Seduced By The Babysitter

Katie Webster is thirty-two, divorced, and trying very hard to remember how to be a woman someone might want.

There's a wrap dress on the bed. There's a first date waiting at an Italian place on Mill Street. There's an eight-year-old son downstairs in his dinosaur pyjamas who doesn't care that his mum is upstairs having a small crisis in front of the mirror. The babysitter her best friend lined up is a nineteen-year-old from across the road who Katie has never met, and Katie is far too distracted by her own thirty-something nerves to think twice about it.

Then Laura knocks on the door.

Blonde bob. Denim shorts in October. A cropped t-shirt with a peach on it. Pink socks with tiny strawberries. A laugh that fills the whole hallway and a way of looking at Katie that makes her forget what she was about to say. She's warm with Kyle within about ninety seconds. She's barefoot on the living room carpet within five minutes. And when she tells Katie she looks gorgeous, the word lands somewhere low and strange, somewhere Katie has spent her entire adult life pretending she doesn't have.

Katie goes on her date. It's fine. It's all fine.

She comes home to the sound of Laura laughing on the sofa and a feeling in her chest she doesn't have a name for yet.

Seduced By The Babysitter is a slow-burn, tender, deeply filthy story about a woman who spent eight years being told she had a low drive, three bad dates trying to prove otherwise, and the patient, wickedly clever nineteen-year-old who walks into her hallway one autumn evening and rearranges everything she thought she knew about herself. About coffee dates that last longer than they should. About a hand at the small of a back doing up a stuck zip. About the particular terror of realising, at thirty-two, that the flutter you've been chasing has been standing in your kitchen drying your plates the whole time.

It is a first-time story. It is an age-gap story. It is a late-bloomer story. It is, above all, a story about finally being seen by someone who knows exactly what they're looking at.

By the time Katie works out what Laura has been doing, Laura has already been waiting weeks for her to catch up.

A sapphic romance for grown-ups. Warm, slow, filthy, and very much worth the wait.