The Peanut Butter Babysitter
Copyright© 2004 by MarkStory
Chapter 1
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 1 - Jim and Aimee have a chance meeting over a jar of peanut butter. In the beginning, he's a married father, she's a college student. That chance meeting in a grocery store, and the coincidence that follows, will change their lives (and others' lives)! I brought this story back to life in late 2025, more than 20 years after I first started writing it.
Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Consensual Romantic Lesbian Heterosexual Fiction Cheating Polygamy/Polyamory Masturbation Oral Sex Babysitter Slow
“Come on kids, dad’s got a headache,” I said, good-naturedly. The kids were behaving decently in a public place, for once, and my headache was from the workday, not them.
“We are so close to done,” I said, steering the cart like it was a tired boat and we were all taking on water. Ethan — now four and fully feral after preschool — was bouncing in the main basket. Jake, two and a half, was in the seat, chewing on a box of granola bars like a bear breaking into a campsite.
It was five-thirty on a Thursday, fluorescent lights buzzing like they also wanted to go home. I had a headache from back-to-back Zoom meetings and exactly zero parenting reserves left.
I checked the shared grocery list on my phone. Peanut butter.
“Daddy, peanut butter!” Ethan announced, as if reading my mind, or reading the list I wasn’t hiding very well.
“I know, bud,” I muttered, turning down the aisle.
I leaned over to the shelf at the same moment another head did — then thunk. Forehead to forehead.
“Ah — sorry,” I said, rubbing the spot.
“No, no, my fault,” a woman’s voice answered. When I looked up, she was already looking at me, and something in my brain misfired for a second.
She was young — probably close to 15 years under my own 35. She wasn’t dressed up — leggings, oversized green hoodie, hair still damp like she’d showered and then realized she was out of groceries. A coffee cup balanced in the crook of her elbow. She had a few freckles across her nose and cheeks, like constellations you had to be close to see.
She smiled — caught, like she knew we’d both done a little too much eye contact to pretend otherwise. I smiled back, throat suddenly dry.
Jake dropped the granola bars. Ethan announced, “I bounce HIGHER than the peanut butter,” which was true, if unhelpful.
I stepped back so she could take a jar. She reached for one ... then another ... and another.
As she placed four ... then five ... then eight jars into her cart, I couldn’t resist commenting. “Guess you really like peanut butter, huh?”
“Well, the protein, you know, um,” she said. Her face blushing and pointed at the floor, she wheeled her cart down the aisle and disappeared around the corner.
I watched her go — but not in that old, hungry way I might have before kids and exhaustion sanded my edges down. More like: whoever she is, she’s living in her own story, and I suddenly want a chapter.
I chuckled softly to myself, shaking my head, and grabbed a jar of the forgotten peanut butter.
I moved down the next couple of aisles, picking up the items on Beth’s ever-so-organized list. The cart got fuller and fuller, the boys crankier and crankier, as I moved through the list. “Did you guys take naps at school today?” I asked, pushing them around the corner to the cookies and crackers aisle.
“No, Daddy. I wasn’t sleepy at naptime,” Ethan answered me. Jake was still chewing on a package of something and ignored me.
I moved down the aisle, looking for the box of “low-fat Cheez-Its” that Beth had on the list. Finding them and dropping them in the cart, I pushed the boys down the aisle. It was here that I made the mistake of pushing them past the rows and rows of packaged cookies. The begging started immediately.
“Daddy we want cookies.”
“Cookies cookies cookies.”
I started to explain things to them, calmly and rationally. “I can only get what your mom put on the list,” I said, waiting for the carts in front of me to move so I could get out of this aisle from hell.
The boys refused to be mollified. “Cookies NOW” became their battle cry, and my headache intensified.
Just then, my mystery girl appeared. She grabbed Chewy Chips Ahoy at the exact moment my kids spotted them.
“Cookies!” the boys shouted, shaking the cart like a cage.
She glanced over, eyes warm, then dropped a pack into our cart with casual precision.
I mouthed: “You’re trouble.”
She mouthed back: “You have no idea.”
“Daddy, who is that lady?” Ethan asked me.
“I don’t know, Eth,” I replied. “But she was very nice to give those cookies to you, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” he replied enthusiastically.
We met up with the nice lady several more times, and I proceeded to flirt with her a little. I couldn’t resist getting a flash of those eyes, and I made eye contact with her every chance I got. She held back a bit, probably figuring that a man with two kids is not the best target for a grocery-store pickup.
We got to the frozen foods section, and I was still thinking of her. As I opened the freezer case to pull out a package of mixed veggies, I heard Ethan clapping behind me.
“Yay!” he said, and I turned around to see a package of chocolate Fudgesicles on his lap. My new friend was across the aisle, innocently looking the other way. When she turned back towards us, I waggled my finger at her.
“So that’s how you want to play, huh? Let’s have some fun, boys!”
I pushed the cart over to her side of the aisle and grabbed the first decadent item my eye fell upon, a box of strawberry popsicles. I dropped it into her cart, on top of several jars of peanut butter.
Not to be outdone, she raced to the other side and grabbed a package of corn dogs, throwing them into my cart. I laughed, thinking of Beth’s reaction.
We moved down the aisle in unison, dropping items into each other’s carts. The kids squealed with glee as microwave pizzas fell into ours, tiramisu into hers.
The game went on like this. Strawberry cheesecake into ours, whipped cream into hers, on and on until we reached the end of the frozen aisle.
At the registers, I watched, bemused, as the cashier rang up junk food and snacks that weren’t anywhere near Beth’s shopping list. I was certain a lot of these items had never been on any list Beth had made.
“Mommy isn’t going to like all this. Oh no, mommy is gonna yell at daddy,” Ethan said, loud enough for the entire store to hear.
I glanced up, and my mysterious stranger was looking at me again. She looked back at me over the breath mints and tabloids, something unreadable in her expression.
“She’s gonna kill me,” I mouthed, indicating the snack foods moving down the conveyor with a toss of my head.
“Sorry,” my new friend mouthed back, a wave of sadness flashing over her face.
She finished her transaction before we did, and I watched as she wheeled her cart out of the store, and out of my life. Or so I assumed.
“Come on boys. Let’s get you home.”
Beth was in the kitchen when we got home, still in her scrubs, hair pulled back in a tired knot. She looked at the grocery bags, then at me, then at the boys — already tearing into the Chips Ahoy like raccoons who had won a legal battle for the porch.
“Jim,” she said, not angry. Just ... thin. “This wasn’t the list.”
I started unloading in silence, lining up items on the counter that absolutely had not existed on the list this morning. Fudgesicles. Corn dogs. Whipped cream. Microwave pizzas with cartoon characters on the box.
“I know,” I said. “I lost track of things.”
Beth leaned her hands on the counter, breathing slowly through her nose the way she did when she was choosing not to snap. “It’s not about the food. It’s just — when we talked about splitting this, I thought we meant splitting it. Not me planning and you improvising.”
“I wasn’t improvising,” I said too fast, and the moment the words left my mouth, I heard how childish they sounded. I dragged a palm across my forehead. “Okay. I was improvising.”
The boys thundered down the hall toward the living room. Their laughter echoed back to us — wild, sugar-scented, oblivious.
Beth kept putting items away. “I feel like I’m dropping balls everywhere,” she said quietly, and there was something in her voice I hadn’t heard in a long time: not blame — fear.
“You’re not,” I said. “You’re carrying all of this, and I know it.”
She didn’t look up. “Sometimes it feels like I’m doing it all alone.”
She closed the pantry door with a soft thud. “When I went back to work, we said we’d do this together. I can’t clean teeth all day and run this place by myself at night. I need a partner, not...” She hesitated, eyes flicking toward the pile of snack boxes, “ ... not someone who gets to opt out when he’s tired.”
There wasn’t anger in her voice. That almost made it worse.
“I’m trying,” I said, and I meant it, even if I knew it hadn’t been enough.
Beth closed the fridge, resting one hand on the handle. “Jim, I need us both here. Not just bodies in a house. I need --” She stopped, shook her head. “Never mind. I’m tired.”
I opened my mouth to say something — anything — but she was already moving toward the hallway.
“Can you feed them?” she asked, almost gentle.
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
She nodded and disappeared into the bathroom, door closing with a soft click that somehow felt louder than it should have.
Beth closed the bathroom door and stood there a moment, her palm still resting on the knob as if she might change her mind and walk back out. She didn’t. The mirror over the sink showed a face she recognized only in pieces — eyes a little older, mouth a little harder, a thin smear of toothpaste on her scrub top from a patient who’d tried to talk while she worked.
She pressed both hands to the counter and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
She wasn’t angry about the groceries. Not really. It was just food. Corn dogs and sugar and a husband who had once known how to look at her like she was something sweet. Maybe that was what stung — how easy it was now for both of them to reach for the wrong things.
She turned on the faucet, not because she needed the water, but because the sound kept her from hearing herself too clearly.
She used to want things. She remembered that much. Before the boys, before the routines that felt like duty masquerading as love, before she’d stopped asking herself what desire was supposed to feel like. There had been a girl once. A warm laugh, a thumb tracing her jaw, the unexpected relief of being seen — not as a wife or a mother or a reliable person, but as a body that could want and be wanted.
That part of her was still in here somewhere, she knew. She just didn’t know how to name it without breaking something she wasn’t sure she was ready to lose.
Beth closed her eyes. For a moment she pictured Jim in that grocery store aisle, overwhelmed and trying his best with two raucous kids, and she felt a flicker of something soft. Then another feeling layered underneath it — a quieter, lonelier note. The kind that made her wonder whether the distance between them was a temporary exhaustion or a map they were both following without realizing it.
“I’m tired,” she whispered, and it meant more than she wished it did.
When she opened her eyes again, she smoothed her hair, wiped the toothpaste from her shirt, and let the running water cover whatever truth she wasn’t ready to say — not yet.
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