I’d spent the whole week thinking about canceling the trip, and yet Saturday morning found me at Regina’s dorm in Waimea, on the northwest side of the Big Island. The oceanography institute had crammed all the grad students into a small clapboard house, set apart from the other houses at the bottom of the hill. But everyone else was gone for break already, which meant I got to have my morning coffee alone on the porch. It was unconscionably early, the air with a bit of a chill in it, the wide open sky lit in pastel yellows and purples. Not a single car around, just a breeze rustling the palm trees, making them whisper.

I still wasn’t sure if coming had been a mistake. In the end, I’d told myself it didn’t make sense to cancel, not after all the trouble I’d gone through to get Cornell to pay for the trip. Besides, Regina would’ve wanted to have a whole conversation about it, and I wouldn’t have known what to say.

Something had just been off the last time we talked — really talked, not texted. A few days before coming I’d FaceTimed her from my bed, jealous to see she was outside, the sunlight bringing out the red tint in her dark brown hair. The last winter flurries were still lingering around New York, but evidently not Hawai‘i.

“And oh my god, Jen, you would not believe how hot my roommate is. I have the biggest crush on her. No, I do!” she’d insisted with a laugh. (Regina always laughed). “Yesterday she started talking to me about carbon removal, and I was like, literally incoherent.”

I’d rolled my eyes. Regina’s crushes lasted for a maximum of two weeks before wearing out. “On that note, how’s Joe doing?” 

I actually liked Regina’s boyfriend for a change. Joe was a sweetheart, bless him, even if he had about as much personality as a soggy piece of cardboard.

“Oh, he’s fine. Studying,” Regina had said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “Shoot. I totally forgot, I have to hop on a call with my advisor.”

“Oh, well, super quick.” I’d instinctively sat up straight, fiddling with the edge of my comforter. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”

“You okay, hon?”

“Yeah, fine. I just, um.” I’d looked around my room, as though I’d find the right words posted on one of the walls. I should’ve written out a script. “Well, so it’s funny, actually. It turns out I’m, uh. Well. Bi?”

Most of my law school friends had taken this news (which, for the record, had been genuinely shocking to me) with an extremely anticlimactic lack of surprise. But I clearly couldn’t have caught Regina more off-guard if I’d come out as a Republican congressman. I don’t have words to describe what her face did — it was something resembling a triple take.

“That’s — wow — what?” Then she’d laughed. “Oh my gosh! Dude, congrats!”

Something in my chest loosened. “Thanks,” I’d said. “Yeah, it’s funny, I — well, you have to go. We can talk about it when I’m there. I just didn’t want to wait to tell you.”

“No, yeah, thank you for telling me,” Regina had said, shading her eyes against the sun.

I leaned against the porch railing with a sigh. She’d said all the right things. Or at the very least, she hadn’t said anything wrong. But all last week, I’d kept coming back to the expression on her face, that weird triple take. I hadn’t expected her of all people to be so shocked. 

I was just about to head back inside Regina’s house for more coffee when the screen door creaked. Regina ambled onto the porch in her sleep shirt and no pants, wrapping a blanket around herself. She took the chair next to me, leaned her head on my shoulder.

I ran a hand through her newly-short hair, breathing in the scent of her trademark clove cigarettes. “Hey, sleepy. Did I wake you?”

She nodded, even though I’d tried to slip out quietly. “S’okay. We have things to do.”

“No, we don’t.” The money the school had given me only had one (very reasonable) string attached: I had to visit an archive at the University of Hawai‘i law school in Oahu. But my flight wasn’t for a few more days.

Regina spoke into my neck. “I made a list. I’m taking you everywhere.”

*

That first morning, Regina took me to a local shop for coffee and malasadas, round fried slices of heaven. Her office at the research institute, foreboding and gray. And finally, the beach — not one of the touristy beaches, her favorite beach, a quiet little half-mile cove we had to hike down to, loaded with bags.

I grew up on the Caribbean side of Mexico, where the ocean is more like a pool, the continental shelf extending so far that you can walk a quarter mile out without getting too deep. The ocean looks green when it’s that shallow, the blue of the sky mixed with the yellow sand on the bottom. But the waves here were a stark, electric blue, the kind of blue that warns you you’re entering deep water.

After a quick swim, Regina and I threw down towels and lay on our stomachs, committed to getting a tan that would last us the rest of the semester. Without a cooler, the moscato we’d brought tasted hot and sugary, like flat soda.

I looked up from my book just in time to watch Regina undo the strap of her bikini top, toss it on her bag. I could easily see the white curve of her breasts where her body met the towel.

Christ. I was not equipped for this. I turned resolutely to face the other way.

*

Regina and I were still at the very beginning of our friendship in those days, though I didn’t realize it then. We’d met only a couple of years before, moving into the same co-op in Ithaca. But from the start, it felt like I’d known her longer. Every once in a while I’d catch her eye across the room and know that she was thinking precisely what I was thinking, that words were not required between us.

I guess it’s no surprise we’d both had a crush on the same guy — Charlie, a grad student from the co-op. He was unspeakably annoying, couldn’t make it through a single sentence without going off on some unrelated tangent. But this minor detail did not prevent 21-year-old me (or Regina, evidently) from wanting to fuck his brains out. The two of us followed him everywhere, like puppies.

That’s how we ended up at the party.

Cornell had great parties, but this was not one of them. Our host was a French architecture student with a newfound passion (and no talent) for DJing. But Charlie was dancing, which meant we were dancing, even though there was no discernible beat and the beer was warm in our solo cups.

And then all of a sudden, I looked up, and Charlie and Regina were making out. Not kissing, full on making out, right next to me.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. All the boys liked Regina, they always had. And who could blame them? Regina was beautiful the way a Barbie is beautiful — obviously, undeniably. Always put together, too. She’d had terrible acne as a teenager and categorically refused to leave the house without a full face of makeup.

I was about to leave, but then they broke apart, and Regina turned around and kissed me. And I could feel Charlie’s eyes on us, taking in the way her mouth moved quickly against mine, her hand on the back of my head.

This was my chance. I drew away and, heart thundering in my throat, kissed him, completing the triangle. It would’ve been a great kiss, except Charlie was a little too enthusiastic, his beard scratchy on my face. When he pulled away to catch his breath, I made an excuse and went looking for Regina, alarmed to find she was no longer next to me.

I didn’t find her until much later, after the party had started winding down. We were both drunk by then, and neither one of us was sure where we were, so there was nothing to do except wait for Charlie. I plopped down on the couch beside her — a red monstrosity of a couch, the kind of couch you only ever see in grad student apartments, passed down free from year to year.

I turned to look at Regina, but she was already looking at me. She’d worn that green sweater I liked, the one that brought out her eyes. Her dark hair was tucked behind her ears.

No one else was there. No one but her was watching.

I leaned closer. “Could we try that again?” I whispered.

“Sure,” she said, and then she was straddling my lap, her long hair falling like a curtain around us, earthy and warm.

It was like kissing a boy, only softer. She tasted like beer and lip balm, and her hands were light as she tilted my face back, making me shiver.

No one else was there, and so no one saw the way my own hands rose up in response, slowly, up past the hem of Regina’s sweater. No one but me heard her gasp.

Charlie was gone for a long time.

*

A full bottle of moscato later, Regina and I had flopped onto our backs, ready to tan our other halves. The beach was still deserted, and I was tipsy enough that I’d tossed my own top carelessly next to hers. I had my arm over my eyes to block out the sun, and I was halfway to falling asleep when she poked me with her foot.

“Have you thought at all about what kind of women you’re attracted to?”

I groaned. “God, I have no idea.”

She poked me again. “Weren’t there ever any girls you liked? Back in school?”

I knew from the way she asked that she didn’t mean law school, or even college — she was talking about all-girls Catholic school, back in Mexico. 

I crossed my arms behind my head and thought about it. There had been sixty girls in my class. The same sixty girls my whole life, from pre-K all the way to high school. I’d met most of them so young I couldn’t even remember a time when I didn’t know them. 

“Not really,” I said. I’d never had so much as a fantasy about one of them. How could I? It was impossible to be turned on by Marina Alvarez’s boobs when she’d spent all of third grade telling everyone I smelled. Or by Paty García, who I’d met before her (expensive, effective) nose job. “I don’t think I could even fathom being gay when I was a kid.”               

Regina took her sunglasses off and shot me a look. “Okay, but like, there has to be at least one woman in the entire world you find attractive.”

The name of every female celebrity fled my mind. And Regina was right next to me, bikini top still off, wind playing with her hair. She was the only thing on the beach I could look at. Finally, I said, “You, obviously. But you were fishing for that.”

“No, I wasn’t,” she protested, but then I raised an eyebrow and we both dissolved into giggles. “Would it be weird to talk about it?”

“Um, yes,” I said, and we laughed again.

See, I was being a very good friend. Very respectful. And then Regina pulled up the porn.

It happened like this. Regina had decided to make a list of seminal gay media for me to consume on the trip. She’d spent the past thirty minutes hard at work crafting a Spotify playlist, which so far was just every song in Tegan and Sara’s discography with some Mitski thrown in.

“Oh my god, and gay movies, obviously, I wouldn’t be a good gay elder if I didn’t show you all the movies.”

“You’re six months younger than me.”

“In straight years.” Regina shook her head knowingly. “In gay years I’m eight, you’re a baby. Baby dyke.”

I huffed.

“Aww, we can watch But I’m A Cheerleader,” she said, typing furiously. “Ugh, that movie was my gay awakening. The sex scene? Art.”

“I thought your gay awakening was that girl you used to have sleepovers with.”

She laughed. “I may have had to be awoken multiple times before I got the message.”

I sipped on my lukewarm moscato, wondering what my gay awakening was. It wasn’t kissing Regina, much as I’d enjoyed it. At the time, all that did was convince me I was straight, because (and I quote), “if kissing a girl feels pretty much the same as kissing a boy, that’s just ‘cause, like, a mouth is a mouth, right?”

Maybe some people didn’t have a gay awakening at all. Or maybe I’d had mine at the exact moment I came out, drunk and sobbing on one of my friends in a party bathroom.

“Okay, okay, look,” Regina said, thrusting her phone at me. All I could make out were two girls, only parts of them visible against a dark background.

She scooted closer to me, cupping her hand around the phone so we could see better. There was kissing, and beautifully manicured hands on flesh, and —

“Did she just suck her finger?” I gasped, slapping Regina’s shoulder.

“A move you’ll become very familiar with one day,” she said, taking a swig of the moscato. 

The scene itself was cheesy, all 50s pink satin and high-strung violins. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that we’d each had a bottle of moscato, and Regina was topless, her face right next to mine. And somehow, even after all that saltwater, she still smelled like clove cigarettes.

Regina dropped her phone back on the towel when the scene ended, but she didn’t move away. Instead she looked at me and asked, “Did that turn you on?”

It occurred to me in that moment that I’d never watched a sex scene with a friend before, certainly not a friend I’d kissed, and that if a guy did all this I would absolutely think he was flirting with me.

I panicked. 

“Oh, yeah, I actually have a big thing for satin sheets,” I said, shattering the moment.

Regina groaned. “I know, it’s a little corny.”

I bumped her shoulder. “Let me see that playlist again?” 

I was probably just reading too much into things, I thought, half-listening as Regina tried to explain that boygenius are not a throuple, even though they’re always making out. The video had just come up naturally. She couldn’t have actually been flirting — she wouldn’t do that, not to Joe.

*

We spent most of the day at the beach, alternating between dipping in the water and drying off on the sand. Regina stopped drinking before I did, but we still had to wait for her to sober up a bit, so we ended up driving back to Waimea in darkness, both of Regina’s hands on the steering wheel, twisting and turning in an effort to keep up with the road. Outside my window, the pitch-black sky was drowning in stars, and I had a feeling if Regina got distracted, even for a moment, we’d end up driving right into it.

But I was still a little tipsy, and so I squealed when the radio played a familiar riff.  “Oh my god.”

One of the guys in our co-op at Cornell had played the piano. This song had been one of his favorites. And every single time, no matter where we were in the house, Regina and I would come running and lie down on the floor under the piano, eyes closed, feeling the song vibrate into us.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” I sang.  “I really have, you know.”

Regina scoffed.  “Name one.”

“Just cause I can’t think of one right this second doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” I insisted.  (I wasn’t going to law school for nothing). But Regina just shook her head at me.

“You know, you never told me how you figured out you were bi,” she said a little while later, turning the radio down.

“Oh.” No fair, bringing it up when I was still tipsy and she was sober enough to drive. “I mean, I dunno. I should’ve known sooner.”

She waited.

“It was in the back of my head for a long time.” Since we kissed. Was that a weird thing to bring up? In three years, we’d never really acknowledged it. “You know that one party we made out at? I remember thinking that kissing you felt the same as kissing anyone. Well not anyone, just like, it wasn’t that different from kissing a guy? Which really should’ve tipped me off.”

“Mmmm.” It was too dark to make out Regina’s face properly. “That’s not what you said at the time.”

“Wait, what?” 

“The next day. I asked you about it. You seriously don’t remember?”

I seriously didn’t. My memory ended with the three of us (we’d found Charlie eventually) taking the Cayuga Falls trail home, uphill the whole way, talking loudly over the roar of the water. “What’d I say?”

She stared straight ahead. “That it did nothing for you.”

“Huh.” I leaned my head back against the seat and thought about that kiss, the heat in it. “It actually did a lot for me,” I admitted, unable to look at her head-on.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Regina’s fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Then she reached out and turned the radio all the way off. There were no other cars around this far up the mountain, and the only sound was the droning hum of our engine, steadily chugging its way up.

So I heard Regina inhale before she said, “Did you know I had a crush on you, back then?”

  “You what?” I twisted in my seat so I could face her, but her eyes were still glued to the road. “No, you didn’t.”

But even as I said it, I remembered. Regina doing my makeup before a party, her face so close it was almost touching mine, making me hold my breath. Resting my head in her lap so she could play with my hair, gently, so gently, curling a strand this way and that. The way she’d always tell me I was beautiful, charming. Magnetic, she’d say, leaning close.

“I thought you had a crush on Charlie,” I said.

“You are the only human alive to ever have a crush on Charlie,” Regina said. “Anyway, it wasn’t a big deal, it was just for a couple weeks right after we met. You know how I am.”

“Yeah, totally,” I agreed reflexively, still trying to understand how I could’ve misread the situation so badly.

“But then we kissed, and you said that, and it — I don’t know, I — I felt used, I guess?”  Her voice quivered on the question mark.

“Oh, honey,” I breathed, leaning over to rest my head on Regina’s arm. “Of course you did. I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I said that.”

“It’s fine, it was a long time ago,” she said, with a chuckle that didn’t sound fully genuine. “But yeah, anyway, I was shocked when you came out. It… kind of brought up a lot of feelings for me.”

Her words hung there for a moment, and I could’ve asked then. It was the obvious question. “Which feelings?” I could’ve said, looking at her face closely. “Which feelings came up?”

Instead I let the moment pass, and Regina changed the subject, and it was late enough by the time we got home that we went straight to bed without much conversation. But as I lay there, all the way across the room in Regina’s roommate’s tiny bed, getting increasingly sober, I just couldn’t stop thinking.

She said she’d had a crush on me for a few weeks when we met, but that had been in August, months before we kissed. What would it mean if she’d had a crush on me that long?

What did it mean that she’d told me?

I rolled the opposite way, facing Regina’s side. The room was small enough that I could just about make out her shape on the other bed, hear her even breathing.

*

By the time we set out on our waterfall hike the next morning, I had firmly decided to just be cool about the whole thing. So Regina had had a crush on me, so what. It wasn’t like it made any difference now. She had a boyfriend, and even if she didn’t, she was my friend. I’d already made her feel used once, I never wanted to do it again.

But when we finally got to the waterfall — after a 45-minute climb AllTrails swore would only take 20 minutes — the first thing Regina did was take her shirt off. “Alright, let’s go.”

I wiped the sweat off my face and looked at the waterfall. It was stunning, clearly powerful. The water roared down the hundred-foot rock face, churning up a fine mist.

“But we didn’t bring bathing suits.” Why didn’t she say we should bring our bathing suits? 

She wagged her eyebrows at me. 

I took a step back and crossed my arms. “No way.” 

“Come on! I bet you’ve never skinny dipped.”

I hadn’t. She knew I hadn’t.

Regina shimmied out of her shorts and panties in one go. You’d think I would have gotten used to seeing her naked by now, but it seemed there was no getting used to it. Nothing I could do but catch my breath and look away, every time. “There’s literally no better place for it.” 

Annoyingly, she was right — we hadn’t come across a single person on the trail. And the water looked so tempting, fresh and blue-green against the stark black volcanic rock. I kicked my sneakers off. “Fine.” 

Regina ran in, shrieking about how cold the water was. I folded both our clothes and left them on a rock before following her. The water really was freezing — and deep, much deeper than it looked, so that you had to actively tread to stay afloat.

I joined Regina under the lighter part of the waterfall, letting the water pound some sense into my head. She yelled something at me.

“What?”

She swam up so I could hear her. “Aren’t you glad we did this?” she said, grinning up at the cloudless blue sky. I nodded, but all I could think about was how close to me she was, how naked. How easy it would be to touch her, even by accident. 

Be cool. I floated slightly away. “So, how’s Joe doing?” I asked. They’d had a long phone call that morning. Regina had been gone for an hour and a half. 

“Ugh.” She bobbed underwater, then popped back up, brushing her wet bangs out of her face. “I don’t know what we’re doing. I actually think we might break up.”

I almost stopped swimming. “Wait, what? Why?”

Had they been having issues? Regina hadn’t said anything, the last few times we’d talked, and she wasn’t really one to keep things to herself. 

Regina sighed, looked around. “Come on.” 

We swam over and sat on some moss-covered rocks off to the side. In the water, I could try to pretend we weren’t naked, but now that we were half in, half out, I had to be intentional about only looking at Regina’s eyes. 

“It’s not that there’s anything wrong, it’s just… I don’t know.” Regina shrugged.  “I never saw myself ending up with a man, you know?  I always thought I’d end up with a woman.” 

Had her eyes flicked down when she said that? No. No way. I fought the urge to fold my hands over my chest. Instead, I said, “Really?  How come?”

“I guess it’s like, there’s so many things that men don’t get, you know? And even when you explain —” she shrugged. “It’s not the same.”

“Yeah, no, I get what you mean,” I said, though of course I didn’t, not yet. For years, I’d been fighting the idea of even being attracted to women. Dating them? I was just starting to let myself imagine what that might be like. 

“But is that like a general thing? Or is there a specific girl you’d wanna date?” I hurriedly specified, “Like your hot roommate, maybe?” 

“Phoebe’s straight.” Regina sighed. Then she grinned. “Though I guess that’s always subject to change.”

“See, e.g.” I said, gesturing at myself. 

“Yeah, maybe I can convert her, too.”

I splashed water at her. “Excuse you. You don’t get to take credit for this.”

Regina raised a cocky eyebrow. “Don’t I? Cause I hear that kiss, and I quote, did a lot for you.”

I laughed, hoping I was tan enough that she couldn’t tell I was blushing. “Pretty sure I was already predisposed.”

“Okay, but a bad kiss could have set you back years. Instead I sped the process up, because I am an incredible kisser.” She looked beautiful as she said it, cheeks flushed from the cold of the water, wet hair dripping onto her chest.

“You’re fishing! Again!” 

Regina shrugged, didn’t deny it.   

“Fine. You’re not not an incredible kisser.”

A slow grin spread across her face, and I could’ve sworn her eyes did that thing again — flick down, then up.  

I eased myself back into the water, feeling exposed, and looked up at her. “Guess you better kiss Phoebe, then.”

“Guess so. God, it’s freezing out here,” Regina said, and then she slipped under the water, kept going deeper and deeper, until she was so far down I couldn’t see her anymore.

*

I’d blown half of my hotel budget so we could spend my last night on the Big Island at an extremely fancy resort, my way of thanking Regina for letting me stay with her. The night air was chilly enough that the rooftop was deserted, lit only by the eerie neon glow of the hot tub. Our wine bottles, full and empty, were lined up neatly along the side, openly defying the no-glass rule. I’d closed my eyes, listening as the water hummed steadily around us, bubbles steaming and fizzing into the air. 

“Do you think you’ll ever date a girl?”

My eyes flew open. “Where did that come from?”

Regina was looking out at the skyline, the glimmer of the other hotels in the distance. “I dunno, we were talking about it yesterday, and I realized I never asked you.”

I leaned back to rest my head on the side of the hot tub and looked up. The sky was clear, but there were too many lights around to see the stars the way we had in Waimea.

“I don’t know, I… it’s kind of hard for me to imagine what that would look like,” I said.

“‘Cause of your parents?”

“Well, yeah. But also I – I don’t know, I’m being stupid.”

The water lapped at me as Regina laid her head beside mine. “So be stupid.”

“It’s just –” I sighed. “I feel like I know how to date guys, you know? I’ve spent years learning the rules. And with women, I don’t know the rules at all. I don’t even know where to start.”

She smiled. “You know, I’m not sure women really have rules.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, who asks who out, who makes the first move? There’s no rule about it.” She paused for a moment, then looked up, eyes catching mine. “You can’t just assume the other person’s gonna ask you out because he’s the guy and he’s supposed to. If you like a girl, you have to make the first move.” 

I was pinned in place by Regina’s gaze, my back flush against the harsh concrete of the hot tub. “That’s terrifying.”

“But also freeing, right? You don’t have to deal with all these default assumptions about who’s gonna do what,” she said. “You can just be two people, and maybe actually it makes sense for you to be the one to pay, or take out the trash… or try to kiss her.”

In that moment, I would’ve paid good money to know what Regina was thinking.  Whether she was just being a friend or trying to give me a sign. But it was impossible to tell.

I groaned, burying my face in my hands. “Ugh, that’s the other thing.”

“What?”         

“I don’t know if I can have sex with a girl.”

Regina raised an eyebrow and leaned her head on her hand, the way she always did when something had her full attention. “Say so much more.”

Some part of me knew I’d regret admitting this when I was sober, but I pressed on anyway. “Like, kissing?  Fine. I know what a mouth is. But vaginas are so… foreign.”

She bumped my leg with hers. “Bitch, you have one!”

“It’s not like I’ve ever licked my own vagina.”

Much giggling ensued. Regina opened a new bottle of wine — red this time. We were past solo cups. She took a generous swig and passed it over.

“Okay, remember the first time you had sex with a guy? You were probably terrified, and a little like, ew, dicks are gross, why would I put one there?” she said.

That was exactly what I’d thought.

Regina saw my face and chuckled. “It’s the same concept. I mean, obviously what you’re doing is different, but at the end of the day, sex is sex. It’s always gonna be sticky and vaguely gross if you think about it too much.”

“Hmm.” I thought again about kissing Regina, how it hadn’t felt as different as I’d thought it would. “So it’s the same.”

“Well —” she looked off into the distance again, and I wondered what memory she was replaying.  “Just the physical part. Everything else is different.”

“What, like, the dirty talk?”

She laughed at that one, bold and loud. “No! Like, okay. When you have sex with a guy, there’s also kind of rules, right?  First you kiss, and then maybe he fingers you or eats you out, but either way you definitely give him a blowjob, and then you have sex?”

I nodded. “Like a script.” 

“Right. But with a girl, you can do anything.” She leaned in, lowered her voice. “One time this girl came just from grinding on my leg.”

“Your leg?!”

Against the cool night air, I could feel the heat of Regina’s arm, so close it was almost touching mine, but not quite. 

“Yeah, that’s literally all clit action,” she said, looking at me like she knew I was imagining it — what it would feel like.

We weren’t doing anything wrong. Friends did this. I talked about sex with my friends all the time. So I swallowed, licked my lips. “What did you do?”

“That’s the other thing. Even after someone cums, you can just keep going.” She shrugged, grinning. “So we kept going.”

I motioned for the wine. Regina passed it to me, laughed when I pressed my flushed cheek to the cool glass of the bottle. 

“Anyway, look, you don’t have to have it all figured out. You learn how to do all this by doing it. Someone will show you the ropes.” I could’ve sworn she did it again — the quickest flick of the eyes, down and up. 

Regina took the bottle from me and drank, long and deep, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. I watched a red bead of wine slowly trickle down the side of her neck. Thought about licking it off. 

I edged closer. Fuck being careful. I wanted to touch her almost as much as I wanted her to be the one to touch me, to make the first move, come up and straddle me again, like she had all those years ago on that horrible couch. I could already imagine the way her leg would slot perfectly in between mine, how easy it would be to tug on her strap and slip off that blue bikini top, the way she’d gasp into my mouth if I did.

She put the bottle down and leaned in, a coy half-smile on her lips, like she was about to whisper something. Or maybe kiss me. Please let her kiss me.

Would she still taste the same?

I never got to find out. Because right as our faces got dangerously close, there was a splash, and we both looked up to see an old man in a speedo grinning as he joined us at the other end of the hot tub.

“Look at that. Must be my lucky day,” he said.  

Asshole.

Regina hopped out, wrapped herself protectively in her towel. “I should go see if Joe’s still up,” she said, not meeting my eye.

“I’m gonna go shower,” I said. She wordlessly opened a towel for me, shielding me from the man’s view as I stepped out of the water. 

“I didn’t mean to disturb you, ladies.”

But you did, I wanted to yell. Instead I shoved all the wine bottles into our beach bag and slid on my flip-flops. When I looked up, Regina was long gone.  

*

I’d pretended to be asleep when Regina slipped back into our room later that night, forestalling any conversation. When I actually woke up, she’d gone for a morning run and left her phone behind. It was like we’d both decided to force the moment to pass.  By the time she returned, aglow with sweat, I was packed. 

We only made one stop on our way to the airport, at the malasadas shop. Ate in the parking lot, the car to our backs, facing the beach. Before us was a perfect blue sky, perfect blue sea, same as every day here. Even the palm trees were a Crayola shade of green, like we were in a coloring book. 

To our right, a sputtering pickup truck pulled up, spilling out five men in construction boots. One of them went inside for supplies, but the other four stayed, presumably to enjoy the view. 

A woman in a striped pink one-piece passed us by on her way to the beach, pastry box in hand. She looked off into the distance, face perfectly neutral — the same look I put on to walk the gauntlet past a group of men. But they didn’t say anything this time, just nodded to each other, faces knowing.

I bumped Regina’s shoulder. “Do you think we look at women the way men look at women?”

“God, no,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I really, really don’t.”

I could tell she was sitting with the question, so I sipped my coffee, waiting for her to finish licking sugar off her fingers.

“Remember in the PowerPuff girls, the secretary lady with the red dress?” Regina asked. “You never got to see her face, they only showed her from the neck down.”

Funny, I hadn’t remembered that until Regina said it. I must’ve imagined a face for her, as a kid. “You think they see women like that?”

“Not always. And not all of them. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman like that.”

I nudged her again. “Even when she’s really hot?”

She shook her head. “I’m always seeing the choices she made. Like, oh my god, I love her eyeshadow. That top looks so good on her.”

“Yes! She doesn’t just look like that, she wanted to look like that. The outfit is trying to tell you something.”

“Meanwhile men are like, babe,” Regina put on a dudebro voice, “you’re beautiful even without makeup. And you’re like —”

I cackled. “You just spent fifteen minutes painstakingly putting blush on so this man can think you’re not wearing makeup.”

“It’s like… watching a show from the stage and watching it from behind the curtain.”

“Hmm.”

“That’s why I just — ugh.” Regina let out a dramatic groan and buried her face in my shoulder. “I just feel like if I end up with a guy, he’ll never be able to see all of me. You know?  No matter how great he is, he can never be behind the curtain.”

As we drove to the airport, I thought about school again, all sixty of us in those criminally ugly navy and black uniforms, hidden away like a treasure behind tall white walls. The way all the teachers and staff were female except for the one elderly gardener, and even the popular girls would show up to class with a pimple patch stuck on their foreheads, hair unbrushed. How we sat at our desks with our legs spread wide.

I remember in 8th or 9th grade, some administrator decided that we should wear the same uniforms as our sister school in Mexico City, a cool 7,000 feet above sea level. Our new skirts were a heavy wool, the shirts made of such thick cotton you couldn’t see a bra strap through it if you tried. In 90-degree winters and 110-degree summers, with no air conditioning in sight, they’d been intolerable. At recess we would lie down on the cool tile, undo every button in our shirts but one, and flap our skirts in the air like fans. It would’ve been a male fantasy, except it was only possible because there were no men around, because when we were together we could just be girls. Girls who were sweaty, in need of more deodorant, at severe risk of heatstroke. 

Regina parked in front of the terminal. We sat there quietly for a moment, both staring straight ahead like we were still driving, like the car was still moving. Finally, I twisted in my seat and pulled her into a hug, closed my eyes. Breathed in coffee, cloves, sunscreen. 

“Jenny?” She ran a hand through my hair.

“Yeah?”   

“You really haven’t made a mistake. Ever.”

I pulled away so I could look at Regina, really look at her. She’d gone without makeup that day, and I could just make out a faint line of freckles peppering their way up her nose. Her green eyes stared right back into mine, and I knew then that there were many things she understood about me, spoken and unspoken.