Seducing the Babysitter

by Sally Cox

  Seducing the Babysitter

  by SALLY COX

  I checked my phone again for about the fifteenth time.

  “Forget it, Penny,” my friend Tara said, sitting next to me on the school bus. “He’s not going to call.”

  “He might,” I said, as I clicked the phone off. I slid it back into my jeans pocket.

  Tara shook her head sadly. “He won’t, babe, sorry, but he’s a douche.”

  “You did warn me,” I said.

  “Well, at least you didn’t put out.”

  I laughed. “Maybe if I had…”

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “He still wouldn’t have called, trust me, I’ve…been there.”

  I knew it. He’d told everyone he fucked her. But Tara didn’t usually like to talk about it. I don’t know why I had given him a chance, but he was charming and handsome. I told myself I wouldn’t have sex with him, that he would show he was interested in more than that—which is what he told me. But it looked like I was wrong. I was 18, just turned 18 a few days ago actually, and I was desperate to lose my virginity. Even to have a boyfriend.

  “I’m going to be alone forever,” I said, and tried to make a joke of it, but Tara didn’t laugh.

  “You’re not going to be,” she said. “You’re pretty. You just have…”

  “What?”

  Tara shrugged. She sighed. “Your standards are too high. There are a lot of great guys out there, if you’d give them a chance.”

  She was probably right. I wanted my first time to be with a really great guy, not just any guy. I could have lost my virginity a long time ago if all I cared about was just to lose it to someone. With no false modesty, I was more than pretty. Our little town didn’t have many opportunities, but I could have been a model. The population of the town was tiny, I think a little over 2,000 people, so there weren’t a lot of guys to choose from at our high school. I dreamed of getting out of there. We were in our last year, it was almost the end of the year, I was waiting to hear from colleges. But I didn’t want to still be a virgin when I went to college, I wanted some experience first.

  “Maybe I should lower my standards,” I said.

  “I didn’t say you should just fuck any old schlub,” she laughed. “But you want some kind of alpha male mountain man Navy Seal, Fabio type…and in this town, that just ain’t gonna happen!”

  “No, you’re right,” I said, and noticed that we were approaching the school. Luckily the bus was as always noisy and crowded, our conversation had been practically whispered in each other’s ears. Maybe we should have texted it, but I was always paranoid about putting personal stuff like that down in writing, even with my best friend. It was the same reason I had never kept a diary.

  The bus came to a stop outside the school.

  “Well,” Tara said, getting up, “here we go again, another day,” and sighed heavily.

  “Yeah, I said, “another day. Fuck I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  Later that day we had stopped at a coffee shop in the mall and were both nursing lattes. Tara had gone to the bathroom. I was people watching, not even really touching my drink, it was just a prop, really. I was scoping out all the guys that walked by, assessing them like the Terminator, finding ever single one of them wanting. Did I have too high an opinion of myself? Was I a narcissist? I hoped not, but maybe. I wondered if I was building this up too much, if I should have just had sex with some guy freshman year like Tara did and so many others had, got it over with.

  A college guy walked by, wearing his Junior College jacket, backwards baseball cap on, the swagger, he flashed a smile at me but I didn’t respond. “Smile, baby,” he said as he passed by. I raised an eyebrow and a dismissive laugh.

  Tara came back, a couple high school guys behind her checking her out, and I thought, gross. There were a couple middle aged guys in the place too, DILFS maybe—dads I’d like to fuck—dad bods and everything, but no, kind of creepy. Only one of them ever looked my way, and he definitely would have been down-to-fuck but no thanks.

  I sighed and started to drink my drink. Tara was done hers before I was. More people started to file in, people just off from work, but more guys from our school, too, and Tara said, “Maybe we should go before you start getting too depressed,” and again she said it like a joke but it seemed like maybe not a joke.

  “Good idea,” I said evenly, and chugged the rest of my now-lukewarm latte, the foam all gone, we chucked the cups in the garbage and left.

  Maybe I was being too picky—I felt like no one was good enough. I should just settle, not look for Mr. Right but Mr. Right Now. I said this to Tara, and she laughed. “I don’t know if that’s the way to look at it either, like just ‘fuck anyone’.”

  “Well, I didn’t quite mean that,” I said. We were outside. “Where are we going?”

  “My place?” Tara said.

  Tara’s place was down the street from me, and Tara, like me, both still in high school, still lived with our parents – but Tara at least had her own room. Despite having two sisters, she got that perk. I had one sister, but still had to share a room—there were only two, ours and our parent’s room.

  Tara’s room was tiny, though, and crammed with junk, but at least she had it to herself. It was always a total pig sty. It was in the basement, too, and fairly soundproof—she’d had many guys down there before and no one had heard a thing. Or at least they pretended they hadn’t. Her family was very religious, so I doubt her parents would have allowed it if they’d known. Rumor was she’d had a few girls down there before, too, and sometimes multiple people when her parents were out of town. Sometimes I wondered why we were friends when we were in many ways so unalike.

  She had her own bathroom, too, unlike her two sisters who had to share one, and her parents had an ensuite. On the back of her bedroom door there was a full-length mirror and Tara started to examine herself in it, checking her makeup, her outfit. She kicked off her shoes and took her socks off. Thrust her chest out a little to see if how her smallish breasts looked, then turned and, looking over her shoulder, thrust her butt out, and laughed at my expression.

  “You’re kind of egotistical, Tara,” I said.

  She laughed again. “Hey, I have to check myself out once in a while,” she said. “See how things are developing.”

  “Well, I don’t think your tits are going to get any bigger,” I said, but instantly regretted it. Mine were rather large, at least compared to hers, a C cup—big enough. She was only an A.

  She frowned. “Shut up,” she said, but wasn’t really angry. She was one of the most confidant, together people I knew. And we’d known each other so long.

  Before I could say much, we heard what sounded like incessant beeping outside. She threw open her curtains on her basement window and tried to see out, but couldn’t. Her window looked out on their own driveway and maybe at first she wondered if it was one of her parents’ cars, the car alarm gone off or something.

  “I wonder who that is,” she said, and closed the curtains again. “You want to get high?” she said, and pulled a joint out from her pocket.

  “You bitch,” I laughed. “You had that this whole time?”

  “I forgot about it,” she said. “Here, in the bathroom, we can turn the fan on.”

  “I look forward to when we can smoke dope without hiding it.”

  “In college, in a dorm? We’d still have to hide it,” she said.

  “I guess,” I said, “but we’d certainly be able to do it other places.”

  She got a lighter from under her mattress. “We might not go to the same college, though,” she said. “I might have to get a new best friend.”

  “And me,” I said, “but hopefully that won’t happen.”


  She grimaced. “Well, you’re a lot smarter than I am, I think I tanked my SATs.”

  “I doubt it. Anyway…” I trailed off, indicating the joint, then motioning theatrically toward the bathroom. “Shall we?”

  “You still hear that?”

  “Oh yeah, the honking.”

  “Let’s go see,” she said, and pocketed the joint and lighter.

  We went upstairs—no one else was home yet—and out into the driveway. Across the street was one of her neighbors, a fairly new one I think she said. I vaguely remembered the Sold sign outside a few months ago. Someone in a car was honking, honking, honking, yelling out the window. Finally her neighbor, tallish, dark-haired, came out the side door leading a boy of about four or five by the hand. The kid got in the back seat and the man buckled him in, then went to the driver’s window, which had now been raised, and knocked hard on it but she didn’t lower it again. He said a few things, clearly angry but not raising his voice—I guess because of the child. She could be seen shaking her head, then started to back out. Then, she was gone. He shook his head in disbelief, and you didn’t need to be able to read lips to see him calling her a bitch and a few other things.

  Tara, too, shook her head. “I can’t believe that bitch,” she said, and moved to go back inside.

  “Who is it? Ex-wife?”

  “Yeah. Total fucking bitch. The guy’s cute. If I was a bit older…”

  I could see he was attractive. About 6’2”, cute, dark hair, well-built, clearly he looked after himself.

  Tara noticed me noticing him. “He’s hot for sure,” she said with a smile. “You should see him with his shirt off. I saw him out there one day, washing his car, shirtless, shorts… Man, I had to go inside and rub one out.”

  “Rub one out?”

  “Masturbate.”

  “I know what that means, but…” I trailed off, realizing I was maybe about to confess too much.

  “Your method might differ from mine,” she said, laughing, and we went back inside. “By the way, you can’t stay that long today, I have a date tonight.”

  “Steve?” I said.

  “Harvey.”

  “Steve Harvey?” and I laughed a little too much at that.

  She slapped me on the arm. “I’d do Steve Harvey,” she said.

  “Of course you would,” I said.

  Tara flopped back on her bed. “We don’t need to use the fan, I think,” she said. “I forgot no one else is home anyway. The smell should be gone by then.”

  “Okay,” I said. I sat on the bed as she lit the joint. “Tell me about your neighbor.”

  “His name is Joe something, I think, he’s 30-ish, don’t really know too much. Works in computers.”

  “Oh.”

  “Divorced, like I said before, ex-wife’s a total bitch,” she took a super long drag and then passed it to me, holding the smoke in for as long as she could and then exhaling it through her nose.

  I took a much shorter drag, I didn’t like smoking the stuff, but I liked the high. The smoke burned my throat. “And?”

  She shrugged. “And what? I don’t know, he always seems really stressed, probably because of her. He needs to, uh, you know—unwind.”

  “Your kind of unwind, you mean,” I said with a smile.

  “Sure, yeah, I’d definitely do him.”

  “He’s old enough to be your dad.”

  She shrugged again. “So what? Although my dad’s older than that.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, taking the joint I handed back to her. She took a shorter drag this time, held it, exhaled, took another short one and passed it to me again. “Got any roach clips?”

  “No,” I said, taking a drag. “Sorry.”

  She grimaced. “I forgot all about that, I hate getting down to the end like that.”

  “We’ll have to just burn our fingers,” I said.

  “He likes the attention, you know,” she said.

  “Joe?”

  She grinned. “Yeah, Joe. You didn’t see him? He saw us looking, checking him out, he definitely had a swagger after that.”

  “I didn’t notice,” I said. I’d probably been too busy mentally undressing him.

  She grinned again. “Your pussy probably did. I bet you’re wet.”

  “Shut up,” I said, embarrassed, although she was right. “Don’t be so crude, you’re always so crude.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re such a prude,” she said.

  Inside his house, Joe took a beer from his fridge and cracked it open, sitting at the kitchen table, chugging it, downing the whole thing in seconds. He took another, opened it, but took his time with this one. When he finished it he threw both cans in the recycling bin by the door and went around the house picking up after his son, Paul. The house was obsessively clean, and Paul’s little room completely squared away. Joe figured he might have some mild OCD but it was mostly in check. Or else he just liked things neat.

  He didn’t know if it had been a good idea to go freelance. He was a computer programmer and had worked for major companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, but had hated having bosses and hated the rat race. He’d moved to this small place and gone independent, still programming for other people but working from home was great—at first.

  He’d started to feel very lonely. He hardly went out anymore, and while he didn’t miss his old commute he did miss having co-workers. He got his son every other weekend, and was also teaching classes at the local Junior College—maybe it was too much. He was feeling more and more stressed. And he hadn’t gotten laid in a while. He finished cleaning up and sank down on the couch with another beer and turned on the TV. He counted in his head how long it had been since he’d gotten laid. He didn’t like the number he came up with. “I’ve got to get out more,” he said, “and I’ve got to stop talking to myself.”

  The next day at school, Penny and Tara were in a classroom with a bunch of other kids who hadn’t yet finished their required community service to graduate. “I can’t believe you forgot, Pen,” Tara said, surprised to see her friend there. “I can see me, but you’re usually more on the ball.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened either.”

  Mrs. Brown, head of the program, stood at the front of room haranguing them. “Remember, school ends very soon and if you want to graduate, if you’re going to college or whatever you’re doing, you need to get your hours in.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know,” Tara said under her breath.

  I laughed behind my hand. “Shh,” I said, “you know the acoustics in the this place.”

  “As do I,” said Mrs. Brown, and the room had gone quiet.

  “Sorry,” Tara said, smiling, clearly not sorry.

  Mrs. Brown shook her head and continued. The hum returned to the room. “Try volunteering door-to-door,” she said, and waved a stack of forms in the air. “Get them to sign these, though, remember if this form doesn’t get signed it doesn’t count.” She put the papers down but kept talking. “Offer to do any chores for them, but it’s going to be hot the next few days, so hopefully you won’t get stuck mowing lawns or gardening, but if you do—well, that’s why you should have got this all done sooner rather than later.” She paused to take a sip from a bottle of water. She always had a bottle of water with her, and a lot of kids speculated it actually contained vodka.

  She started in again. “I can’t stress how important it is to get this done in the next two weeks, preferably the next week, the school board will not bend on this, you cannot graduate without your hours!”

  Luckily, I knew Tara wouldn’t get right on that, but I’d been slacking off lately, worried too much about the wrong things—like getting laid. I used to be that girl who always had her homework done, always on time, always toed the line, I needed to get back to that. We lived on the same street, at opposite ends, and I need to get our street done before she did—whoever got to it first would probably get all th
e chores down that needed doing. It was Friday. I took my stack of time sheets and started out that evening, door to door, and through the weekend the next week racked up most of my remaining hours—I had done some earlier in the year, I wasn’t as behind as Tara—mowing lawns, cleaning houses, weeding gardens, washing cars. Exhausted by the end of the week, I had one last house to try, or rather try again. The neighbor across from Tara, the single guy, the divorcé, the hot guy. I’d tried him first and several times after that, but nothing. I knew he worked from home, but maybe he didn’t answer the door during the day. Tara had also said he taught part time at the local junior college, so maybe he actually hadn’t been home.

  Joe was having a very bad day and a very bad week.

  Freelance was a very hard game to play, highly competitive, high stress. He wondered if he’d taken on too much by also teaching programming at the local college. It was Friday again, and it was supposed to be her weekend with Paul, but she was going away with her new boyfriend for the weekend and had foisted the boy on him. Basically just dropped him off at the door and peeled out. Told him her plans later in a text, ignoring his replies.

  He slammed the phone down. He’d struck out trying to get someone to babysit. He needed someone to watch Paul so he could get caught up on some stuff at the college over the weekend. But at such short notice, no service could help him—and he didn’t know any local girls who could do it. Not that he minded having Paul stay—normally he’d be delighted. He loved spending time with the boy, and would even like to have him live there full-time—and resolved then to, as soon as possible, reduce his workload enough to be able to do that, if he could. Maybe challenge for custody. But at least be available when something like this came up. He didn’t want the boy to think he wasn’t wanted.

  Almost panicking, he took a shower before getting out his rolodex to try the last of his contacts. Towel around his waist, of course there’s a knock at the door.

  My fist was poised to knock again when the door was suddenly wrenched open. Joe looked pissed. He also was dressed only in a towel. His semi-dry hair was tousled. His broad, hairy chest was bare. I stared for a minute, the realized he was talking to me.