting me an unrepentant grin and winking. “You’re welcome,” he mouthed.
“Stop it,” I muttered so only he could hear.
“No, a little farther to the right,” he said, his eyes glued to her ass again. She bent even closer to the water. “Or maybe it was to the left,” he drawled. I elbowed him hard, angry that he was teasing her that way. He let out a sound that was somewhere between an “ooph” and a laugh.
Lia’s body stilled right before she reached behind her to pull her shorts down. She stood up quickly and faced Cole, her eyes narrowed. She had realized what he was doing. She picked up a small rock and hurled it at him. It hit him square in the shoulder, and he grunted in pain. I laughed.
“Ouch,” Cole said, examining the small red mark on his tan shoulder. “You’ve marred me.”
“You deserved it,” Lia said, emerging from the water.
Cole laughed and leaned back on one elbow. “I did,” he admitted on a grin. “I hope you can forgive me.”
Lia stuck her tongue out at Cole as she walked back toward us, but then laughed when he pretended to stab himself in the heart. She sat down on a rock next to me, holding the small piece of glass up, her smile filled with pleasure. She squinted over at me, and my heart flipped again.
Her eyes . . . I’d never get used to the beauty of her light eyes emphasized by her bronzed skin. I thought about her mother—a short, slender, Mexican woman with darker skin than Lia’s and straight, black hair. I guessed Lia’s green eyes came from her father, but when I’d asked about him once years before she’d only shrugged and said she didn’t know him. And then she’d changed the subject.
Lia never talked about her home life, though it was obvious she was poor, and even if I didn’t go to the same high school as her and didn’t see the old clothes she wore and the secondhand backpack she carried with someone else’s initials on it, I’d know because her mother had worked on our farm. Although our dad paid all his farm workers fairly, it was still barely above minimum wage. I didn’t imagine the shabby motel her mom worked in now paid much more, maybe even less.
I’d heard my dad vouching for her mom’s reliability when the people who owned the farm next to ours called about her renting an outbuilding on their property, so I knew Lia lived in what had once been nothing more than a storage shed.
The knowledge of Lia’s poverty caused a strange sort of anger to boil in my gut, though I wasn’t sure exactly who I was angry with. It was a helpless rage, one I couldn’t direct anywhere specific, so it lashed out and then, directionless, found its way straight back to me.
I looked at her now in her wet T-shirt and shorts, knowing she wore them because she didn’t have a swimsuit. It was the reason we never invited her with us to the town pool where we were members.
Even Cole, with his constant jokes and devil-may-care attitude was sensitive to the fact that Lia didn’t have the things we did.
We’d seen her less and less since we’d grown from children to teenagers. She still walked over to our farm now and again and if we were outside and saw her, we spent a lazy afternoon cooling off in the shallow creek that ran behind our property. Or if we didn’t have much time for a break, or if it was too chilly, we’d rest under a tree and just talk.
Mostly I watched her grow older from afar. Both living for and dreading those times we’d have a few stolen hours, or even minutes, to spend together. I loved spending time with her, but it was always too short and never quite enough.
I noticed as her legs grew longer and her hips and breasts began to round slightly in the beginnings of womanhood. My mouth went dry whenever I looked at her for too long and I ached to touch her. But I also felt that same protective instinct I’d always felt for her since the moment we’d met. It was weird, because in some ways, Lia was a mystery to me—so secretive about her home life, so dismissive about the dreams in her eyes—but in other ways, I felt like I knew so much about her. She was pensive and kind, giving yet remote, and she exuded a gentleness I’d never felt so strongly in another person.