Chapter 1

Let me start by saying that the title of this story is misleading. My babysitter didn’t seduce me. Not intentionally, anyway. That will be explained as the details of what happened are laid out. But I was seduced by this woman. That’s a simple thing to say, but it was a very complicated set of conditions that led to it. I didn’t intend for any seduction to take place, either by my intent or hers. What it all amounts to is that we can’t choose who we are attracted to. That just happens and we really have no control over it.

That’s what this story is actually about.

Let me start like many of these kinds of stories begin. Let me describe myself and some other people in the story.

First me. I’m Bob Wellington and I’m nothing special. I was twenty-eight when all this started, and hadn’t done much in the way of working out or exercising since I was eighteen. I’m five-nine, weigh a smidgen over 200 pounds, and have the beginnings of a little pooch where my six pack should be. My hair is brown and is a bit shaggy, since I only get a haircut every couple of months or so. I own my own business and only rarely meet my clients, so a traditional “business-like” appearance isn’t necessary. I like comfortable clothing and have never been a fashionista. I wear glasses, to correct mild myopia. Basically, if I’m in a crowd, most people wouldn’t give me a second glance.

My wife is Melody Wellington. She’s two years older than me and we met at college. She’s also an inch taller than me and her personality is that of a mover and shaker. Or at least she wants to be a mover and shaker. Why she actually chose me is a mystery, because she’s a good looking woman who was popular with all the guys at college. She was a mover and shaker there, too, active in lots of clubs and involved in student activism concerning a number of issues, both on and off campus. She’s the kind of person who, back during the Vietnam war period, would have gone to demonstrations and carried anti-war signs and all that. I wouldn’t have said it then, but now I understand that she dominated our relationship. We went where she wanted to go and did what she wanted to do. Our marriage was the same way, with one exception. She didn’t want children, but got pregnant anyway, by accident. The pill is only 90-something percent effective and she was in the 10 or so percent who it doesn’t work for. Part of that might have been because her sex drive was over the moon. When she decided I was her boyfriend, she was “seeing” three other guys and all of them were fucking her. That stopped when she decided we were “serious” and suddenly, I had to take the place of three guys in her bed. Not that I complained. I got to have hot sex at least twice a day. I think I was a little dazed because there I was, with this fabulous, hot woman, who wanted me over all other males.

That lasted until she had our child, a boy we named Jordan, named after my paternal grandfather. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The other important person in all this was (at that time) a college sophomore named Erica Jardeen. I’ll provide more information on her at a more logical point, when she came into our lives, but she needs to be identified now.

Which brings us to the point of explaining why she did work for us. We hired her to be our babysitter. It wasn’t in the traditional kind of way, where the babysitter watches the child while the parents go do something together. In this case, it was because my wife decided to go back to work two months after she gave birth, and I work at home, which meant we needed someone to take care of Jordie while she and I were both working. I suppose they call that “child care” nowadays, instead of “babysitting”, but in my mind, she was our babysitter.

Let me start by going back to Melody’s decision to go back to work so soon after giving birth. She’s a paralegal for one of the high profile law firms in a major Missouri city, which we live half an hour north of. Which city isn’t important, but the population is over 120,000. That puts in context what “high profile” means in terms of a law firm. They weren’t ambulance chasers. Though, come to think of it, they did have an arm of the company that advertised on TV constantly how much they would help you if you were in an accident. Melody, though, worked for one of the partners. She was closed-mouth about her work, saying it was confidential.

I objected, of course, when she said she wanted to go back to work. Jordie was an infant and still needed a ton of care. I was fully aware of that. Quite often I was the one who got up in the middle of the night to give him a bottle. Melody didn’t want to breast feed, so Jordie got started in life on formula. I changed his diapers and bathed him and held him and all that. Melody did, too. I’m not knocking her, but she wasn’t nearly as interested in her infant son as I was.

I think, now, that she had post-partum depression. I didn’t recognize it then and I’m not any sort of expert in the field. In fact, I think she had pre-partum depression, if there is such a thing. She didn’t want to have the baby in the first place, and she was miserable throughout her pregnancy. She never mentioned abortion, but I’m sure that’s because her parents were staunch Catholics. They’d have had a hissy fit if they’d even known she was on birth control pills, but she did not want children. She wanted to focus on her career. As I look back on it, I think Melody saw those 11 months as an aberration in her otherwise perfectly planned life, a necessary but temporary detour on the path to her master plan. As soon as she could, she got back to her plan, which didn’t really include taking care of a baby.

This is not to say she neglected Jordie when she was home. Not at all. She helped take care of him. She just wasn’t... invested ... in his progress, if you know what I mean. Taking care of him, to Melody, was more like a chore that had to be done, whether you wanted to or not. Like vacuuming the carpet. Or dusting the blinds. She liked him. That was clear. She smiled at him and talked to him. But he wasn’t the center of her life, like you see quite often with a new mother. She didn’t display any of the “normal” symptoms of post-partum depression, but I think, now, that’s what led to the decisions she made.

When she announced she was going back to work (not that she wanted to go back to work - she was going back to work) I said I couldn’t take care of Jordie and do my own work at the same time.

“So we’ll hire somebody to step in while I’m at work,” she said.

“You mean a nanny?” I said, because that’s what I thought she meant.

“Not a nanny,” she said. “A babysitter.”

“That’s an almost full time job,” I said. “I mean if you’re working full time, then I’ll need somebody on a mostly full time basis. I mean I still have to do my job, too ... you know?”

What I do is debug computer code for a variety of programs that are written by somebody else. Anyone who’s in the business knows that the author of code knows what should be there, and so they sometimes miss what actually is there. A second set of independent eyes can catch issues that the author misses. I’m told it’s similar to what editors do for authors of books. Big companies have their own full-time IT people to do this kind of thing, but smaller companies can’t afford that. That’s where I come in.

This is not necessarily high-paying work. My wife made more than I did, usually, though my reputation in the industry was getting better and my work load was slowly climbing. Anyway, I needed to be able to concentrate on what I was doing, without the frequent interruptions a baby causes.

“We make enough to do that,” she said. “I need to get back to work before they decide to hire somebody else to take my place.”

And that was that. Melody had made (another) decision about how our marriage was going to work.

We put an ad in the paper, and I got calls from half a dozen women, but when I explained what we wanted they lost interest. When I checked into putting Jordie in a regular day care situation, it was too expensive. That situation would cost almost all of what I was currently making.

It was the comment of one person who called that led me to Erica.

“What you need is a college girl to come in and help you,” she said.

“College kids are going to classes during the day,” I observed.

“Not necessarily,” said the woman. “What with Covid and all, a lot of that is being done online. Check into it. For what you can offer, that’s probably what you’re going to have to do.”

So I made some calls and, long story short, ended up putting up notices on bulletin boards in the dorms.

To her credit, Melody didn’t just abandon me during this process. She only went back to work on half days, at first. But by the time Erica responded to my ad, my wife was chomping at the bit for me to hire somebody. So, basically, I took the first person who said she was willing to give it a try.

So, this is the logical time to provide some information about Erica that might be helpful. She was nineteen and in her second year of college. She came from a small town in southwest Missouri, where her father worked at the local lumber yard and her mother was the minister’s secretary at the Presbyterian church in town. She got to go to college because she received seven or eight small scholarships from organizations like the Lions Club, a ladies’ group at church, the lumber yard where her dad worked, and a bunch of others that she researched and applied for when she was a senior in high school. Almost all of them were based on her having a 3.0 GPA or better and she took that seriously. She wanted to borrow as little money as possible to get her degree. She had a part time job at the campus library when I met her and not much in the way of a social life, though I only learned that after she’d worked for us for quite a while.

She had not yet declared a major, and was taking core courses. It turned out a lot of them were online, or she had the option to do them online. Covid had upset the traditional college apple cart and what was going on was very fluid. The point is that, on most days, she could spend from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon at my house. She might be doing some of her own work on her laptop, but what I needed her to do fit in with that. Jordie needed attention about every 45 minutes or so and she could carry him around between times, or keep an eye on him while he was in the wind-up swing we had and all that kind of thing. I heard him cry, but I didn’t have to jump up and do something about it. And, with my office door closed, even his crying didn’t really distract me too much.

My initial reaction to Erica was somewhat muddled. I thought of her as a “girl” but recognized she looked and acted like a woman. She stood at about 5’ 8” and probably weighed 125 pounds, though I never asked her about that. She was slim. I’ll admit up front that I looked her over when I first met her. She didn’t have much up top, though her hips were noticeable. I suppose if you were an ass man, she might have appealed to you. She wasn’t pretty in a classic sense. What I mean is she looked very normal. She wore glasses, like me, and pushed them up with her forefinger, like I do. She was soft-spoken but didn’t seem shy. And when she met Jordie, her behavior and motions made it clear she’d been around babies before. I would learn that she’d done a lot of what I perceive as traditional babysitting when she was in high school.

What sealed the deal, though, was that Jordie took to her immediately. What I mean is that he was content to be held by her. He even smiled, which was something he had only been doing for a week or two.

“You’re a handsome little man,” she cooed at him. That’s when he smiled.

I got into the specifics of what I’d need her to do and she nodded all the way through it.

“I can do online classes while I take care of him, and do my homework at the library in the evenings,” she said.

Then I got to the salary.

“Can I eat while I’m here?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, somewhat taken aback.

“I didn’t get the meal plan at school,” she said. “If I can get a couple of meals here, it would save me a lot. What you’d pay me would be my spending money, and I can keep working at the Library in the evenings.”

“Meals is no problem,” I said. “You could do breakfast and lunch here, no problem.”

“Then let’s give it a try,” she said.

And, just like that, we had a full-time babysitter.

Initially, I didn’t see a lot of Erica when she first started working for us. I usually have a bowl of cereal in the morning because it’s quick and easy. So I’d usually already eaten by the time Erica arrived to start her duties. There was a little chit chat between us. She didn’t talk to Melody much because she was usually in the process of leaving for work when Erica got there. You’d think - or at least I would have thought back then, if I’d been paying attention - that Jordie’s mother would give the babysitter instructions about his care, but that really didn’t happen much. Melody’s disinterest in her baby wasn’t really evident, at that point, if you understand my meaning.

And, to be honest, Erica didn’t need a lot of instruction. She knew what to do and when to do it. After the first two or three days, it got to the point where I closed my door and didn’t worry about either Jordie or his care-giver. I know that sounds like I was disinterested, too, but it wasn’t that way. It was just obvious that Jordie was in good hands with Erica. And I was right there, in my office, if any issues came up.

I probably got to know our babysitter at lunch. I knew it was important not to get tunnel vision when I did my work and that I should get up and move around, every so often. I saw Erica when I went to get coffee, or a soft drink, and we might exchange a few words, but lunch was a different situation. I spent a good hour eating lunch and I spent those hours with Erica as we ate together.

Before Erica got there I ate out of cans a lot. Melody wasn’t much of a cook and neither was I. If it couldn’t be prepared in a microwave, we just didn’t go to the effort. Erica, on the other hand, liked to cook and prepare good meals. She asked if she could do that and I rather absent-mindedly told her to feel free. When I came out of my office on the third day, to find meatloaf, baked potatoes, and carrots waiting, I was a little stunned.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said, staring at the repast in front of me.

“It didn’t take much,” she said. “I put it in before Geometry and by the time I was ready for my American History class it was done. I hope it didn’t get cold waiting for you.”

“It looks and smells delicious,” I said, as my mouth started watering.

“Eat up,” she said. “I had a plate already. It’s time for me to feed Jordie.”

She brought a happy-looking baby boy to the table and sat him on her lap while she gave him his bottle. He fussed a little bit, clamping his lips closed and turning his head. At one point she said, “You shouldn’t always need...” She stopped and flushed. “Never mind,” she said, to the room in general. “Come on, Sweetie,” she begged and about that time he latched on to the nipple and then sucked greedily, in big gulps, gasping for air occasionally. “Good boy,” she cooed.

I paid that little scenario no particular attention at that time, but I would think back on it later.

I asked her about her classes, and we made a little small talk, but I was more interested in eating. It’s sad to say, but a simple meal of meatloaf, potatoes, and carrots was a real feast for me.

It was probably halfway into our second week before the initial shyness of two strangers meeting and spending a little time together gave way to a more relaxed relationship. She talked a lot about things Jordie was doing.

“I’m thinking about declaring a major in early childhood development,” she said, one day.

“Really?” She had made tuna casserole that day and I was pigging out on it. “What made you think about that?”

“Jordie, actually,” she said.

I stopped eating.

“Why? Is something wrong? Is he not developing right?”

“No,” she said, laughing in a way that made me calm down immediately. “It’s just fascinating seeing him develop. I’ve done some online research and there’s a ton of information about milestones in a child’s life. He seems to be right on track. He acts a lot like a little girl I sat for when I was in high school. I didn’t think about it then, but now that I can compare him to what I remember about her ... it’s just interesting. And I love kids, and taking care of them. So why not make a career out of it?”

“If your interest lies in that direction, you should go for it,” I said.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said. She was burping Jordie, and the way her hand landed on his back with a solid thump seemed kind of strong to me. He let out a big belch and she lightened up. It was one of the first times I actually paid close attention to what she was doing.

“Sure,” I said, distracted by my thoughts.

“Your wife doesn’t seem to worry about how I take care of Jordie,” she said.

There was a long pause before I spoke.

“That’s not a question,” I said.

Her cheeks got pink. She pushed her glasses up on her nose.

“What I mean is, I’m used to moms being kind of fussy about things. I guess I’ve never met a mom who didn’t give me lots of guidance about taking care of her baby.”

“I don’t give you lots of guidance, either,” I pointed out.

“I know that,” said Erica, “but you pay attention whenever I see you. And you help out.” She was referring to those times when she did have to go off to a brick and mortar classroom during the week. “When your wife gets home she never goes right to see him. I guess I’ve just never met a mom like that. Most of the mothers I’ve worked for practically inspect their baby after I’ve been taking care of it.”

And that, my friends, was the first time I actually thought about the relationship my wife had with our child. It would be almost two more months before I started thinking about post-partum depression, but that conversation was the seed that germinated into my later ... concern.

“She trusts you,” I said. “I do, too. She doesn’t get to see you with Jordie, but I tell her how well the two of you get along.”

“Okay,” she said. “I was a little worried that she didn’t like me.”

“Melody isn’t a very social person,” I said. “In her work everything is required to be very professional, and gregarious behavior isn’t encouraged, I guess.”

“Well, I know she’s a good mom,” said Erica, wiping up some burp mess Jordie had produced.

“Oh?” I said.

She looked at me blankly.

“Oh what?” she said.

“You said my wife is a good mom. I wondered why you’d say that,” I said.

She blushed a lot this time and, for the first time, I realized she had a spray of freckles across her nose, from cheek to cheek.

“I was thinking ... I shouldn’t say it,” she said, clearly flustered.

“Shouldn’t say what?” I asked. I put my fork down. “Is anything wrong?”

“No!” she said. “I just don’t want to be rude.”

“Rude?” I said. “I’m confused. What does being rude have to do with saying my wife is a good mother?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Sometimes I let my mouth run when I shouldn’t.”

This turned out to be a pivotal point in my relationship with our babysitter. That relationship had become relaxed, familiar in a way that is often associated with people who are friends, without having actually declared they were friends to anyone, or even each other.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re kind of part of this family now. I don’t want you to feel like there’s anything you can’t talk about, especially when it comes to Jordie.”

“Well, it’s going to sound discourteous, but I don’t mean it to be that way,” she said.

“Spit it out,” I said. “I can take it.”

“It’s not about you,” she said. “It’s just that every morning, when I get here, I kind of ... well ... I sort of inspect Jordie.”

“Inspect?”

“Yeah. Look him over. Make sure nothing had changed.”

“What could change?” I had a sudden thought. “Do you worry that we abuse him?”

“Of course not,” she actually snorted. “I guess I just do what I saw all those moms I babysat for in high school do. I look the baby over to make sure everything is okay.”

“Oh,” I said. I thought about that. I was still too “new” at scrutinizing Melody’s actions, as they pertained to Jordie, to think of anything that had been discussed as odd, or off. “I don’t see anything rude about that at all,” I said. “Actually, I’m kind of glad you take that kind of interest in him.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking more at ease. “I didn’t mean to offend anybody. It’s just that it seems like I do that kind of thing more than Melody does.” She blinked. “Of course I have no idea what she does when I leave.” Her shoulders slumped. “I feel like such an idiot.”

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Support the author's future writing by purchasing this book from Bookapy

The Babysitter Seduced me!

Lubrican

$3.25