Page 37 of Every Step She Takes
NINETEEN BAIONA, SPAIN
Sadie
Mal has been avoiding me.
She was already gone this morning when I woke up, and she’s made a deliberate effort not to be alone with me all day. And thank fucking God for that.
I should probably be offended by her distance after last night’s gelato kiss, but I’m too relieved to care. I don’t want to be alone with her either.
Something strange is happening to my body, something that started taking shape when I first saw this tattoo on my skin.
The arrow and scallop shell, representing this new path, the one where I keep moving forward, keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The one where I keep taking steps into the unknown.
Right now, the tattoo is distorted beneath the sticky bandage that protects it from my sweat, but even so, it demands my attention.
I keep peeling back my sleeve to see if the tattoo is still there.
It feels like proof that I can change, proof that no part of me is set in stone.
That I can keep discovering myself, keep creating myself, keep claiming myself.
The ink on my skin anchors me to my body in a way I’ve never experienced before.
I am physical. Visceral. Aware of my muscles, my bones, my breath.
Aware of the feeling of my feet on the ground as we walk, aware of my blood pumping through my veins and the air in my lungs.
And whenever I’m close to Mal, or whenever I look at her, or whenever I do so much as think about her, I can feel her presence like my heartbeat against my rib cage.
I can feel her hands in all the places they’ve been and in all the places they haven’t.
So, no. I don’t want to be alone with Mal any more than she wants to be alone with me, because I don’t trust myself not to make another catastrophic mistake.
Fortunately for me, it’s our longest day on the Camino so far—19 goddamn miles—and Mal avoids me the entire time.
Unfortunately for both of us, avoiding me has a natural expiration date.
Our accommodation for the night is a quaint B my tongue anywhere she wants it.
The need in me only grows, and my legs hurt from holding them taut against the sides of the tub.
My wrist is miserably tired. “Tip over, dammit!” I grunt, but I can’t get there.
And that’s when the shame creeps in—the shame that tells me I should know my own body well enough to make this work.
The shame that tells me I shouldn’t be thinking about Mal like this.
The shame that tells me I’m too late, too inexperienced, too far behind in every way.
Except two nights ago , a small voice cuts through the shame spiral. Except two nights ago, I kissed a woman for the first time, and it didn’t feel too late. It felt right on time.
My hand stills, then slides out from between my legs. All around me, the bathwater has turned tepid.
I still feel an aching need throughout my body, and I still have so much shame to work through, but as I sit in the cooling water, I decide exactly what I have to do about both.
“I think you should teach me how to have sex!”
Mal pauses halfway through the door to our room with a paper grocery bag in her arms. “Um. What?”
“Like practice kissing,” I say, “but for sex. I want you to teach me how to have sex.”
She steps fully into the room and sets the bag down on her bed. Then she puts both hands on her face, her expression contorted into a perfect impression of Munch’s The Scream . “That… that’s a joke, right?”
I’m pacing our hotel room in my pajamas, short hair soaking wet, chest heaving. I probably look half-drowned and fully desperate. So, like, no. It’s obviously not a joke at all. “Teach me how to have sex as part of my queer adolescence.”
Mal drops her hands from her face and laughs.
“There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don’t even know where to start.
” She shakes her head and sits down on her bed next to the groceries.
“Actually, yes I do. I’ll start with hell no .
Sadie, you don’t need someone to teach you how to have sex. ”
“Yes, I do!” I feel manic with the need to convince her, which is, admittedly, a problematic way to feel while propositioning someone for sex. The fact that I have to persuade Mal to have sex with me is a clear sign that I should stop. Hell no means hell no , and all that.
But in the bathtub, this seemed like the perfect solution to my problems, so I find myself pushing forward. “I’m thirty-five, and I don’t have the faintest idea how to have sex with a woman.”
“May I recommend watching porn by yourself, then, and leaving me out of it?”
“Porn won’t help.” I’ve tried porn before, and there’s always so much squelching . “I understand the mechanics of it. I need an opportunity to practice the practical application.”
She raises her hands into Prayer pose. “And that is one of the many reasons the goddess invented masturbation.”
“I masturbated in the bathtub, and it didn’t help.”
Mal starts to say something but quickly cuts off. “Wait, what?”
I sit down on my bed so we’re directly across from each other, opponents in this tense negotiation. “I know it sounds deranged, but the thing is, I’ve never been sexually attracted to anyone before.”