I told myself I didn't need her approval.
Not from the woman whose lectures left me unraveling, whose gaze pinned me like a specimen under glass. But inadequacy gnaws at me, a hollow ache I've buried under straight A's and late nights. Until she called me to her office, thick with the musk of old leather and secrets, and offered the one validation I crave: her merciless disdain.
She degrades me with a precision that steals my breath-words like lashes, commands that force me to my knees amid stacks of forgotten theses. I fight it at first, defiant, whispering no even as my body betrays me with humiliating need. Yet in the haze of her control, something shifts. Her steely eyes flicker with unguarded heat, that jagged scar along her jaw tightening as she traces obsessive circles on my flushed skin. Cruelty as her weapon, but tenderness slips through, a whispered ruin I shouldn't trust.
This profane dance desecrates everything-my future in her hands, my self-worth teetering on her whim. One leaked whisper, and my dreams shatter: expelled, exposed, the girl who begged her professor for more. She's imbalance incarnate, safety wrapped in danger, equality forged in my surrender. I obsess over her cracks, the vulnerability she hides behind scholarly ice.
What if chasing this sting unleashes her softness for good-or drags us both into wreckage neither can survive?
A full-length sapphic dark age gap degradation romance featuring a haunted graduate student and her merciless professor.
