Page 2 of Stepping Up

In a true break from tradition, the handsome stranger and I talked most of the night after that. I told him about my roommate, about the art projects I was neglecting, and he listened with perfect attentiveness. One minute, we were joking like old friends, laughing in a way that could barely be heard over the continued loud music, and in the next instant, we’d be seconds away from crying or kissing or both. It was a conversation that melted into the cracks of the late night, dripped through our fingers like our ever-flowing booze. My cup of jungle juice emptied, turned to a second. Eventually, I lost all sight and thought of Danielle, turning for once into the young and irresponsible girl I’d feared becoming. Just like my mother.

Cinderella before midnight. Which meant there had to be a moment when the clock would strike twelve and it all would fall apart.

It took a while for that glass slipper to drop, though. When we eventually kissed, sighing into each other and embracing the anonymity of the night, it was too heated to be a fairy tale. His hands waited for permission to roam, and my teeth grazed his lower lip, and we were off.

The boy and I found our way into a spare bedroom wordlessly, shedding clothes like the worries and final projects I’d forgotten in the heat of his mouth and skin. The lust between us was as hazy-warm as this night would become in my memory, though the feeling was something I’d never lose to time. He had gentle hands, soft lips, and when we were naked in each other’s arms and he finally pushed himself inside me, it was with just enough force to make me gasp.

When I came first, the bright acid of his eyes brought me to a shuddering climax just as much as his firm body did. I kissed him hard as he joined me over the edge, and even after he’d finished, still kissing my lips through his ecstasy, I lay naked in this charming near-stranger’s arms, happy and calm.

He may have been a miracle, because in that moment, I could have sworn at least one of my heart’s impenetrable walls lay in rubble at his feet.

Maybe everyone is meant to have one life-changing hookup, an encounter steamy and seductive and perfect enough that you use it as a metric by which to measure every potential fuckbuddy who comes after it. But I’m not sure everyone’s life-changing hookup is meant to live quite so fully up to its name as mine did.

It was that night with the sweet boy whose name I must have forgotten that I’d look back on as the turning point. The reason I left school, moved back in with my irresponsible mother, and forgot for a while that art was my greatest passion. Because in a few short months, I had a new passion to contend with. Thanks to that frat party stranger, my daughter came to be. That night was without a doubt my biggest mistake. At least on paper.

But I couldn’t make myself regret sharing myself with that boy. Not when I first saw that positive pregnancy test, nor when the nausea and heartburn kicked in, and especially not after I got to fall in love with my child’s bright green eyes, just like her dad’s.

All I could really regret was forgetting him.

1

CARLY

Few operations are as delicate as getting a five-year-old ready to leave the house in a hurry. Especially when you’re dealing with my precocious, fiercely independent five-year-old, Ella.

“We need to meet Grammy at the airport soon, honey. Are you almost ready?” I tried to call toward my daughter’s bedroom with the appropriate level of calm urgency in my voice. One wrong tonal shift, and all hope of cooperation would be gone. Parenting was not unlike defusing a small, potentially deadly bomb.

“Almost, Mommy!” Ella’s sweet little voice piped up from behind her door, high-pitched and with a tinge of a smile behind it. And of course, all of my tension melted out of me in an instant, a tiny smile of my own forming on my lips automatically. I loved this kid enough to deal with this high-stakes scene a hundred times over. And honestly, I wasn’t looking forward to our airport errand, anyway.

With a burst of energy and the ring of an enthusiastic “ta-da!” that filled our small house, Ella emerged from her bedroom. Her outfit, which she’d insisted on picking out herself to surprise Grammy with her fashion sense, was fresh off the runway. That is to say, it was one I couldn’t see any sane, practical person attempting to wear in real life. A child, though? Sure. My child? Perfection.

Her blonde hair hung in baby-soft waves around her young face, her bright green eyes and partially-toothless smile displaying her satisfaction at the ensemble. She’d, unsurprisingly, picked her favorite shirt of the moment—a pink T-shirt with a smiling green bug on it and the words “Buzz off, you’re bugging me!” in glittering font—and tucked it into the rainbow tutu she’d worn to be a unicorn for Halloween. Red tartan-patterned leggings peeked out from underneath the layers of tulle, and her hot pink Crocs completed the look. The shoes were a tiny act of rebellion that gave me a pang of sadness, wishing she were tiny again. They didn’t fit her anymore, and I’d tried to get rid of them a few times, but Ella was too attached to her favorite shoes even now that she’d outgrown them.

“You look beautiful, baby,” I started, telling the truth even through my struggle to hold back a laugh, “but you need shoes that fit to go to the airport. How about you put on those light-up sneakers that Grammy got for you? I think they’d work great with all your colors, and she’ll be excited to see you wearing them.”

A pause, and Ella’s smooth brow furrowed as she considered this. Finally, she gave a short, decisive nod and ducked back into her bedroom to switch shoes.

By the time Ella reemerged in her light-up sneakers and I finally wrangled her into the car, we were definitely later than we told my mom we would be picking her up. There was relief, at least, at having finally left the house, Ella snug in her car seat, but that left me with the dread about actually picking up Mom. Worse, she’d told me in her text with the details of when her flight would be landing that she had a “surprise” waiting for us, and knowing Jodie Sanders as I did, that was a scary prospect.

I’d never been one for surprises, and I especially disliked the kind that excited my mother. It could really be anything—an unsightly face tattoo she got on her vacation, a mangy puppy she’d smuggled home in her suitcase, or any number of horrific things my sensible brain wouldn’t be able to handle. I’d barely been able to handle the idea of her going on a singles’ cruise for several weeks to begin with.

I was glad she was coming home, at least. I loved my mom the way disappointed parents probably loved their prison inmate children, fiercely, unconditionally, but with a healthy acknowledgement that there was something not right there. Mom was always a romantic I wasn’t built to understand, the happy-go-lucky type that made her seem younger than me half the time. We often butted heads, though that wasn’t as much the case these days. Neither of us wanted my daughter to witness her mom and grandma constantly bickering. Plus, I was grateful to her for letting me and Ella live in her house rent-free while I worked as a waitress and struggled to save up enough money to move out. There was nothing more helpful for a single mother than free, reliable childcare, and Mom was always supportive of my budding photography career, too. She was more than happy to watch Ella on a weekend when I secured a wedding gig after one of my shifts at the too-fancy-for-me-to-eat-there restaurant I’d worked at for a while. We’d learned to coexist peacefully over the years, but Jodie Sanders and I were still such drastically different people, it’d be easy to think we weren’t related were it not for our strong family resemblance.

Although I was full-figured, always more on the plus-size spectrum than my almost-willowy mother even before I’d had a child, we had the same almost-black hair color, the same tendency to freckle in the sun, and strikingly similar bone structure. Mom always said Sanders women had incredible cheekbones, and she wasn’t wrong—even baby-faced Ella was starting to show the beauty she’d one day grow into. My blue-gray eyes apparently came from the anonymous guy my mom had hooked up with in high school and promptly never seen again, though, because Jodie’s were a deep brown. And her now-graying hair had an enviable curl pattern that I suspected Ella was going to develop as she got older. Unfortunately, it had skipped a generation and left my own hair frizz-prone and wavy at best.

“Do you think Grammy brought me any presents from the cruise?” Ella asked from the backseat, struggling to sound unbothered about it. I cracked a smile and brushed away my complicated Mom-angst to glance back at her in my rearview mirror.

“Maybe,” I mused. “But remember how I told you it’s rude to ask people for presents? It makes them feel bad if they didn’t get you anything.”

“Yes, Mommy,” Ella sighed, sounding older and world-weary in a way that made me want to laugh out loud. I held it back so as not to offend her. She didn’t like being laughed at when she wasn’t trying to be funny. “But that’s why I asked you, not Grammy. Asking you isn’t rude. You say to ask you anything.”

This time I did laugh, a quick burst of delighted surprise that Ella seemed to deem acceptable. My kid was too damn smart for her own good.

“Alright, you got me there, kiddo.”

We spent the rest of the too-long drive to the airport going over the final details of Ella’s biggest passion in life—bugs. My quirky little girl had skipped over the princess phase entirely and decided her dream was to one day be an entomologist, and though bugs certainly weren’t my thing, I loved hearing her tell me fun facts about crickets she’d learned from the encyclopedia of bugs I’d bought for her last birthday.

“Ladybugs eat other insects, you know,” Ella told me excitedly from the back seat as I struggled to find a place to park at the airport. “They can eat up to 5,000 insects in their lifetime. Isn’t that a lot, Mommy?”

---