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“Sounds terrifying.”
“It is,” she says, “and I’m very excited to be almost done with it. It’s the last summer class I’m taking, and then I have no more courses that have to do with math, thank the lord.”
“Not a fan of numbers?”
She shrugs. “Just prefer the people-y part of business, you know? I think a lot of people get a business degree because they want to know how to handle money, but I’m doing it more because I need to understand all the background stuff—licensing, contracts. The education stuff I have down, but there’s so much more to learn if I want to open my own business.”
My head tilts to the side. “I didn’t know you wanted to open your own business.”
“Yeah, I thought you might have seen something about it on my resume. I want to create my own daycare center.”
“Emily,” I say, my lips curving in both surprise and wonder. “That’s such a great idea.”
A smile stretches across her face. “Thanks. But I have a long road ahead of me to get there, so…” She holds up her laptop. “Just pushing myself wherever I can.”
I nod. “Well, I’m not surprised by that. August told me you’re the hardest worker he knows, and that you’ll let nothing stand in the way of your goals.”
She bobs her head, though her eyes stay downcast, and that’s when I know she has something to tell me that I’m not going to want to hear.
“Colton, I…” She pauses. Licks her lips and looks around the room before I watch her gather her courage to look me dead in the eye. “Your mom might have been out of bounds yesterday with what she said, but she wasn’t entirely wrong.”
My shoulders go tight, and a little voice inside of me says I can already see where this is going.
“I need this job. I need it because it’s a step for me to get to my goal, which is to start my own business one day. As much as I love my time with you…and I do, truly…I can’t let anything get in the way of where it is I want to get to.”
“And I’m in the way?”
“You’re not in the way, but you’re…” She sighs, rubbing her hand against her head. “It’s hard for me to explain.”
“Well, I’d like you to try.”
“I’ve spent my entire life watching my mother use men to get what she wants,” Emily says, her words coming out sharp and fast. “And I promised myself I would never be that person, swore I would always do everything above board, ethical, transparent. The waters you and I are wading in feel awfully murky.”
I start to feel antsy at the way she’s talking about this. About us.
“You make it sound like what we’re doing is wrong and it’s not.”
“Isn’t it though? You pay me. Yes, to watch your son, but how easy would it be for someone to say, ‘Well, he’s also paying you for sex.’”
“Do you really care what other people think?”
“Of course I do!” she says, her voice a shrill whisper. “Of course I care,” she says again. “I have lived in this town my entire life. It is filled with people who know my mother and my sister, and the last thing I want any of them to think is that I got a nanny job by sleeping with a widower.”
My eyes narrow at her.
“We both know that’s not what happened. Is that not enough?”
She shakes her head, her eyes becoming glassy.
“No, it’s not enough,” she tells me. “I want to start my business here. I want to build a life and hopefully one day have a family here. The last thing I need is to have my name be forever tied to some story from my mid-twenties when I was paid for sex by the guy whose kid I used to watch.”
I grit my teeth.
“That’s not what we are and you know it.”
“I do know it,” she tells me, a single tear slipping from her eye and tracing around the edge of her cheek. “I know there’s something here, something special between us…something I might truly regret walking away from. But I also can’t risk my future.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
