Page 33 of Every Step She Takes

Sadie

A horrible banging echoes through my head when I wake up the next morning, and it takes me a minute to realize it’s not merely the throbbing effects of my sangria hangover. Someone is banging violently on our hostel door.

“Sadie! Mal! Wake up!” It’s Inez’s voice shouting at us from out in the hall. “You were supposed to be downstairs ten minutes ago!”

Shit . I fumble for my phone on the bedside table, and the screen plainly tells me it’s ten after eight. I slept through my alarm.

Wait, no. I was so drunk, I forgot to set my alarm.

I jerk up in bed, and the motion sends the entire room spinning.

Sangria? Never again.

In the opposite twin bed, Mal attempts to get up, but gets caught in a tangle of sheet and duvet and ends up hopping halfway across the room before she falls into a pile of blankets and bare limbs.

“Fuck!” she grumbles.

Fuck indeed. I need to get up, get packing, get downstairs, but I’m afraid if I move, I will have to see that octopus again on the other end.

My only comfort is that Mal looks as shitty as I feel as she stumbles into her hiking pants, forgetting to take off her sleep shorts first. Her mullet is plastered to the side of her face, her skin is unnaturally pale, and she keeps hissing words in Portuguese.

I don’t have to speak the language to know she’s cursing.

“Are you up now?” Inez shouts through the door.

“Uh-huh.” Mal grunts. “Up! We’re up!”

“You have five minutes to get downstairs.”

Five minutes. Five minutes to make everything stop spinning. Five minutes to get over the worst hangover of my life and be ready to walk all day.

At the very least, I need to start by walking to the bathroom to brush my teeth so I can get the taste of sweaty toe socks out of my mouth.

I carefully shift my legs over the side of the bed and ready myself to stand, a process that takes an embarrassingly long time.

Then it’s an agonizing shuffle to the bathroom, where Mal is standing over the sink, splashing water onto her face. “Can I… teeth?” I barely manage to ask.

“Good idea.”

Mal slides over so we can both brush our teeth in the tight bathroom.

Our tired eyes meet in the mirror above the sink, and I’m pleasantly reminded that not only did I get regrettably plastered in the middle of a two-hundred-mile trek, but I also regrettably kissed the roommate I’m still sharing a small space with for the next nine days.

I kissed Mal. Experienced, confident, beautifully handsome Mal . I kissed her like a fumbling teenager with no experience and very little understanding of human anatomy. I kissed her like a horny, eight-handed octopus monster.

Shame whirlpools in my stomach at the memory of the eager way I clung to her on the beach, the way she had to guide my hands, my tongue. The way she had to coach me through something as juvenile as a kiss.

I wanted to make a mistake, and I sure as hell didn’t half-ass it.

Mal’s toothbrush dangles from her mouth as she stares at my reflection. She looks like she might say something, her mouth slightly ajar, her eyes fixed on the reflection of mine.

I feel like I should say something, but I have no idea what.

I’m sorry I bullied you into kissing me last night?

I’m sorry I enjoyed it so damn much?

It was a huge mistake, and we never have to talk about it again, and please don’t hate me forever?

Bravely, I opt to say nothing at all as we continue brushing our teeth in silence. When she finally spits into the sink, she wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, and states the obvious. “So, this is kind of weird, isn’t it?”

I spit out my toothpaste too. “Very weird.”

“But it doesn’t have to be weird.”

“I’m listening…”

“We kissed,” she says with a shrug. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Totally not a big deal,” I lie.

“It’s like you said,” Mal continues as she wrangles her greasy hair into a half ponytail. “I’m your fairy god-dyke, and last night was like turning a pumpkin into a carriage, or… something.”

“Totally.” I can be as casual and flippant as her. Watch me nod my head with complete indifference. “Though I don’t recall the part of Cinderella where she makes out with her fairy godmother.”

A grin flickers on her face. There’s toothpaste in the corner of her smile. “That’s because Disney is always straight washing that shit. In the original Grimm Fairy Tale, they totally had a Holland Taylor–Sarah Paulson thing going on.”

“Ah, of course.” I nod, and Mal nods, and we’re standing two feet apart in a tiny European bathroom, nodding like a couple unhinged bobbleheads, and it’s still weird.

I can’t stop staring at her mouth. At the curve of it, at the toothpaste smile, at the perfect v of her upper lip.

I licked that spot last night. I took the curve of her mouth between my teeth and tried to find the right equation to measure its parabolic arch.

“I’m sorry I forced you to kiss me,” I blurt in an attempt to silence my mouth and math-related fantasies.

“No, you didn’t.” Mal takes a step toward me, then two steps backward and bumps into the shower door. “I-I chose to kiss you. You know, for science.”

“Right. For science.”

We’re both still nodding, and I’m starting to worry we’ll never be able to stop nodding at each other. We’re going to be stuck in an awkward nodding loop until the shame from last night finally fades. If it ever fades.

“And the experiment was successful,” Mal adds. “It… it helped, right?”

I nod and nod and nod. “Totally. Very helpful. I-I think I just needed to… you know…”

“Kiss a woman,” she fills in, and those words are enough to conjure a visceral memory of her hot hands and her wet mouth and the pulsating ache in my lower stomach.

“Ehm, yes. That.”

She nods, and God, she even makes nodding sexy.

I try to look anywhere but her mouth, but it’s a small bathroom, and she takes up the entire space with her long limbs and her perfect hair, her tattoos and her nipples beneath the thin fabric of her shirt.

There’s literally nowhere safe to fix my gaze, and when I glance back up at her face, I find she’s looking at me too.

There’s another violent knock on the door, and we both jump. “I swear to the goddess, I will break down this door!”

“It’s only nine miles,” Inez says from behind the giant pair of sunglasses she’s wearing indoors when we make it downstairs eleven minutes later. “A Guarda is nine miles away. We can make it nine miles.”

Ari groan-burps in protest as she pours Liquid I.V. into a water bottle.

“That shit doesn’t actually do anything,” Ro points out.

“Leave me to my delusions, Hashmi!” Ari screams in a very proportional response.

“No loud noises,” Vera mumbles, rubbing her temples in slow circles.

“What did y’all get up to last night?” Rebecca asks innocently, as if she doesn’t know exactly what the sangria did to all of us.

Then she starts passing out hangover kits she put together in paper bags before the rest of us woke up this morning.

Inside, I find a water bottle, paracetamol, and several carb-heavy items from the breakfast buffet.

Lastly, she hands me a paper cup of black coffee.

And thank goddess for Rebecca.

Inez turns to me, and I can see my wrecked face in the reflection of her glasses. “Would you mind, um, not writing about last night? You know, for the blog?”

Writing about last night is the last thing I want to do. “I promise,” I reassure her, and her hungover grimace softens a bit.

“We can totally do this,” Inez says again, and no one believes her. “Wait…” She looks around the hostel lobby, scanning the faces of her ill charges. “Where’s Stefano?”

There’s a chorus of confused grumbles. “Maybe he went home with Oliver?” Ari suggests before the door to the hostel opens.

Stefano struts inside wearing his tiny shorts, sipping water from the CamelBak straw attached to his pack.

“Buongiorno!” He greets cheerfully. “Sorry I am late. It was a beautiful morning for a sunrise 10k.”

Everyone glares at him before Ari says what we’re all thinking. “I really fucking hate you.”

I should feel like shit. Between waking up at four yesterday to hike Santa Luzia and staying out all night drinking, walking the Camino should be the hardest thing in the world.

But as we follow the coastline out of town, each step feels invigorating and energizing, like it’s slowly bringing me back to life.

I love the sun and the sea and the predictable routine of putting one foot in front of the other.

The water and coffee clearly help my mood, as does the giant croissant Rebecca put in my breakfast bag, but they can’t explain why I feel almost giddy, why I can’t stop grinning to myself.

The Camino is not the reason why I keep pressing two fingers to my smile, remembering the heat of Mal’s mouth against mine. It’s not why Vera takes a photo of my goofy expression and asks me if I’m still drunk.

And I am still drunk. Drunk on Mal Goncalves.

I have a giant, uncontrollable, all-consuming crush on Mal, the kind of crush that makes me so distracted, I trip over my feet three times in a row, and on the fourth time, I skin my knee so badly it bleeds.

The kind of crush that makes it hard to focus on anything but her lean legs and long stride.

I’m separated from Mal by two retirees and one hundred yards, but it feels like her body is still pressed against mine on that beach.

Is this how my middle school friends felt about their crushes? No wonder they never shut up about boys. If I had someone to talk to about this, I don’t think I would ever stop.