Sunburn by John Lescroart Page A

She might, in fact, be almost forty. Her skin is smooth and strangely light. Perhaps she hasn’t been long in Spain. Her hair, reaching to her shoulders, is almost perfectly straight, and a shining deep brown. Her legs are her best feature—very long and not too thin. The shift is tantalizingly short, and shows them off well. She is like a boy on top, but there is something distinctly sensual about her. Her whole demeanor is amused and, somehow, challenging, though not in a harsh way. When the other woman talks, she listens carefully, leaning forward toward her. She’s vulnerable, you think, though maybe it’s only the contrast.
    The other one is a beauty. Possibly she is much younger than her friend. She wears white pants and a halter top that make her seem to glow in the bright sunlight. Her skin is dark, dark tan as though she’s spent the summer sunning herself, and her hair has started to bleach itself from the exposure. She laughs often, loudly. You can easily hear her after they’ve gone some ways down the beach, but the laugh is not shrill. On the contrary, it is inviting. Her nose is slightly too big but it gives her face the character it needs to keep it from being merely pretty. Her mouth is full, her eyes a kind of bright sultry—the youth has not quite worn off them. In a few years, her eyes will positively smoulder, but now they are almost schoolgirlish. Her body is large and slowly graceful, but her waist is fine. Nowhere has she begun to go to flab. Her pants sit low on her hips, and her exposed midriff is, well, perfect. You think you’ve never seen more attractive breasts. She turns around abruptly to see something and catches you staring after her, and winks, or do you imagine it? You finish your beer and get up to walk to the shade of the narrow streets between the glaring white buildings, and try to find a place to eat lunch.
     
    Lea pulled the shift over her head, and placed it on the sand so that she could lie on it.
    “Remind me not to get too much sun.”
    When they had arranged themselves, Kyra asked, “You were saying?”
    “Oh, about Sean. I know now it’s ridiculous to talk about him. In a lot of ways I don’t know him at all anymore. Certainly you know him better, but it’s funny. Though he’s so different from the brother I’ve known all my life, in many ways he reminds me of how he was when I was a little girl.
    “There’s this part of him now that he’s either purposely kept hidden all these years or has truly repressed, and now it comes out. I really don’t quite know how to handle it, or rather my reaction to it. He’s—I don’t know—childlike almost, but that’s not really what I want to say either. He’s more like he was when he was younger.
    “He was always the acknowledged leader in the family. Not so much because he tried to be, or even wanted to be, but he just always had so much enthusiasm. He was always planning, planning, planning, and getting things done. Even if they weren’t anything special if you looked at them objectively, he made them special for us. He always got so excited about things, and made it contagious. I remember he used to put on these neighborhood circuses, which were really just a bunch of kids walking a two-by-four stretched between two packing crates, or arranging five of us into a pyramid when none of us thought we could do it. But it’s funny. That’s the circus I remember. It was much more real to us than any real circus.
    “The amazing thing to me now is that we never felt bulldozed. It always seemed the most natural thing in the world to do whatever Sean had planned, not only to us in the family, but to all the kids near our age. Our age? When I think of it, all of Sean’s friends were young teenagers when I became aware of all this, and still I felt somehow included, and my friends did, too. There was never any feeling that we were less because we were younger, but we just fit naturally into whatever plan we were carrying