Page 74 of Every Step She Takes
I nudge a reluctant Mal with my shoulder. “Part of adolescence is making mistakes, right?”
She shakes her head at me. “I’ve created a monster.”
I reach over the empty basket of bread between us and put my hand on hers. “And Mal?” I wait until she meets my gaze, until her hazel eyes are completely fixed on mine. “You have to get a Camino tattoo with me.”
SEVENTEENA 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. “Youthink it hurts? Then why do you have so many?”
“I told you. Ireallyhate 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 likemyvery 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 regretnotkissing her again in the bathroom this morning. I shouldn’t have given into her drunken request to test a hypothesisandI 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 ideaandshe 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.”
