Page 29 of Every Step She Takes

FOURTEEN VILA PRAIA DE ?NCORA

Sadie

The octopus is definitely a metaphor.

I’m not exactly sure what the metaphor is, exactly, but I know that what seemed like a good idea now feels like chewing on tentacle suckers.

I can’t flirt with a stranger at a bar. I can’t flirt with a woman .

I can’t flirt with another woman in front of the woman I actually want to be flirting with.

My crush on Mal is becoming a sentient being with its own free will, and it’s no longer obeying my attempts to silence it.

When she fell on top of me in bed this morning, my butterflies came rushing back in. And when she sat next to me on a bench watching me watch the sunrise for an hour, my body almost reached for her body. And it can’t do that. I can’t do that.

I might have a vaguely bisexual haircut, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for any of this.

“I can’t do this,” I blurt out while Mal is in the middle of exchanging oyster recipes with Vera. Mal sets down her sangria glass and turns to me like a parent addressing a child that’s interrupted them in the middle of an adult conversation.

“You don’t have to eat the octopus, Freckles,” she says.

I shake my head. “No, no, it’s not that. I-I can’t learn to flirt!”

Apparently, I’ve said this loud enough that Ari a few seats down responds. “You don’t know how to flirt?”

My cheeks feel hot from sangria and shame, and I press my cool hands to them as everyone looks at me again.

At least the group has thinned a bit. After finishing two pitchers of sangria, Ro offered to walk Rebecca back to their room, though they were both so drunk, it was unclear who was helping whom.

And Stefano has been flittering between our table and a group of twentysomething British dudes who are biking the Camino, so it’s only Inez, Ari, and Vera who are staring at me now.

And Mal. Always Mal. They all seem to expect me to say something, but I can’t remember what the question was. “Mal is going to teach me how to flirt,” I say, hoping that about covers it.

“Oh, is she now?” Inez asks. There are several empty seats between Inez and Mal, but the way she glares at her cuts through the dead space.

“Are you looking to flirt with handsome man?” Stefano asks as he bounces back to our table.

“I am most excellent wingman. Arjun!” he calls over his shoulder, and a boyishly attractive man appears beside him.

Stefano slings an arm around him. “Susie, this is Arjun. Arjun is a heterosexual. Arjun, this is Susie. She is also a heterosexual.”

“Her name is Sadie,” Vera slurs.

“Not Susie,” Stefano says to Arjun, “but still heterosexual.”

“Hey,” Arjun says with a grin that reminds me of the dead octopus still sitting on my plate.

And it must be 90-proof brandy in that sangria, because I start shouting at Stefano. “Not heterosexual! Not Susie, and not heterosexual !”

Ari gasps. “Plot twist!”

“I am completely blindsided by this news,” Mal says, loudly and unconvincingly.

“No she isn’t,” I say, because I’ve clearly forgotten how to filter myself. “Mal knows, and she’s going to teach me how to flirt with women tonight.”

“Come, Arjun. I have miscalculated.” Stefano leads the confused man away from our table and leaves me with the wreckage of my drunken outburst.

Ari stares at me with her cool septum piercing and her cool hair and her cool smoky eye. “So are you bi, then?”

“I-I don’t really… know.”

Ari shrugs. “Oh, cool.” And then she takes another drink of sangria, as if it really is cool that I am clueless about this entire part of myself.

“I-I feel like I’ve lost so much time,” I hear myself drunkenly confess.

Stefano pops back over to us. “Lost it? Where did you put it?”

It’s unclear if Stefano is being profound or if there’s a language barrier at work.

“You cannot lose time, Shari, because none of us possess it.”

Profound, then. Sort of.

“We just fucking told you her name is Sadie, dude!” Ari screams.

“Scusi! Scusi! I have name blindness!”

“You seemed to remember Arjun’s name just fine.”

There’s more yelling, more arguing, as Mal discreetly hands over a credit card, and the British boys grow impatient, urging us away from our table and toward the bar. Arjun has seamlessly shifted his attention to Ari, and she basks in it like the goddess she is.

That’s when I finally realize how nice everyone looks tonight.

Ari is wearing her usual hiking outfit, but she’s painted her lips deep red.

Inez always looks fantastic, but her high-waisted linen pants and barely-even-a-shirt crop top flatter her lean, muscular body.

Vera looks stunning in a tennis skirt and moisture-wicking polo, but Vera would look stunning in a burlap sack.

Stefano is wearing his usual too-tiny shorts, but based on the reactions he’s getting from Arjun’s friends, the shorts are working for him.

And then there’s Mal. She didn’t do anything different for going out tonight. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her mullet is its usual level of unstylishly tousled. Her clothes are neither nice nor clean, but for some reason, she’s still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.

“You’re all so beautiful,” I unintentionally say aloud, my eyes still turned to Mal. Stupid sangria.

“Thank you, Sadie,” Vera says earnestly.

Stefano nods in agreement. “This is what I am always saying. Not now, Oliver,” he says to the British boy clamoring for his attention. “I am with my beautiful girls.”

“Some of us are very, very beautiful,” Ari purrs. Her eyes are fixed on Mal too.

Oliver is on his knees next to Stefano’s chair. “You are the most beautiful,” he gushes, and Stefano bops him on the nose.

“Wait, I’m confused,” Mal says, studying the interaction between Stefano and Oliver. “Y’all, is Stefano… hot ?”

“Objectively, yes,” Vera immediately answers.

Ari nods. “A total daddy.”

“I cannot comment on that,” Inez says professionally, as she throws back half a glass of sangria in a single gulp, then hiccups again. “But also, yes. Yes, he is.”

“I am very hot, indeed,” Stefano clarifies for the group, and to demonstrate, he stands up and lifts his shirt to show off a comically defined set of washboard abs on his ageless body. He’s like a gay, Italian Rob Lowe.

This is apparently the final straw for our server, who comes over scolding us in Portuguese, and we finally clamor out of our seats, talking over each other. No one seems to care that I don’t know if I’m bisexual or asexual or gay. They’re too busy arguing over their favorite Chappell Roan songs.

I feel both dizzy and firmly planted, both nervous and hopeful, both drunk and completely sober.

Maybe this night won’t be an octopus, after all.

Mal grabs my hand to guide me through the labyrinth of patio tables and out to the sidewalk, and my drunk brain savors the feeling of her palm in mine.

Mal doesn’t have the hands of a trust-fund kid.

She has the hands of someone who knows how to use a garden hoe.

They’re callused and strong. Capable. I imagine they’d feel good all over me.

Which isn’t something I’ve ever imagined before.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” I say.

“I don’t have to hold your hand? I’m not sure that’s true, Freckles. You almost took out that server. This way.” She tugs me along as we follow the British boys to the bar.

“Pay,” I say, thinking this makes perfect sense, syntactically.

“What?”

“You don’t have to pay for everyone, just because you can.”

Her hand twitches in mine, and I crane my head to see her jaw clench for a few seconds before she relaxes into an easy smile.

“I know I don’t have to. I like to do it.

I don’t have expensive taste, really. I travel, I support causes that are important to me, and I take care of my friends when I can.

Besides,” she says breezily, “it’s fun to blow my dad’s money on a bunch of bad-ass queers and think about how pissed that would make him. ”

I squint at her in the setting sun. That last part, I suspect, is the closest I’ve gotten to the real Mal, to the person behind the easygoing nomad facade.

The words are casual and teasing, but when she mentions her dad, there’s something beneath her flippant tone—bitterness and resentment, I think.

But she makes me dig for the real feelings, scanning for clues in the subtle shifts in her eyebrows, her jaw, her stupidly pretty mouth.

I want to tell her that she doesn’t have to fight so hard to keep these uglier feelings hidden away, because she’ll be beautiful no matter what. But my sangria-soaked brain can’t focus on saying actual words. It can’t do anything but stare at her mouth.

Ahead of us, Ari has consented to a piggyback ride from Stefano, and he weaves around sidewalk signs and people, who glare at them both.

Behind us, Vera and Inez are laughing wildly.

But right here, it’s just me and Mal, and her hand is still in mine.

Another thought pierces through the alcohol: I’m holding hands with a woman.

A tingle shoots up my arm from the place our skin touches. I’m walking down a public street, holding hands with a woman I want to hold hands with. And shit, it feels good. I feel giddy and nervous; I feel the way I suspect my middle school friends did the first time they held hands with a boy.

The first time I held hands with a boy in seventh grade, I felt sick with anxiety the entire time, and I practically ran to my bus, dragging him along as fast as I could, because all I wanted was for the moment to end.

I feel a little sick holding Mal’s hand right now, but it’s sick in a good way . It’s the nausea of reaching the top of a roller coaster before the drop, the thrill of standing on the edge of a rock on Lake Washington before plunging into the water below.

Mal leans over to whisper. “You don’t have to flirt with anyone at the bar, okay?”

I tilt into her and our shoulders collide. She feels like a sturdy wall keeping me upright.