The Peanut Butter Babysitter
Copyright© 2004 by MarkStory
Chapter 20: Epilogue
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 20: Epilogue - 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
13 years later...
The bleachers were warm from the sun, the metal humming faintly beneath Beth’s thighs as people shifted and settled. The high school football field stretched out in front of them--yard lines freshly painted, the goalposts bright against the blue June sky. A banner hung crookedly between the light poles — CONGRATULATIONS, CLASS OF 2041 — the year Jake had once written on his sneakers in Sharpie and insisted would “take forever to get here.”
And now here they were.
Beth sat between Aimee and Jim, their knees touching without anyone thinking about it, the three of them angled slightly inward as if the world might lean in at any moment and overhear something private. She could feel Aimee’s leg pressed along her own, warm and solid, familiar in a way that still occasionally surprised her even after all these years.
Jake wasn’t hard to spot down on the field--taller than most of the other graduates, or maybe just standing straighter now, gown flapping against his calves as he laughed with a cluster of friends. He kept tugging absently at the collar of his robe, the way he always did with shirts that felt too tight. Beth smiled despite herself.
Ethan, on the other hand, was nowhere in sight.
“He said he’d be back before they start lining them up,” Jim murmured, leaning forward to scan the crowd anyway.
Beth nodded. “I know. He ran into half his graduating class on the walk over.” Two years out, and still tethered to this place by invisible threads. She could picture him easily--hands in his pockets, head tilted, listening intently, already halfway inside someone else’s story.
Aimee leaned forward to tuck a strand of hair behind Beth’s ear, quick and casual, the kind of touch that looked like nothing to anyone watching. “He promised,” she said softly. “And he promised Jake he wouldn’t miss it.”
Beth reached down and squeezed Aimee’s knee once, grateful, steadying herself. These moments still had a way of sneaking up on her--pride, ache, wonder--all braided together.
“I told him he’d better make sure to say hello to Mimi and Papa and Grandma,” Beth said.
A few rows down and off to the side, Beth spotted her mother waving enthusiastically at someone she clearly did not recognize from this distance. They’d tried, briefly, to sit together, but the grandparents had claimed the lower bleachers early--less climbing, better shade, and a quicker escape when the ceremony stretched long.
Beth’s mom was seated beside Aimee’s parents, all three of them leaning together in the way people did when they’d learned, over time, how to share space easily. Her mom wore her good sunglasses and had brought a folding fan, the kind she kept in her purse “just in case.” Aimee’s mother was already fanning herself and laughing about it.
Beth watched as Aimee’s father reached over to steady Beth’s mother as she stood to get a better view of the field, their heads bent together in easy conversation. It hadn’t always looked like this. The first holidays had been cautious, then awkward, then merely tense. But time had done its quiet work. The boys had done the rest.
Aimee’s parents treated Ethan and Jake like grandchildren they never hesitated to claim. Beth had learned to stop bracing herself for questions that never came. They knew — of course they knew — but no one said it out loud.
Her father would have liked this day, she thought suddenly. The noise, the formality, the sense of arrival. The thought passed through her gently, without the sharp edge it once carried.
The principal stepped up to the microphone, tapping it once, and the low hum of conversation began to settle. Beth straightened, smoothing her skirt automatically.
Aimee’s hand slid into hers, fingers lacing without looking. Beth turned her head just enough to catch Aimee’s eyes--blue, bright, full of the same mixture of nerves and pride--and smiled. Aimee smiled back, soft and private.
Then Beth leaned the other way, brushing her shoulder against Jim’s, feeling the solid reassurance of him there. He glanced at her, caught the look, and nodded--just once.
The announcer cleared his throat.
Beth faced forward again, heart full, ready.
The school board president was speaking now. I knew because her name was printed in bold on the program, and because she had the particular cadence of someone determined to sound inspiring before lunch.
I listened for a sentence or two. Something about foundations and investments in the future. Then the words thinned out, turning into a steady background hum, and I let my mind wander.
Not surprisingly, it jumped back to Jake’s first day of kindergarten.
All five of us had walked to school together that morning. Jake had insisted on wearing his new sneakers--the ones that lit up with each step--and had spent the entire walk asking if his teacher would be able to see them from across the room.
Beth on one side, Aimee on the other, Jake swinging their hands as if testing the structural integrity of the adults in his life. Ethan had walked just ahead of us, backpack already slung over one shoulder, explaining patiently with second-grade logic that kindergarten wasn’t scary, it was just different. Aimee had listened like it was a briefing, nodding seriously, as if Ethan were the expert in charge.
At the crosswalk, a crossing guard had smiled at the sight of us. “Big day,” she’d said.
The sidewalks around the school had been alive with motion--kids darting, parents hovering, teachers in bright lanyards calling names and waving people forward. Jake had slowed as we reached the entrance, his grip tightening just slightly, the smallest hitch in his confidence.
Aimee had knelt in front of him without a word, eye level, adjusting his backpack straps even though they didn’t need adjusting. “You’ve got this,” she’d said quietly. “And if you don’t, that’s okay too. I’ll be here if you need me.”
He’d nodded, solemn, then leaned in and hugged her hard around the neck before doing the same to Beth, and then--almost as an afterthought--to me.
When he finally let go and followed his class inside, Ethan had watched him disappear and then looked up at Aimee. “You’ll walk us home, right?”
“Of course,” she’d said. “I always do.”
By the time the kids were into the elementary school rhythm, Aimee wasn’t just around the school anymore. She was part of it.
Typically, her name came up before ours did. At pickup, teachers nodded toward her without breaking stride. The office staff waved her through with a smile and a “Hey, Aimee,” already reaching for the attendance clipboard she usually needed. Kids detached themselves from parents mid-sentence when they spotted her, barreling over to tell her about loose teeth or spelling tests or something very important that had happened at recess.
Parents noticed too. They always do.
At first it was casual--compliments delivered sideways, like they hadn’t rehearsed them on the drive over. She’s great with the kids. You’re lucky to have her. I wish we had someone like that when ours were little. Conversations gathered around her without planning to, then drifted away again, leaving behind a kind of quiet approval.
One afternoon, during a fall barbecue thrown together by people who barely knew each other but shared a bus stop, a guy I recognized only from the PTA roster had tipped his beer toward us and said, “Those boys are lucky. You three run a tight ship.”
He’d said you three without hesitation. No pause. No correction.
That became the pattern. Invitations arrived without qualifiers. Birthday parties. End-of-year cookouts. No one asked where Aimee lived or why she was always there. They asked what days she worked, whether she liked coffee or tea, if she’d heard about the new principal yet. The logistics of us seemed less interesting than the results.
Not everyone was comfortable. That showed up in smaller ways.
A glance that lingered too long. A question framed oddly--So, is Aimee ... still helping out? Once, at a fundraiser dinner, I caught a whisper that wasn’t meant for me: it’s so weird that she’s ... living with her married employers. The words landed like a stone dropped into water--no splash, just ripples I could feel more than see.
Aimee heard them too. She always did.
She never confronted anyone. Never tried to correct the narrative or soften it. She let it sting, then kept showing up the same way she always had--steady, visible, impossible to dismiss. What she refused to do was shrink. That mattered. Probably more than she knew.
Watching her those years, I realized something else: the school didn’t just accept her. It relied on her. Kids sought her out when they were overwhelmed. Parents asked her advice in the parking lot, voices lowered, trust implicit. Teachers looped her in on conversations that had nothing to do with her job description because they knew she’d handle it well.
She’d come home some days exhausted, collapsing onto the couch with a sigh. Beth would rub her shoulders, I’d massage her feet, and she’d talk through the small, heavy things--meltdowns, bruised feelings, kids who needed more than the system could give them. I listened, filing it all away, thinking how strange it was that something so unplanned had become so essential.
Back then, I still thought of it as settling in. Like we were finding our footing.
Looking back, I can see it for what it was. We weren’t settling.
We were being seen.
And somewhere in the middle of all that--drop-offs and fundraisers and casual barbecues--it stopped feeling like something we were managing, and started feeling like something that simply was.
As I watched Jake and his friends laugh on the field, I thought back to the second grade afternoon when he broke his arm.
It wasn’t dramatic. No ambulance lights, no shouting. He fell off the monkey bars at recess, landed wrong, and stood up pale and furious, insisting he was fine until the teacher saw the angle of his wrist and made a decision for all of them.
The aide ran down the hallway to get Aimee. Everyone at the school knew Jake and Ethan were “hers.”
She rode with him to the hospital, sat beside him in the back seat of the nurse’s car, kept him talking about anything except the way his arm throbbed. She texted Beth and me updates in clipped, practical sentences--We’re at urgent care. They think it’s a clean break. He’s scared but okay.
Before Beth and I got there, she’d already done everything that mattered. Ice pack. Reassurance. Explanations pitched exactly right for an eight-year-old who wanted facts but not fear.
It was only when the nurse came in with a clipboard that things shifted.
Forms. Questions. Signatures.
Aimee answered the first few automatically, voice steady, posture relaxed. Name. Date of birth. Allergies. Then the nurse paused, pen hovering.
“And you are...?”
Aimee didn’t look at me when she answered. “His mom and dad are on the way. But I’m also his parent.”
It wasn’t a lie. Not in any way that mattered.
The nurse’s expression changed--not unkind, just careful. Professional. “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I just need a legal guardian to sign this.”
There it was. Clean. Impersonal. Final.
Aimee nodded once and stepped back without argument, setting the clipboard down until Beth and I got there. She handed the clipboard to Beth as if it weighed nothing at all. Jake didn’t notice. He was busy asking whether the cast would come in blue.
I signed where they told me to. Beth did too. The doctor came in, explained the break, cracked a joke, set the arm. Everything proceeded exactly as it should have.
Except it didn’t.
Later, after Jake was settled and arguing cheerfully with the nurse about cartoon channels, Aimee stood near the window, staring out at the parking lot like she was memorizing it. She didn’t cry. She didn’t say anything about it at all.
That scared me more than if she had.
We didn’t talk about it that night. Or the next day. We focused on logistics--pain meds, follow-ups, how to keep an eight-year-old entertained with one arm immobilized. Life closed around the incident the way it always does.
But the shape of it stayed with me.
Within a week, Beth and I had met with a lawyer. Within a month, we’d redone everything--guardianship, medical proxies, wills. Pages and pages of language designed to translate what we already knew into something the world couldn’t misunderstand.
Aimee didn’t ask for any of it. She sat with us at the kitchen table, reading carefully, asking smart questions, signing when we slid the papers toward her. When it was done, she let out a breath I hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
We told ourselves we were being practical.
But the truth was simpler.
We never wanted her to have to step back like that again.
Not from a clipboard. Not from a question. Not from our child.
And if the law needed proof, we were more than willing to give it.
I realized much later that she’d kept Jake’s hospital bracelet--the little yellow band with his name printed crookedly on it. It lived in her jewelry box from that day forward, saved the same way she saved everything that mattered.
I let the memory loosen its grip and found my way back to the bleachers.
Down on the field, Jake was laughing again, shoulders loose, completely himself. I followed his line of sight back to the stands and caught Aimee watching him, her expression open in a way she rarely allowed in public--eyes bright, damp at the corners, her mouth tilted in that soft, unguarded smile she saved for the boys.
There was nothing tentative about it. Just love. Full and uncomplicated.
I was still looking at her when I realized Beth was too.
She wasn’t watching Jake. She was watching Aimee watch him, something quiet and settled in her face, the kind of look that came from years of knowing exactly what she was seeing--and choosing it, again and again.
I shifted, and Beth’s hand found mine without looking. We squeezed once, a small, familiar pressure that said everything we didn’t need to.
Aimee reached across Beth’s lap and set her hand on top of ours, the three of us connected for a breath in the middle of the noise and the sun and the crowd.
Then Beth inhaled, slow and steady, her gaze still on Aimee.
Beth let the breath finish and stayed where she was.
Aimee was still watching Jake, her attention fixed on him with the same steady intensity she’d brought to scraped knees and spelling lists and late-night worries. There was no difference in her expression now--no distinction between pride and love and recognition. Just the whole of it, shining through.
Beth had learned, over the years, that this was how Aimee loved. Fully. Without hedging.
The world liked tidy categories. Mothers and not-mothers. Parents and helpers. Beth had stopped trying to correct it long ago. Watching Aimee watch Jake--watching the way her face softened, the way her shoulders eased as if something essential had settled into place--Beth knew, with the same certainty she’d felt a thousand times before, that both boys were Aimee’s just as much as they were hers and Jim’s.
That knowledge had led them, inevitably, to conversations they hadn’t expected to have.
They’d talked about a child for Aimee. Carefully at first, then more openly. Jim had been willing. Beth had been willing. It wasn’t the idea that scared her--it was the math. Money. Space. Timing. The fact that nothing was guaranteed, that reversing a vasectomy wasn’t as simple as undoing a decision made years earlier for good reasons. The fact that love didn’t magically produce certainty.
Aimee had listened to all of it. Asked the right questions. Run the numbers. And still, she’d wavered.
Beth understood why. The world had opinions about women and children, especially women who loved children as much as Aimee did. Friends, colleagues, strangers--people who assumed there must be something missing, some inevitable future regret waiting patiently down the road. Aimee wondered about it too, late at night, her voice quiet in the dark. Not because she wanted something more--but because she worried about wanting it later.
Beth never tried to talk her out of that fear. She didn’t need to. Time did the work.
The spring the decision finally settled, both boys came home from school each carrying two construction-paper envelopes they were far too proud of to hide. Jake’s were lopsided and aggressively decorated; Ethan’s neat and carefully lettered, already aware that presentation mattered. Inside, in crayon and pencil and misspelled certainty, were Mother’s Day cards--one from each of them for Beth, of course.
And one from each addressed to Aimee.
They hadn’t asked first. No one had coached them.
Aimee cried then. Not quietly.
After that, there was nothing left to debate.
Those cards never disappeared. They followed her from desk to desk, office to office--pinned to corkboards, propped against books, slipped into frames that didn’t quite match the decor. Sometimes someone would ask about them, curious, confused.
Aimee always answered easily. “Those are from my boys.”
No apology. No explanation beyond that.
Later--years later, though the order of it blurred when Beth tried to pin it down--Aimee became the one they went to with certain questions.
The questions that came with pauses. With hovering in doorways. With sudden interest in helping with dishes or riding along on errands that didn’t need company.
Crushes, at first. Who liked whom. What it meant when someone texted back right away--or didn’t. Then later, questions edged with embarrassment and curiosity, voices dropped low, shoulders hunched in that particular teenage posture that suggested everything was both deeply important and mortifying.
They went to Aimee.
Beth noticed it not with jealousy, but with something closer to relief. Aimee listened without flinching, answered without oversharing, somehow managing to take every question seriously without making it heavy. She talked about bodies and feelings and consent and safety with the same steady clarity she brought to school meetings and scraped knees.
And when the boys started dating--real dates, carefully negotiated and endlessly discussed--it was Aimee they asked to drive.
Always Aimee.
Not because Beth or Jim were unkind or embarrassing, though both of them could be, if pressed. It was because Aimee understood the precise balance required: close enough to be safe, distant enough to pretend she wasn’t listening.
Beth remembered the first time Ethan asked, casually, as if it hadn’t been rehearsed. Can Aimee drive me and Shelly to the dance? The way he’d already known the answer.
From then on, Aimee was almost exclusively their date chauffeur, at least until Ethan started driving. She never made a show of it, barely teased them about it. She just grabbed her keys, called out a reminder about curfews and phones, and waited in the car while one or both boys checked their reflections in the mirror one last time.
Beth had watched from the window more than once, feeling a strange, quiet gratitude for the shape their family had taken--one where her sons had not one safe adult, or two, but three.
Somehow, it had worked. Worked so well.
And when it was necessary, Aimee handled discipline the same way she handled everything else: calmly, directly, without drama. The boys knew when she was serious, knew that a look from her meant they’d crossed a line worth noticing. Beth had watched them adjust to that authority naturally, the way kids did when it felt fair.
Now, years later, Beth watched Aimee blink back tears in the bleachers, watched Jake laugh with his friends as if the ground beneath him had always been this solid.
Beth reached out, resting her hand on Aimee’s knee for just a moment, a quiet affirmation in the middle of the noise.