[BL] Teacher's Pet
love story of obsession.
He fell first, but he fell harder.
Norman Reed is nineteen, a wide-eyed freshman stepping onto the ivy-draped campus of Evergreen University with nothing but a full-ride scholarship, a battered suitcase, and a heart that has never truly been broken. ..yet. His life has always been messy: a childhood spent in a small coastal town where dreams felt too big and people felt too small, a mother who worked double shifts and still never looked at him like he mattered, and a quiet, gnawing hunger for something someone to see him completely. When he walks into his first literature lecture and locks eyes with Professor Duke Brandon, that hunger sharpens into something dangerous.
Duke Brandon is thirty-two, a widower who buried his heart with his husband four years ago and has spent every day since building walls so high no one can climb them. Brilliant, brooding, and terrifyingly controlled, he teaches modernist poetry like a man dissecting his own scars precise, unflinching, merciless. Students fear him. Colleagues respect him. No one gets close. Until Norman.
What begins as a student’s innocent, breathless admiration quickly spirals into something neither of them can contain. Norman falls first hard and fast and reckless stealing glances in lecture halls, lingering after class, scribbling frantic confessions in the margins of his notebook. He tells himself it’s just a crush. He tells himself he can control it. He is wrong.
Duke tries to resist. He marks Norman’s essays with detached precision, keeps his voice cool in the classroom, reminds himself daily of every ethical line he cannot cross. But the boy’s wide blue eyes, the way his throat bobs when he’s nervous, the raw vulnerability he wears like an open wound, it all seeps through the cracks Duke thought were sealed forever. And when the obsession finally takes root in Duke’s chest, it grows wilder, darker, more possessive than anything Norman’s youthful longing could have prepared for.
He fell first.
But Duke falls harder.
#Slowburn
