Page 44 of Every Step She Takes

“Well, congratulations,” I spit. “I’m sure he was only using you as a pawn to make the company appear more progressive. You were just someone he could parade around during Pride month.”

All the radiant light in Inez’s face dies out, and the guilt feels like a corkscrew to my heart. “That was a shitty thing to say,” she tells me in a flat voice.

And I know it was. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“It’s okay. You’re grieving. I know you didn’t mean that.

” Inez exhales and carefully lowers herself down onto one of my father’s many couches, which are meant for looking, not actual sitting.

A couch could never just be a couch; it had to be a statement piece, a conversation starter at dinner parties, a minefield for a perpetually messy little girl.

My lip quivers with impending tears, and I bite down. “I wish you’d told me about this.”

“If I had,” Inez says quietly, “you wouldn’t have come.”

“Yes, exactly.”

She stares up at me from her awkward perch. “You needed to come here, Mal.”

I did. But that wasn’t Inez’s call to make.

My old room has been preserved like a terrifying monument to my preteen self.

In every one of my father’s houses, I was given a space that was solely mine, and it was often the only room that didn’t look like the display floor at a Sotheby’s.

Valentim always gave me full creative freedom with the design and décor of my bedroom, so each one was like a time capsule revealing who I was when he bought the house.

He acquired this house and this vineyard in 1999, which means I’m staring at a reminder of my wannabe emo-punk-rocker phase, with dark purple walls and black curtains contrasting the four different caboodles full of Wet N Wild makeup.

It’s a toss-up between what’s worse: the giant poster of Limp Bizkit’s album Significant Other , or the fact that it hangs over the dresser where I lined up all my Beanie Babies.

It’s a stale, airless mausoleum, and I push through the French doors out onto the balcony to catch my breath.

The view highlights the elegant terraces of grapes that stretch for kilometers in every direction, and all it does is remind me that this house and those grapes and the wine they’ll one day produce are all mine.

But I don’t want it. I hated the summers I spent at my father’s different vineyards.

I hate the smell of fermentation, the stain of grapes under my fingernails, the taste of the thing my father would always love more than me.

I hated it, and he knew I hated it, so why did the bastard leave it all to me?

I can hear a knock on the door from out on the balcony, and I turn, expecting to find Felipe or Luzia or even Inez. “Come in,” I holler over my shoulder.

“Mal?” a voice hedges, and it’s not any of them.

I turn to see Sadie standing on the other side of the French doors.

Her short red hair is wet and clinging to the side of her neck, and relief pours through me at the sight of her here.

I stumble across the balcony and directly into her soft arms. As she holds me gently, my insides shatter all over again, and I start to properly cry for the first time all trip.

Hell, for the first time since I got the news about my father.

I fucking hate crying. My chest gets hot, and my face gets sticky, and every breath feels like fire in my lungs. The headache comes instantly, followed by a wave of nausea, but I can’t seem to stop the tears. And there’s just so much snot.

“Mal.” Sadie coos my name and strokes my hair until I finally pull away, rubbing my hands across my face until I can see again.

I’m arrested by the sight of Sadie’s face in the afternoon light on the balcony.

Even though we’ve shared a hotel room all week, she rarely lets me see her like this, scrubbed clean and makeup free.

And holy shit—those goddamn freckles. There are more of them than I thought, millions of them, perhaps from all our time spent in the sun.

Dark freckles and light freckles and freckles the exact color of her hair.

Big freckles and tiny freckles and clusters of freckles that all swirl into one thing, like an entire galaxy contained on her cheeks.

“Freckles.” I exhale the word, and I’m not sure if I’m calling her Freckles or expressing the sheer enormity of them. “I’m so sorry.”

Sadie is still sliding her fingers through my hair. “Sorry for what?”

For so fucking much . “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. About Quinta Costa, or about who I am, or about my dad dying.”

Her hand falls away. “Your dad died?”

Oh shit. I still hadn’t told her about that. “You… you didn’t notice all the funeral wreaths downstairs?”

It’s obvious she did not. “When did he die?”

“Um, I don’t know, like…” I do the calculations in my head. “Thirteen days ago?”

“Mal!” Sadie gasps. “What the fuck?”

“I think the correct response is I’m sorry for your loss .”

“Why would I say that when you don’t seem sorry for your loss?” Her observation feels like an oyster knife, cracking my shell wide open, cutting to the core of me, the part I never want anyone else to see. It feels like there is nothing left to hide behind, and no reason to try to hide at all.

“I’m not sorry for my loss,” I tell her honestly. “Because I lost my dad a long time ago.”

And then I tell her everything else. It’s as if I can’t hold it in anymore, as if releasing the tears opened some kind of dam inside my heart.

It all comes spilling out. About my complicated relationship with my father as a kid—about the good memories, and the bad ones, and all the ones in between that still hurt after all these years.

I tell her about falling in love with my roommate at boarding school, about wanting to share my love with my father.

And I tell her about the day he told me I couldn’t be both gay and his daughter.

The day I left. The day he let me leave.

We sit across from each other on my childhood bed with its black sheets and Hello Kitty blanket, and Sadie holds my hands in hers and listens to all of it.

She makes the occasional sound of sympathy or outrage, and sometimes, she squeezes my hands tighter, like she’s reminding me that she’s still here, but she never interrupts.

She doesn’t ask me to explain anything, and I find myself explaining everything.

It doesn’t hurt the way I always thought it would, unburdening all of this to another person.

Putting the feelings into words doesn’t intensify them; it takes some of their power away.

Sadie takes some of their power. She takes my complex grief, the years of sadness and shame and loss, and she holds them all like she’s holding my hands.

Maybe it’s because Sadie has experienced complex grief, or maybe it’s because she’s good friends with her own sadness and shame, or maybe it’s because she knows what it’s like to inherit something she never wanted, but Sadie is able to hold all of it, all of me, in a way I thought only Michelle ever could.

“Can I ask…?” Sadie starts when I finally finish. “Whatever happened with Prithi?”

“Prithi.” I exhale her name. It still holds some power.

“She… after I left my dad’s that day, I went back to Scotland for her.

I told her I wasn’t going to Oxford anymore, since I was never taking over the business, and I asked her to come with me.

I wanted to take a gap year together to figure it all out.

I… I wanted her to run away with me, basically. And she…” I huff a laugh.

Sadie gives my hands another squeeze. “I’m guessing that didn’t happen?”

“Worse. She told me I should go back to my dad and grovel for his forgiveness. She told me to go back into the closet. To go to Oxford and to do whatever else my father wanted. She… she made it very clear that she wasn’t interested in me if I wasn’t the heir to Quinta Costa.”

This final confession festers between us for a moment until Sadie makes a grave pronouncement. “You have deplorable taste in women.”

I laugh fully, and it loosens something stale and airless inside me. “Hey, I’m currently having sex with you, so…”

“That doesn’t help your case. I’m a mess. Having sex with me is a horrible mistake.”

“Yeah, but I think you might be my favorite mistake so far.”

We sit on the bed in the aftermath of that confession. Of all my confessions.

Eventually, Sadie lets go of my hands. “We need to talk about the last remaining elephant in the room.” She reaches over to my dresser and picks up my elephant Beanie Baby. “What happened here?”

I snatch him out of her hands. “That’s Peanut, and he does not appreciate your mockery.”

“You must’ve missed him terribly these past twenty years.”

“He promised to write.” I hold up Peanut and force him to wave at her with one hoof. “Oh, the nights I wasted sitting by the window, waiting for his letters.”

“This room is…” She scans the walls, and I want to gouge her eyes out before she notices all my Red Hot Chili Peppers CDs. The humiliation . “It’s a little bit creepy,” Sadie decides.

“It’s a lot creepy.”

“Based on everything you said about Valentim, I’m surprised he didn’t take all this stuff down. Turn your room into a home gym or something.”

I would’ve assumed the same about my old childhood bedrooms. I never expected to find this one exactly how I left it twenty years ago. “I guess that’s what happens when you own multiple mansions. You forget about weird, abandoned rooms like this one.”

Sadie climbs off the bed and traces her hand along bottles of black nail polish, my CD player, my collection of cucumber melon body spray. “I love all of it,” she declares. My chest swells in an unfamiliar way.

Her eyes are on a jewelry box, her fingers sifting through necklaces I never wore, earrings I tried to lose. “Do you miss any of this stuff? Is there anything you want to take with you?”

Sadie is the only thing in this room I want, but I already know I can’t keep her. From the bed, I watch her wander, open drawers without asking, touch things without thinking. I don’t stop her. There’s nothing left for me to hide.

Except a red, lacy thong I bought when I was thirteen and which I hid from my father in the back of my sock drawer. She pulls the cheap lingerie out and shakes it in my direction. “Ooh la la!” she teases in a horrible French accent. “Did you bring lots of girls to this room?”

“Only one.” I intend to sound teasing too, but the words come out in that embarrassing growl from last night. Sadie quiets for a moment, the thong falling to her side.

“Technically,” she says, “I brought myself here. After forcing Inez to tell me which room is yours under threat of writing a negative review.”

“I should’ve known you had it in you to be devious.”

She curtsies.

“You know, there is one thing I would like to take from this room.” I scoot to the edge of the bed.

“And what’s that?” She slinks toward me like she already knows.

“A memory,” I say, as she steps between my opened legs. “Of you, in this room.” I run a hand from her thigh up along her wide hip, the soft curve of her waist. “A memory of your skin, and your freckles, and those little sounds you make…”

Sadie turns to the dresser, picks up Peanut, and then faces his black, beady eyes away from the bed and toward the far wall. I laugh, and she flashes me another devious smile.

“Maybe this time, you could practice taking your shirt off in front of me?” I try. “You know, for sexual confidence reasons.”

She squints one eye and taps her chin. “Only if you agree to wear this.” She tosses the red thong so it lands on top of my head, and we both laugh.

We laugh as Sadie does a very shy striptease, sliding out of her bra and then using several Beanie Babies to conceal her large, pale breasts.

We continue laughing when we discover that I can no longer fit in my thirteen-year-old underwear, and I loudly curse every unholy thong that walks this earth as I inelegantly kick it off my leg.

And then we’re both naked in my dimly lit childhood bedroom, and we’re not laughing at all when I fill my hands with her flesh, when my lips kiss her firm nipple, and then down, down, over her decadent curves, all the way down to the tangle of red hair between her legs.

I crouch before her like a pilgrim before a religious icon, and I fully intend to worship her.

When I lick Sadie for the first time, she gasps and grabs onto my shoulders.

Her nails dig into my skin as I tease out all those lovely little sounds.

She’s extremely sensitive, and I tread carefully with each lick, each suck, each kiss, even though everything about this moment makes it hard for me to hold back.

Her earthy smell and the taste of her as she becomes wet; her fingernails and her moans; the way she trembles and heaves and lets me love her body without an ounce of self-consciousness.

I fuck her here, in my childhood bedroom, against a dresser lined with Beanie Babies, but there’s nothing funny about it at all. It feels sacred .

Sadie comes hard and fast, thrusting herself against my face before she crumples into a boneless pile on the floor beside me. I’m not sure what I’m teaching her as I slide my fingers between her legs and coax out a few more tremors, what we’re practicing as she kisses me after each little gasp.

And when I make her come again, tangled up in my black sheets, I don’t know how either of us will be able to pretend this is for scientific purposes.