1
“YOU MUST BE TIA CRUZ.”
I glanced up at the guy who’d sat next to me and said this quietly in my ear, in an accent from elsewhere. We were on the crowded back porch with the lights off, but beyond the porch ceiling, the summer night sky was bright with a full moon and a glow from the neon signs at the tourist-trap beaches a few miles south.
The diffuse light made everybody look better: smoothed out acne, canceled a bad hair day. And I definitely had on my beer goggles. Boys grew more attractive when I was working on my second brew. This guy was the hottest thing I’d seen all summer. He was taller than me by quite a bit—which didn’t happen too often—with dark hair long enough to cling to his T-shirt collar, a long straight nose, and lips that quirked sideways in a smile. But I wasn’t fooled. In the sober light of day, he probably ranked right up there with the eighty-year-old men who wore Speedos to the beach.
What drew me in despite my misgivings was the diamond stud in his ear. Who knew what he was trying to say with this fashion statement. Unfortunately for me, I was a sucker for a bad boy, and his earring flashed moonlight at me like a homing beacon under a banner that said THIS WAY TO PIRATE.
I told him, “I might be Tia.” What I meant was, For you, I am Tia. I’ll be anybody you’re looking for. “Who wants to know?”
“Will Matthews. I just moved here.” We were sitting too close for a proper handshake, but he bent his arm, elbow close to his side, and held out his hand.
“Really!” I exclaimed as our hands touched. Our small town was stuck in the forgotten northwest corner of Pinellas County, on the very edge of the Tampa Bay metropolitan area. The guidebooks called us a hidden gem because of the artsy downtown, the harbor, and our unspoiled beaches, but the thing about a hidden gem was that it tended to stay hidden. Some tourists came through here. A few newcomers did move here. But most of them were, again, elderly men in banana hammocks. The families who serviced the snowbirds and tourists had lived here forever. My friend Sawyer had shown up only a couple of years before, but even his dad had grown up here. New kids at school were rare. Girls were going to be all over this guy: fresh meat.
Will pointed toward the house. “I introduced myself to your friends inside. They told me I would find you by the beer.”
“My friends are a riot.” My best friends, Harper and Kaye, didn’t drink. That was cool with me. I did drink, which was not cool with them. Over the years, though, Harper’s reasoned arguments and Kaye’s hysterical pleas had mellowed into concerned monitoring and snarky jokes.
This time their witty line wasn’t even correct. I was not by the beer. Along with six or seven other people from school, I was sitting on a bench built into the porch railing, and the cooler was underneath me. Technically I was above the beer. Drinking on Brody Larson’s back porch was standard operating procedure. Most of the houses near downtown were lined up along a grid, backyards touching. When parents unexpectedly came home, interrupting a party, somebody would grab the cooler as we escaped through the palm trees to another daredevil’s house to start over. If this was the first thing Will learned about our town, he was my kind of guy. I reached into the cooler, my braids brushing the porch floor. I fished out a can for myself and handed him the beer he’d come for.
“Oh.” He took the can and looked at it for a moment. He was expecting, maybe, a better brand of free beer? Then, without opening it, he swiped it across his forehead. “Are you even sweating? Perspiring, I mean.”
“Why do you want to know whether I’m perspiring, Mr. Matthews?” I made my voice sound sexy just to get a guffaw out of him.
“Because you look . . .” He glanced down my body, and I enjoyed that very much. “. . . cool,” he finished. “It’s hot as an ahffen out here.”
I popped open my beer. “A what?”
“What,” he repeated.
“You said ‘ahffen.’ What’s an ahffen?”
“An ahh . . .” He waited for me to nod at this syllable. “Fen.” Suddenly he lost patience with me. Before I could slide away—actually I would have had nowhere to slide, because Brody and his girlfriend Grace were making out right next to me—Will grabbed my wrist and brought my hand to his lips. “Let me sound it out for you. Ahhhffen.” I felt his breath moving across my fingertips.
“Oh, an oven!” I giggled. “You’re kidding, right? It’s ten o’clock at night.”
He let my hand go, which was not what I’d wanted at all. “I’ve been here one whole day, and I’ve already gotten my fill of people making fun of the way I talk, thanks.” He sounded halfway serious.
“Poor baby! I wasn’t making fun of you. I was just trying to figure out what an ahffen was.” I elbowed him gently in the ribs.
He still didn’t smile. That was okay. I liked brooding pirates. I asked him, “Who made fun of you?”
“Some jerk waiting tables at the grill where my family ate tonight. We can’t cook at home yet. Most of the furniture showed up, but apparently the refrigerator got off-loaded in Ohio.”
“Uh-oh. Was that all you lost, or did the moving company also misplace your microwave in Wisconsin and your coffeemaker in the Mississippi River?”
“Funny.” Now he was grinning at me.
Warm fuzzies crept across my skin. I loved making people laugh. Making a hot guy laugh was my nirvana.
He went on, “I’m sure we’ll find out what else we’re missing when we need it. Anyway, the waiter at the restaurant seemed cool at first. I think both my little sisters fell in love with him. He told me I should come to this party and meet some people. Then he started in on my Minnesota accent and wouldn’t let go.” Will pronounced it “Minnesoooda,” which cried out for imitation. Plenty of people around here talked like that, but they were retirees from Canada. I decided I’d better let it drop.
“Was this grill the Crab Lab downtown?” I pointed in the direction of the town square, which boasted said restaurant where I’d worked until yesterday, the antiques store where I still worked (or tried not to), the salon where my sister Izzy cut hair, and Harper’s mom’s bed and breakfast. The business district was rounded out by enough retro cafés and kitschy gift shops that visitors were fooled into thinking our town was like something out of a 1950s postcard—until they strolled by the g*y burlesque club.