Her Pet Student

Ross is eighteen, six foot one, and has spent most of his life trying to take up less space than he does.

He sits at the back of every room. He keeps his hair long enough to hide behind. He wears his jumper a size too big. He has never been kissed. He has never held a girls hand. He has a copy of Othello already dog-eared in September because reading is the only thing he is good at, and even then his old English teacher gave him a B plus and never once looked up from the marking.

Miss Davies is new this term.

Twenty-eight. Chestnut ponytail. A cream silk blouse with one button undone more than it should be and a single pearl sitting in the hollow of her throat. She walks into Classroom 14 on the first Monday of the autumn term and looks at Ross across a room full of students and smiles at him like she can already see straight through the jumper and the glasses and the shoulders that curve inward, straight through to the boy underneath who has been waiting his whole life for somebody, anybody, to look at him the way she is looking at him right now.

And then, halfway through the first lesson, she calls on him.

And when he stumbles through an answer hes sure is stupid, she holds his eyes for one long, warm second and says, softly, so the whole class can hear:

Beautifully put, Ross.

Her Pet Student is a slow, wicked, breathtakingly tender story about a shy, brilliant sixth-former and the new English teacher who has decided, very quietly, to make him hers. About extra tutoring after school and a classroom with the blinds drawn. About a hand that settles too warmly on a knee under a desk. About the word sweetheart said softly in a crowded room and the full, crimson, ruinous weight of being called, in that Yorkshire honey voice, a good boy.

It is a first-time story. It is an age-gap story. It is a gentle femdom story about a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and a boy who has no idea it has already happened to him.

Miss Davies has done this before.

Ross has absolutely no idea what is about to happen to him.