The Peanut Butter Babysitter
Copyright© 2004 by MarkStory
Chapter 4
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 4 - 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
In slow motion, the Patriots mug slipped from my hand. Coffee arced out of it, a dark, widening scatter across Beth’s clean tile floor.
I didn’t move. Couldn’t. All I could do was watch it fall and think one loud, useless thought:
How is she here?
Not confessing our sins — Beth was smiling, joking even, so it wasn’t that. But Aimee in our foyer, on Thanksgiving morning, in my house — it felt like the universe had decided to stop being subtle.
The mug shattered. Jake started wailing upstairs. The world snapped back into full speed.
“Jim, be more careful,” Beth said, already halfway to the kitchen for a towel.
“I’ll get Jake,” Aimee said, and before I could answer she was gone, climbing the stairs like she’d lived here her whole life.
I stared at the spot she’d just been in, heart beating too loud. Through the front window, I saw her red hatchback parked right behind Beth’s SUV. As if she belonged here. As if she hadn’t --
I cut the thought off before it finished.
Beth returned, towel in hand, dragging the trash bin behind her. “That mug could’ve broken your toe,” she said, crouching to pick up the larger pieces.
“Right. Yeah.” My voice sounded like someone else’s.
After a few seconds, I found the question.
“What is Aimee doing here?”
“Oh! You’ll love this,” Beth said, cheerful, oblivious. “I ran into her at Cricenti’s. Poor thing — she was buying a frozen turkey dinner. Her parents had to fly to California last minute. Some great-aunt fell and broke her hip, I guess.”
She shook her head, scooping shards into the bin.
“So she turned around and came back to campus. I couldn’t let her spend Thanksgiving alone. I invited her here. You don’t mind, do you?”
My mouth answered on its own.
“Of course not. She’s ... she’s like family.”
And then Aimee came back down the stairs, Jake on her hip, Ethan trailing behind her, chattering. Like she’d always been here. Like nothing had happened in a quiet hotel room in Portsmouth the day before yesterday.
Around 11:00, Beth and Aimee came out of the kitchen, each carrying a glass of wine. Flour on Beth’s arm, a smudge of something sweet on Aimee’s wrist. They looked like they’d been laughing.
“Well, Jim,” Beth said, lifting her glass, “we’ve earned this. Turkey’s in, potatoes peeled, pies are cooling, and if all goes well we eat at four.”
She clinked her glass gently against Aimee’s.
I raised an eyebrow. “Breaking out the wine before noon? Bold move, Robinson.”
Beth smirked. “It’s Thanksgiving. Time is a suggestion.”
I nodded toward Aimee’s glass. “And we’re upgrading the babysitter benefits package, I see.”
Aimee glanced at me — just a flick, quick and hot, gone before Beth looked back. We didn’t need a spoken language anymore; that glance said enough.
“She’s not working today,” Beth said, shrugging. “She’s a guest. And if the roads ice over later, I told her she can stay in the guest room instead of driving back to an empty campus.”
Aimee went very still beside her, and something fluttered painfully in my throat. I prayed Beth couldn’t hear it.
“Well, that’s ... generous,” I managed.
Before anyone could say more, Ethan stirred on the carpet, blinking up at us.
“Mommy, I’m cold,” he mumbled.
“That’s because you’re sleeping on the floor, goofball,” Beth said, scooping Jake up from the recliner. “Nap time for both of you.”
Aimee took a step forward. “Do you want help?”
Beth shook her head. “Nope. You’re off-duty today. Sit, relax, drink your wine.”
Aimee watched her go. When Beth’s footsteps reached the top of the stairs, Aimee set her glass down and said, under her breath:
“Are you freaking out? Because I’m freaking out.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “What happened with your aunt?”
“She’ll be fine,” Aimee said. “Just needs help after the surgery. My parents flew out west to take care of her.”
“Your parents called yesterday and told you that?”
Aimee’s cheeks flushed. “Not ... exactly.”
Silence stretched between us.
“When?” I whispered.
“Last weekend,” she said, voice small. “I knew before Portsmouth. I didn’t tell you because ... the timing was perfect. I didn’t want to ruin it.”
I stared at her. I wasn’t sure whether I was angry or just stunned.
“So after...” I swallowed hard, “ ... you drove straight back?”
“Not straight,” she said. “I sat in a Starbucks for a while. Just so we wouldn’t pass each other on the highway.”
I almost said her name, soft and dangerous, but I heard Beth coming down the stairs. I shifted on the couch, angled my body toward the television, and picked up my coffee like I’d never put it down.
Football pregame blared across the room.
Aimee folded her hands in her lap.
I kept my breathing steady.
And there we sat — like nothing had happened in Portsmouth the day before yesterday. Or yesterday morning.
That afternoon was awkward in a way that didn’t let me forget for a single second what I had done. I sat in the family room with the football pregame show flickering across the screen, pretending to care about offensive line matchups while my pulse refused to settle.
I tried not to look at her. I really did.
But Aimee was curled up on the loveseat across from me, legs folded beneath her, listening while Beth walked her through their plan to hit the Black Friday sales in Concord. She laughed at something Beth said — one of those quick, unselfconscious laughs — and it hit me like a photograph developing too slowly: a memory of her breathy, excited laughter against my neck in a hotel room I had no business being in.
I dragged my attention back to the TV. If I kept my eyes on the screen, maybe the world would stay ordinary.
But every so often, without meaning to, I glanced over. She wasn’t doing anything remarkable — just being herself. And somehow that was worse. Beauty was supposed to be harmless until you aimed it at someone who shouldn’t have it.
I sipped my coffee, willing my heartbeat to even out. I loved my family. I had not forgotten that. And yet I couldn’t pretend my world hadn’t shifted two days ago.
I felt like a man bracing for aftershocks, waiting for the next piece of his life to rattle loose.
The kitchen was warm, loud in the way a holiday kitchen should be — oven blasting heat, timer clicking down, kids thumping overhead, the faint hum of the game on TV.
Beth lifted the turkey baster, squeezed, watched juices spill over the bronzing skin. It smelled right. It looked like a holiday. She should have felt fully inside her life in that moment.
But something in the house was ... off. Not wrong, not yet. Just tilted, like a picture frame bumped but not straightened.
From the doorway, she could see the family room. Jim on the couch, shoulders too square. Aimee on the loveseat, talking with her hands, eyes bright. They weren’t sitting close — if anything, too far apart — but something passed between them. Not a look. Something quieter than that, and harder to name.
Beth swallowed. It was probably nothing. It had to be nothing. She liked Aimee — liked her steadiness, her patience with the boys, the way she took holiday loneliness in stride. It felt good to have another woman in the house. Somebody who didn’t treat her like just a mother or just a provider. Somebody who brought a new energy to the house, even if that energy was ... dangerous?
Still, she found herself stirring the gravy slower than necessary, listening for a note she couldn’t quite hear.
Maybe she was just tired. It had been a long fall. Work, kids, sleep that never seemed to go deep enough.
She turned off the burner and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, letting the warmth settle her.
“Dinner in an hour,” she called out.
She waited for the usual chorus — Jim’s distracted acknowledgment, Aimee’s cheerful reply, Ethan shouting something unrelated.
It came, and the house sounded normal again. Mostly.
Beth wiped her hands on a dish towel.
Sometimes you didn’t need proof to know a storm was forming. Sometimes the air told you first.
The kids woke up in better moods, soft-cheeked and hungry, and dinner really was excellent — Beth in her element, moving between oven and stovetop like she was orchestrating something larger than holiday food. Aimee helped pass dishes, praising the stuffing, the rolls, the way the turkey came out “perfectly, unfairly moist,” and I could see Beth take the compliments like sunlight.
The seating felt ... strategic. Or maybe I was imagining it. Beth centered the boys between them, one beside her, one beside Aimee, which left me across the table, the three people I cared about most forming their own constellation without me. They laughed about preschool art projects, about Aimee’s childhood fear of cranberry sauce, and I joined in where I could, hoping my voice didn’t sound like it belonged to a stranger.
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