Page 28 of Every Step She Takes
She glowers at me, like she’s suspicious of whatever is going to come out of my mouth next. And maybe she should be, because I just can’t fucking help myself sometimes. “But Sadie.” I lower my voice and hope the rest of the group can’t overhear. “Is that how I said it? Was I being infantilizing?”
Her glass is poised below her bottom lip as she pauses. Her eyes look almost turquoise tonight, like the ocean a few meters away. She presses the glass to her lip, then pulls it away again, leaving behind a half-moon imprint of her ChapStick. Her teeth catch her upper lip.
“No,” she finally says. Her voice is quiet too. “No, that’s not how you said it.”
She sets down her sangria and reaches for the menu in front of her with her usual fluster. I reach for my menu too, and notice the entire thing is in Portuguese. “What are you hungry for?” I ask.
She turns the menu over to the backside, which is blank, then sighs. “I have no idea.”
“This place has great seafood,” I suggest, even if those five words are enough to conjure memories of my dad buying oysters, prawns, crab, and clams by the crate-load and bringing them back to Porto to boil in a giant pot on a night his chef was off—one of those rare nights he wasn’t hosting or working or showing some new woman around the vineyard.
It would be just the two of us, with napkins tucked into our shirts like bibs, cracking open the shells on the kitchen counter and eating lobster over the sink.
I clear my throat. “I’ve heard the octopus is especially good.”
Sadie grimaces with impressive cultural sensitivity. “Octopus?”
“It’s a famous dish in Portugal. You should try it before we cross the border into Spain tomorrow.”
She chews on her bottom lip and stares at the menu like a better option will materialize. When the server eventually reaches our end of the table, though, Sadie squares her shoulders, sits up straight, and looks them dead in the eye. “Polvo à lagareiro, por favor.”
She looks exceptionally proud of herself as she hands the menu back to the server. “You can’t order coffee with milk, but you know which item on the menu is octopus?”
She points to a chalkboard menu behind me with the specials listed in both Portuguese and English. “Ah.”
I weigh the ratio of deliciousness to childhood trauma as I debate my order, then get the bacalhau à Brás anyway.
And since I’m indulging in my father’s favorite dish, I decide I might as well pour myself some sangria too.
The red wine, fruit, and brandy swirl on my palate.
It tastes like endless summer afternoons.
“So, before I so rudely got us off track with my internalized fatphobia,” I say now that the rest of the group has moved on from our drama, “we were talking about making moves. You said that dudes never made the first move with you, and you never made the first move with them? So, how did you ever date?”
“Poorly and infrequently,” she answers. “And mostly using the apps.”
“You’ve never met someone in a bar and struck up a conversation with them?”
She chokes on her wine. “Has anyone ever done that?”
“I have,” I say with a shrug. “I do . I’ve never used a dating app before.”
She spills some sangria onto the white linen tablecloth. “Wow. I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“I’m great at starting new relationships, but I’m terrible at sustaining them.”
Sadie watches me take another slow, thoughtful sip of the sangria, holding the flavor on my tongue. “What do you mean?”
“I’m excellent at the falling-in-love bit. The part where everything is new and exciting. Where you can just stare into the other person’s eyes for hours and stay up all night talking about everything and nothing.”
That’s always been my favorite part. I like Mondays.
I like New Year’s and the first day of spring and the beginning of the school year.
I like the first few chapters of every book I’ve never finished reading and the pilots of TV shows I will never actually watch.
I hate endings and goodbyes, but not as much as I hate the dreadful middle part where everything slows down.
I hate February and Thursdays and doing the same thing day after day, because that’s where the silence lives.
“First kisses are easy,” I explain to Sadie. “It’s the one hundredth kiss, or the one thousandth kiss that’s hard for me.”
“First kisses are not easy,” she mutters.
“But they are! Firsts are always the best part. The first glance, the first touch, the first time…” Sadie glances down at the sangria stain on the tablecloth to hide her blush.
“I love the beginning, when you’re drunk on the mere existence of this new person you get to discover.
It’s like traveling to a new country. There’s infinite possibility in front of you. ”
She considers this as she pours herself more sangria. “I bet your thousandth kiss is fantastic,” she says, and it’s my turn to spill some of my sangria, to watch the red wine bloom on the white linen.
“I only meant…” Sadie blushes and blusters, but I don’t get to know what she meant by that because Stefano starts shouting my name from the other side of the table.
Well, he’s shouting “Mel,” but still.
“These kind gentlemen have told me about a gay-friendly bar down the road,” he says, leaning back in his chair to talk around Ro and Rebecca. He sweeps his hand over to the table of hot men who are still hanging on his every move. “We should check it out, yes?”
“Hell yes we should,” Ari says, staring right back at the boys.
It’s then that I start to suspect that this sangria might be unusually strong. Because I realize Stefano is sitting . In a chair. Everyone at the table seems a little loose, a little giddy.
I turn to Sadie. “Maybe take it easy on the—” I start, before realizing our shared pitcher is already down to the dregs of ice and fruit. The server returns to the table and deposits my salted cod in front of me before handing Sadie her octopus. And shit .
“This is a whole-ass octopus!” Sadie shouts before the server is even out of ear shot.
“It does indeed seem to be.”
She pokes at the small creature on her plate with her fork, and all eight tentacles jiggle. “You didn’t tell me it was going to still be in the shape of an octopus!”
“I didn’t know! Usually, they serve you a few tentacles at most.”
“It has a face! At least, I think that’s the face.” She pokes it again. “What does an octopus face even look like?”
“It looks like that.”
She wipes literal sweat off her brow with her napkin. “I can’t eat this!”
“Maybe just close your eyes?”
“There are suckers!” She presses the tines of her fork to the row of suckers along one large tentacle. “Am I supposed to chew on these things?”
Inez pipes in. “This is why you should consider going vegan.”
“I’m going vegan after seeing that thing,” Ro adds darkly.
The server returns with more sangria, and I dump half the contents into my own glass before Sadie can pour herself anymore.
“I was trying to be brave, and this is what happens? A whole damn octopus.” She stares deeply into the creature’s dead eyes.
At least, I think those are the eyes. It really is hard to tell.
“Why do I get the feeling this octopus is going to be a metaphor for the entire night?”