Page 62 of Accidental Mile High Daddy
Alone.
Still beautiful. Still enough in her eyes to make every part of me want to cross the street and wrench her into my arms.
But by the time my brain seemed to want to work again, by the time I’d found even an ounce of control over my limbs towantto do exactly that, she broke her gaze away, looking down at her phone as if it were far more interesting.
At the dinner table that night, Zach wouldn’t shut up about her. Not that he’d really stopped in the last two months — but today, after seeing her, it was a whole new level. One that I wasn’t coping with well.
“Yeah, tiger, that was her,” I said, answering the same question for the fifth time now in the last six hours. Zach hummed his response at me around a mouth full of dinosaur-shaped noodles drenched in artificial cheese sauce. One of these days, I was going to have to insist that he didn’t need to have at least one meal of dinosaur-shaped foods a day.
He swung his feet under the table, chewing gleefully as if the question wasn’t eating away at me every time he asked it. “I thought that maybe it was her but then you didn’t wanna look so I thought maybe it wasn’t her but then I saw her hair and Iknewit had to be her.”
I poked a piece of broccoli with my fork.
“She didn’t wave,” he said, his voice a little quieter. “She just kind of stared.”
My throat worked around nothing, the piece of broccoli still sitting on my fork, my chin resting on my fist. “I know.”
“I never got to swim with her,” he added.
I’d never wanted to jump off a fucking cliff more in my life.
“Can you ask her to come over?”
My grip tightened so hard on my fork that it scraped loudly on the plate. I fought to regain control of myself, taking a deep breath in and out, so I could answer my kid,my perfect kid, with as much patience as I could physically muster. “She’s really busy, Zach.”
He looked at me for a second, gears turning behind his eyes, and I would’ve given anything to know what was going through his head. But he didn’t question it, just kept eating and swinging his feet like the world was made of safe truths and simple answers, and it only made it worse.
A minute passed in silence, and I finally swallowed down that goddamn piece of broccoli, before he spoke again.
“Is Sienna somebody’s mom?”
My hand froze halfway to my mouth, loaded with another stem of broccoli. “What?”
Zach met my gaze again, all wide-eyed and curious. “A mom. Is she one? Like to another kid?”
I blinked at him. “No,” I said, careful not to let the word sound too tight. “She’s not.”
He nodded to himself, his brows furrowing a little. “Okay.”
He paused. I took the bite, watching him like a hawk.
“I wish she could be mine.”
The air in my lungs punched out of me all at once, something wild and broken cracking in my chest. He wasn’t just hitting on the anger I had for myself over the Sienna situation — this was years of knowing that at some point, he was going to put pieces together. Years of knowing he’d ask properly at some point. Years of knowing I couldn’t give him what he would inevitably want, and now he wanted it, and he wanted it to beher.
He shoveled another spoonful of macaroni into his mouth, his gaze locked on it as he moved the little dinosaurs around in his bowl, utterly unaware of the landmine he’d just stepped on.
I pushed up from my seat as calmly as I could muster, doing everything in my goddamn power not to make it look like I was angry or upset or effected in the slightest, and took the few steps from the kitchen table to the fridge. I pulled open the door, staring into it, not looking for anything in particular but just needing to feel the rush of cool air on my face, needing the door in the way to cover Zach’s view of my face while I tried to calm myself down from that one fucking sentence.
I’d spent the better part of my adult life avoidingfamily.I knew what one looked like when it rotted from the inside, knew what it meant when love came with price tags or bloodlines or being born in the wrong order or expectations that choked you until you either became exactly what they wanted or dissolved trying.
And now my kid was casually mentioning his want for one. For something more. For someone else as well as me and Margot.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
It took me too long to school my face back into softness, but I sat with him again regardless, my fingers digging into my thigh beneath the table.
“Zach,” I said carefully, saying my words twice in my head before I let them out. “Sienna’s really great. But being someone’s mom isn’t just about being fun or nice or teaching you how to float on your back. It’s a lot bigger than that.”
