Page 35 of Every Step She Takes

SEVENTEEN A GUARDA, SPAIN

Mal

As the tattoo needle scrapes across my skin, I have a few regrets.

I regret letting myself get bullied into this. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I should be immune to peer pressure at this point.

I regret allowing Ari to do the research on this tattoo parlor, where the artist was happy to tattoo seven people without signing a single consent form. There’s no way this is vegan ink.

I regret letting Vera design the tattoo.

I mistook the camera as a sign of artistic talent, but what she draws up is a rudimentary sketch of the scallop shell and arrow that guides our path.

And now that rudimentary sketch is eternally inked into my skin between the matching pinecone tattoo I got with Michelle and the intertwined rose and honeysuckle I got for my eighteenth birthday, right there on my left bicep.

But mostly, I regret Sadie.

I regret the way I caved the second she touched me. I regret the way I held her hand as we watched Ari go first. “Is it going to hurt?” she asked with the smallest, more endearing lip quiver.

“Yeah. It hurts every time.”

She looked up at me with an open mouth, and all I could think about was how her eyes are the exact color of the place where the sky meets the sea on the horizon. “ You think it hurts? Then why do you have so many?”

“I told you. I really hate my dad.” She squeezed my hand in panic.

“Tattoos hurt like walking the Camino hurts,” I told her. “It’s a hurt that feels worth it. And like the Camino, if you do it once, you become obsessed with doing it again.”

Kind of like falling in love. That’s what I regret the most: falling for Sadie, despite my best efforts not to.

I know love is bad for me—I know it’s a self-destructive pattern, a distraction, a way to avoid being alone with myself and my thoughts—but I’m addicted to the newness, to the magic of a first touch, a first kiss.

And what a fucking first kiss it was. All nervousness and hesitation, sweetness and surrender. It felt like my very first kiss; Sadie made me feel like a teenager, discovering it all for the first time alongside her.

I regret kissing Sadie last night, and I regret not kissing her again in the bathroom this morning. I shouldn’t have given into her drunken request to test a hypothesis and I should’ve tasted the toothpaste on her tongue while I had the chance.

Sadie bit down on her upper lip. “I don’t think I can go through with this,” she said as she watched Vera’s eyes start to water.

“You can,” I said. Because it was a bad idea and she had to do it. “You can install a kitchen backsplash and walk sixty miles and chop off all your hair. You can definitely get a tattoo. Besides, it’s a small tattoo. Less than ten minutes.”

Her sky-sea eyes were full of doubt, and I thought she might back out, until I heard myself say, “what if I go first?”

And now I have a cliché tourist tattoo on my biceps.

After the tattoo artist wraps Saniderm around my arm, it’s Sadie’s turn in the chair.

She insists I hold her hand, and she squeezes as tight as she did on the plane when she thought she was going to die.

She closes her eyes and refuses to watch as the humming needle punctures the top layer of her skin for the first time.

She squeezes me even tighter. It’s obvious that every single prick is agony for her, but she doesn’t complain, doesn’t even flinch. She just holds on to me until it’s over.

As promised, the whole process only takes ten minutes.

Bold line work with no shading, the sideways scallop shell and the arrow pointing forward.

When the artist is done, Sadie opens her eyes and stares down at the black ink on her red, inflamed skin.

There’s a look of awe in her sky-sea eyes, a look of wonder.

Sadie’s first tattoo. All of Sadie’s firsts.

In the end, I don’t regret a damn thing.

“I’ve never felt like this before!” Rebecca thrills as we all walk down the hill toward the water, because apparently, the only logical thing to do after getting impulsive tattoos is to eat ice cream. “I got a tattoo! At sixty-nine!”

Ro grumbles a laugh. “Sixty-nine,” they chuckle to themselves, and that joke is even more shocking than when Ro rolled their sun-protective, long-sleeve hiking shirt to reveal a dozen tattoos up both arms, including several half-naked women and hyper-realistic portraits of their corgis. I didn’t peg Ro for a tattoo gay.

“I feel like anything is possible!” There’s a new spring in Rebecca’s step, all five feet of her bouncing along cobbled streets. “My whole body is buzzing with potential.”

Her sincerity is too much for me to handle. “Well, I hope you know this means you’re paying for my tattoo removal in ten years.”

Vera throws her arm around me. “Aww, you think we’re going to be friends in ten years?”

I roll my eyes as the seven of us push our way into a tiny gelato shop.

The usual group chaos ensues: the overlapping too-loud voices, the arguments about ice cream flavors, the excruciating number of samples the Americans insist on trying before they commit to a flavor.

Sadie has a full existential crisis about her choice before settling on strawberry in a cup, the same flavor I’ve watched her eat twice already on this trip.

I order a scoop of pistachio in a waffle cone.

There’s more chaos as we all struggle to find a place to eat our gelato, and we end up in a single-file line along a retaining wall, our feet dangling above the bay.

The water gently laps against the wall. Old Spanish men dot the pier in front of us with their fishing poles, the way they probably do every evening.

I stare at the joint between the sky and sea, still blazing blue even though it’s almost seven.

That was always my favorite part of trips to Spain in the summer.

The time change meant impossibly long days, daylight until ten at night, extra hours to be outside.

“Do you want a taste?”

I turn to my right to see Sadie, her sky-sea eyes, and her strawberry gelato, which she holds out to me in offering.

Her mouth is extra pink, and I absolutely do want a taste.

I take the spoon from her cup. The gelato is sweet and creamy, and I picture Sadie’s tongue tasting the same way.

I let myself imagine kissing the flavor off her mouth, before I tilt my cone in her direction.

She scowls at the greenish-brown color. “What kind did you get?”

“The only kind there is.”

She hesitates, then swipes her tongue along the edge of my cone with one slow, long lick that makes me shiver from the inside out. And damn, I have to find a way to kiss her again.

“ Mmmm .” She moans the way she did with her first bite of nata, the way she did into my mouth. “That’s delicious.”

There’s a smudge of pistachio ice cream in the corner of her mouth, and she tongues it away, and I’m about two seconds from kissing her right fucking now, on this retaining wall, in front of everyone.

She notices the way I’m staring at her mouth, and when our gazes meet from a foot apart, she doesn’t look away.

“Wow!” I jump and tear my eyes away from Sadie’s as on my other side Ari releases a long, low whistle that rescues me from my foolish lust. “How was I so fucking oblivious?” she shouts at the ocean. I blink in confusion, trying to figure out what I missed while dreaming of Sadie’s sweetness.

Rebecca startles, too, nearly dropping her chocolate sugar cone into the water below. “What are you talking about, ladybug?”

Ari throws her head back and laughs manically while everyone eyes her with increasing concern. “Nothing!” She’s pinching her side as she struggles to breathe through her deranged, barking laughter. “Just realizing I’m always a Judy Greer, never a Sandra Bullock.”

“Um, what?”

“Has Ari lost her pretty mind?” Stefano wonders aloud.

Ari jumps up so she can punch him in the arm. “Hey! You got my name right!”

“Prego,” he says smugly.

“You don’t get a trophy for basic human decency.” She punches him again. “Come on. Let’s head back to the hotel for face masks and wallowing.”

Ari tugs Vera into standing and throws an arm around her shoulders. “At least I have you, best friend.”

“I’m not really your best friend, right? Because I’ve only known you for a week…”

The rest of the group gathers themselves with Ro helping Rebecca slowly rise from the retaining wall.

Stefano, meanwhile, springs from his sitting position directly onto two feet like some kind of magical jack rabbit.

“This is not gelato.” He disgustedly throws his entire dessert into the nearest trash can.

“Come to Italy, all of you. I show you real gelato.”

“You’ve got a deal, Dollface,” Rebecca sings.

I’m still in a dreamy, half-daze, barely listening to the surrounding conversation as I finally push myself up to standing.

Sadie does the same, and we linger at the back of the group as everyone zigzags up the crooked streets back toward the hotel.

Sadie and I don’t speak as we eat our respective gelatos, but it’s not an exquisite silence.

It’s a silence that feels thick with that interrupted moment when I watched her lick gelato out of the corner of her mouth and I almost lost all control of myself, almost licked her mouth too.

I lift my cone to my mouth again, but before it reaches my lips, Sadie’s hand jerks forward, grabs the cone, and pulls it to her own mouth. She licks my remaining gelato, then smiles pistachio green at me.

“Sorry,” she says, without sounding sorry at all. “It tastes too good. I couldn’t help myself.”

The last shred of my self-control melts like the strawberry gelato at the bottom of her cup, and I grab the wrist of the hand still wrapped around my cone—the same wrist where her new tattoo shines under the transparent bandage.

Without thinking, I pull her off the main street and into a small alleyway next to the nondescript entrance of a shop.

I’m pushing her up against the stone wall beside the entrance, crowding against her.

“Sorry!” Sadie repeats with a squeak, sounding like she absolutely means it. “But it was just gelato!”

“I don’t give a damn about the gelato.” The words come out in an embarrassing growl.

The cone falls to the ground between us as I slide my hand around her waist, and then Sadie’s cup falls, too, followed by the clang of her plastic spoon.

“I’m going to kiss you,” I tell her, but before I even can, Sadie’s already kissing me.

Her cold, sticky fingers cradle the back of my neck while her mouth crashes against mine.

And this kiss —this strawberry- and pistachio-flavored kiss—is somehow even better than last night’s.

There’s no pretense, no preamble, no pretending.

We don’t have to negotiate the details or cloak drunken desire in scientific curiosity.

I’m kissing her because she tastes so fucking good, I just can’t help myself.

And Sadie is kissing me back like she wanted this too.

Her hands travel from my neck to my shoulders, my shoulders to my collarbone, my collarbone to the sides of my breasts beneath my tank top.

Then she grabs a handful of that tank top and pulls me even harder against her.

Our first kiss was drunk and sloppy and self-conscious, my whole body focused on easing Sadie’s nerves, on helping her relax until she became pliable in my arms, like Play-Doh I could mold. But our second kiss.

We’re completely sober, and it is broad daylight, and Sadie isn’t Play-Doh at all. She’s the one sculpting me with her hands, moving me where she wants me, touching me and turning me into goo.

She bites my lip, so I bite her back, pushing her against the wall until she lets out a little yelp of pain, then laughs into my mouth. “Sorry.” She says the word against my lips, and I start laughing too. “Sharp stone.”

I maneuver her away from the wall, and the sober, broad daylight of it all comes crashing down on me. I clear my throat to ensure my next words don’t come out in that same horny growl. “You… um, you’re getting good at that. Very quick learner.”

She starts nodding, and then I’m nodding too. We keep nodding at each other and not touching, and I feel like I might combust. “Yes, well, I have a good teacher,” she stammers.

I’m shaking with desperation, with a feral need. “You know what they say about scientific experiments…”

“Of course. You replicate the experiment to see if you get the same findings.”

And shit. We’re back to equivocating, back to pretending these are practice kisses, when the last thing Sadie needs is practice . She already knows how to kiss me in a way that makes me want all of her, in a way that makes me feel like no amount will ever be enough. And I want to tell her that.

I need to tell her that none of it has been practice. But what if they are only practice to Sadie?

“Mallory! Samantha!” a voice shouts, and I take another step away from Sadie before Stefano rounds the corner of our little alleyway. “There you are! They sent me to find you! What are you doing here?”

Stefano smiles at us in a way that makes it painfully obvious that he knows exactly what we’re doing here. He glances down at our feet. “Oh no! You spilled your disgusting gelato!” Then, he goes so far as to wink at us. “We will tell the others you had a little mess to take care of.”

A little mess, indeed.