Page 51 of Every Step She Takes

Sadie doesn’t press the issue. “What do you think triggered these feelings today?”

“There… there was this… article ,” and fuck. Now I’m crying for the millionth time. The tears are sticky and hot, but Sadie quickly brushes them away with the tips of her cool fingers.

I don’t want her to see me like this, but Sadie always sees so much of me. Too much .

I brush away my own tears, brush away everything I want to keep hiding. “I’m not sure what part of your queer adolescence this is,” I joke.

“Are you kidding?” Sadie squeezes my hand. “What could be more queer than comforting the woman you’re having casual sex with through a mental health crisis?”

“Party girl?” Inez throws aside the newspaper in disgust. “I’ve only seen you truly drunk twice, and you wouldn’t even do mushrooms with me when we trekked the West Highland Way.”

She snorts, then takes a long drag of her cigarette.

“That’s hardly the worst part,” I tell her with my legs dangling off the balcony in her room.

The rain stopped at some point in the night, and now Pontevedra smells damp and earthy.

I keep breathing it in through my nose, keep finding calm in the early morning smells of an ancient city.

“And I’d rather be a party girl than someone people depend on for their livelihood. ”

She studies me before leaning over to flick her cigarette against the edge of an ashtray. “Is that why you woke me up at four in the morning?”

I honestly don’t know why I did it. After Sadie drew me a warm bath and went out to get us sandwiches from the supermercado down the street so I wouldn’t have to face everyone at dinner, we snuggled in the two twin beds we’d pushed together until I fell into a hard, deep sleep wrapped in her arms.

But at three in the morning, I startled awake in a cold sweat and couldn’t quiet my brain.

In the silence of the night, the noise in my head had too much room, and my thoughts were running wild circles around dads and legacies and family empires; around the past I can’t change and the future that’s crowding in on me.

First times and thousandth times, something both old and new, and falling and falling and never reaching the bottom, because what if there is no bottom? Thoughts of saying goodbye in Santiago.

Thoughts of rejection and shared Google Calendars. Thoughts of heartbreak and loneliness and living out of a single suitcase. Assembling IKEA furniture and Peanut the Elephant and somewhere that feels like home. Some one .

All of it—every single thought—sitting on my chest until I had to escape that sarcophagus of a hotel room.

I tried going for a walk, tried calling Michelle, and when she didn’t answer, I found myself knocking on Inez’s door instead.

Three cigarettes and thirty minutes of backstory later, and we’re sitting on the cramped balcony, and I still don’t know why I’m here, what I’m looking for.

“I woke you up because I’m having a panic attack!” I fidget under the blanket Inez threw over my bare legs.

“Are you having a panic attack about the article?” Inez asks with another leisurely inhale. “Or are you having a panic attack about Sadie?”

“It wasn’t supposed to mean anything!” I explode.

“I was just helping her experience her queer adolescence, just teaching her how to flirt and kiss and be comfortable with a woman, and it—” Got out of hand?

Snowballed into practice sex? Turned into something that feels too real?

Any attempt to describe it sounds ridiculous, so I lapse into silence, picking off bits of lint from my borrowed blanket.

Inez leans forward and flicks her cigarette over the ashtray again. “I told you not to fall for Sadie,” she says. “But you did what you always do. Such a Gemini move.”

“I think… I don’t know… what if this thing with Sadie is… more than that?” A weird question mark asserts itself. It’s the punctuation mark of emotional avoidance and cowardice.

“Do you want my honest take?” She stamps out her cigarette once and for all.

“I think you’re doing what you always do, Mal.

You meet these women that you know it can never work out with long-term, you instantly fall in love with them, completely lose yourself in them.

And like clockwork, as soon as the novelty wears off, you fall out of love and move onto the next thing. ”

Her honest take is a little too honest. It’s the most direct she’s ever been with me. No mysticism, no hiding behind a horoscope, no bullshit at all. “And you think that’s what will happen with Sadie? That I’ll… fall out of love with her?”

“Don’t you always?”

I keep picking and picking at this blanket until I snag on a piece of fabric instead of lint. The string starts to unravel between my fingers.

“You’ve known Sadie for two weeks, which means you’re in the height of your honeymoon phase. Everything is new and fun, distracting you from all the real shit you don’t want to deal with.”

Today didn’t feel fun or distracting. When Sadie held me until I fell asleep, it felt like something else entirely.

“What happens when we get to Santiago?” she presses. “Sadie lives in Seattle, and you have to deal with things here, whether you want to or not. And let’s say you do find a way to make it work with her.”

Inez keeps pushing and pushing, and I keep unwinding the thread wrapped around my fingers. “What happens when things get too comfortable? When Sadie wants to settle into a life with you and realizes you never settle?”

What Inez is saying… It’s everything Michelle has always said, everything I know, deep down, to be true about myself. I love beginnings—a new journal full of blank pages, the first few tracks of an album, the first few months with someone new.

But I’ll only use the first five pages of that journal before I abandon it, and I’ve never listened to a thirteenth track in my life, and the middle was what ruined things with Ruth: the middle gave her time to see I wasn’t worth the long haul.

I know all of this, yet here I am, still repeating the same cycle with Sadie, tricking myself into thinking that maybe, with her, the middle wouldn’t be so intolerable.

“You don’t think that maybe… maybe Sadie could be different?” I ask Inez with more hope than I care to admit.

“I’m sure she could be different,” Inez says casually, “if you were different.”

“Ouch.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Mal. But I’ve designed this trek to be a journey deeper into yourself, and have you participated in any of that self-reflection?

Did you do any soul-searching on this trip?

Or did you dismiss it all with the same old flippancy?

Because I think the woman sitting in front of me right now isn’t any different from the woman I picked up from the Porto Airport.

And that woman is going to hurt Sadie. She’s going to hurt herself too. ”

I tug on the loose thread until the entire damn blanket comes apart on my lap. “Damn. You’re unexpectedly brutal at four a.m.”

Inez sighs. “And there’s the flippancy, right on cue.”

She slides out of her chair and disappears into her room for a moment. When she returns, she’s holding a dark red crystal. She thrusts it into my hands.

“Seriously, where are these crystals coming from? Do you have an entire quarry in your pack?”

“It’s jasper,” she says bluntly. “To give you some courage.”

The rock is silky smooth in my hands. “Courage for what?”

“To do the right thing,” she says, like it’s so easy.

But I have no idea what the right thing is .