Page 31 of Every Step She Takes

I put a hand on Mal’s arm to steady myself.

“Yes,” I say, because Ari is objectively beautiful.

She has a heart-shaped face, large chocolate eyes, and brown skin that shimmers thanks to impeccable makeup.

I find her a few feet away, dancing with Arjun, but even as she gyrates her body seductively, I can’t seem to move past objective .

Ari feels like a celebrity in a magazine: I can recognize her as attractive, but I can’t seem to conjure the feeling of attraction.

My appreciation for her is purely intellectual.

It doesn’t stir anything in me. It’s not physical, not visceral, not…

sexual. I’ve never felt that way about anyone.

Not even Eliza Dushku, really, even when I touched myself to the thought of her in a cheerleading uniform. I still felt this… distance .

Maybe that’s why it’s taken me thirty-five years to question if I’m queer.

Maybe I am asexual, after all.

Except there is one glaring fault in that logic, and she’s got her hand on my lower back.

Whatever misguided feelings I have for Mal, they live inside my body in a way no feelings ever have with anyone else.

She’s in the flush of my cheeks, the twist of my stomach, the throbbing ache that makes my legs restless.

“If you were to go flirt with Ari right now,” Mal is saying, and I try to quiet my riotous body. “What would you say?”

I bite my lip. “I-I don’t know.”

“I’m not going to make you do it,” she reassures me as we gently move back and forth to the song. “I’m purely curious.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“Hmmm,” Mal murmurs, moving even closer to me. “Okay. What if you were flirting with me right now? What would you say to me?”

I haven’t the faintest fucking idea. I stare down at my feet like they might hold all the answers. “Nothing. I-I really don’t have any clue how to flirt.”

“I know we’re up against a steep learning curve here, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”

I lick my lips. Everything feels dry. “I-I can’t.”

“Sadie, look up at me.”

I slowly, reluctantly, do.

“Eye contact is the first step in flirting,” Mal says, and I feel like her stare is turning me inside out.

We’re too close together for this kind of eye contact.

“If I meet a woman at a bar, and I’m into her, I make sure to look her in the eye while we’re talking.

And if she holds my eye contact, I figure there’s a chance she might be into me too. ”

I look away. “But… but how do you know for sure if someone is into you?” I ask, because I need to immediately do the opposite, so Mal doesn’t figure out about my misguided, juvenile crush.

“The mature thing to do is ask her directly if she’s feeling it,” Mal says with her usual casualness.

“But it can be scary to put all your cards on the table like that, and I usually want to have a good idea of what she’s going to say before I go for it.

So, I test the hypothesis further, by flirting with her. ”

I start biting my lip again.

“For example,” Mal continues. “I might stand close to her, to see how she reacts.”

She’s so unbelievably close right now, as close as she can be without our bodies actually touching anywhere but the place her hand is anchored on my back, the place my hand is tethered to her arm.

“And if she doesn’t move away,” Mal says in a quiet voice, “I might find an innocent excuse to touch her. Maybe I’ll act like I need to hold her hand.”

I think about Mal holding my hand as we walked down the street.

“Or maybe I’ll say she has food on her face, so I can touch her cheek.”

Mal’s thumb in the corner of my mouth.

“I might find an excuse to whisper in her ear,” Mal whispers now, her lips brushing my earlobe. “And depending on how she responds to those touches, I might put a hand on her waist, or the small of her back.”

Her hand singes my skin through the fabric of my yoga pants.

“And if she likes my hand on her back,” Mal says, so quietly I can barely hear her over the music and the blood rushing in my ears. “If she leans into me, or even better, if she touches me back”—My hand falls away from her arm—“then I might try to kiss her. I might stare at her mouth…”

Mal’s eyes drop to my mouth.

“And I might lean in even closer…”

She’s already so close, and my entire body is a jumbled mess. I miss the safety of men, because this feels dangerous. I’m petrified that she’s about to kiss me.

I’m even more petrified that she won’t.

I’ve only kissed men I didn’t want to be kissing, and I’m desperate to know what it’s like to kiss a woman. To kiss someone I actually want to kiss. To kiss Mal.

I think kissing Mal might answer questions I didn’t even know I had, so I lean closer too.

And Mal steps away. Her hand isn’t on my back.

Her eyes aren’t on my mouth. She’s a solid two feet away from me.

“And that’s flirting. That’s all there is to it,” Mal says plainly, lifting her hands in with a casual shrug to indicate that this—the last ten minutes, this entire night—were nothing more than a demonstration, a lesson on how to flirt.

Every touch, every lingering glance, every second of her closeness was all for the sake of my queer adolescence. Mal was never actually going to kiss me.

I feel so silly for thinking she might, for briefly wondering if my crush wasn’t so absurd after all.

I feel fifteen and humiliated. I feel like crying on the dance floor.

I feel… surprisingly grateful, I realize. Because for the first time in my entire life, I wanted someone to kiss me. And it felt so fucking good to want.

I grab Mal’s hand and, without explanation, I pull her away from the dance floor, past the black tables and the wood-paneled bar, dragging her down the boardwalk until our feet land in the sand.

I keep going until the music becomes a faint sound over the waves, until the lights from the boardwalk bars fade, and it’s just the two of us on the twilight beach.

“Sadie, what’s going on?” Mal asks when I drop her hand and wheel around to face her. She’s standing there with her mouth half-open, her eyebrows crinkled, and I’m so damn furious that she has the audacity to be so beautifully handsome.

“I have a hypothesis to test,” I tell her.

This is a mistake. Something I will regret in the morning.

But I’ve never made a mistake like this before, and like Vi said, I’m long overdue.

I look up at her confused face in the moonlight. “I need you to kiss me.”