Page 54 of Every Step She Takes
“Yes, well, it’s the essence of the thing. Besides, we have curfew. We’re all supposed to be in our rooms from midnight to six a.m. for safety.”
“Well, if it’s for safety, we should probably abide by the rules.”
“Said like a rule-follower who’s never defied her parents.”
My taunting still isn’t enough to rouse her, so I switch to physical coercion. I latch on to the duvet still covering her face and attempt to yank it off. The problem is, awake Sadie might be as stubborn as a bull, butsleepySadie is as stubborn as every fucking bull in all of Pamplona combined. I pull on the duvet, and she pulls right back twice as hard.
“I thought you wanted quintessential adolescent experiences!” I screech as I struggle to outmuscle her.
“Adolescents need sleep!” she screeches back with one more vicious yank of the duvet. I lose my footing, and she ends up pulling me along with the blanket. Our little game of tug-of-war ends suddenly when I fall on top of the duvet and her.
Sadie yelps. “What are you doing? Get off me!”
My brain scrambles for a way to play this off as intentional, but it’s four in the morning, and my elbow just collided with what I hope was her stomach.
She quickly disabuses me of my hope. “Ouch! That was my boob, you boob!”
“This is the natural consequence of your actions,” I tell her with all the casualness I can muster while my face is buried in blanket.
She flails beneath me, and I flail on top of her, and somehow that’s the moment I register our bodies are only separated by the thin fabric of this duvet.
I wonder if she realizes it too, because she goes still beneath me. I roll off her and wedge myself between her body and the wall on this tiny twin bed. Neither of us moves for the length of three labored breaths, and then I pull the blanket down from over her face.
She looks pissed. Her hair is mussed, with her bangs sticking straight out like an awning over the rest of her face, and her eyes are furious but awake. She looks—
Off-limits.
“Was this strictly necessary?” she whispers. Our faces aren’t even a foot apart on her pillow.
“Depends,” I whisper back. “Did I change your mind?”
“Let me make sure I understand. You want me to get up at…” She checks the time on her phone. “… four in the morning, so I can walkmore?”
“Yes.”
“And sleep less?”
“That would be correct.”
She unleashes a string of ingenious curses, and I sit up beside her, folding my hands beneath my chin. “Please?”
“I’m already getting up,” she harrumphs, throwing the blanket off herself and onto me. As she rises from the bed, her sleep shorts bunch together, giving me a view of the dimpled flesh of her upper thighs.
Sadie adjusts her shorts, then turns to glare at me. I do a thoroughly good job pretending I wasn’t staring at her arse. “Let’s go,” I say very calmly, very indifferently, very not aroused. “I’ll race you to the stairs.”
“Stairs? You didn’t say anything about stairs.”
I insist that we tiptoe past the door to Inez’s room like the rebellious teens we’re pretending to be, and Sadie reluctantly humors me. The lobby of our private albergue is dark except for the faint glow of the front desk and the blue computer light reflecting off the glasses of the clerk. We creep past them too, and stealthily slip into the predawn.
Viana do Castelo is eerily vacant at this hour. It’s not a big enough city to have a nightlife, and no one in Portugal wakes up before six. As we wander toward Santa Luzia hill, it’s as if we’re the only two people in the world. I usually hate this kind of silence, this quietly meditative time of day, but with Sadie clinging to my side, it’s slightly more tolerable.
Of course, she’s only clinging to me because the headlamp I’m wearing is our primary source of light.
“About these stairs…?” she starts.
“How did you think we were going to get up the hill?”
“Not via fucking stairs,” she grumbles, tripping over cobblestones in the dark and swearing again.
