Tonight was a Level Three gig. Level One was standard: pizza, Disney+, kids in bed by nine, mindless scrolling on her own cracked phone. Level Two was the sweet spot: kids asleep early, access to the good snacks (the dark-chocolate-covered pretzels hidden behind the oat milk), and a movie she’d been dying to see. Level Three, however, was rare. Level Three was magic.
The babysitter lifestyle wasn’t about the stuff. It was about the silence. The clean, borrowed silence of a house where someone else paid the mortgage, and your only job was to keep a small, granola-bar-eating human alive. fucking the babysitter
Leo thought about this. “Can I have a granola bar?” Tonight was a Level Three gig
Back in the living room, she kicked a throw pillow onto the floor and lay down like a Roman empress. The movie played. She ate a handful of the dark-chocolate pretzels. Then another. Level Three, however, was rare
Tomorrow, she had a shift at the campus coffee shop. But Friday? Friday, the Millers were going out of town. And they had a hot tub.