Some lessons don’t unlearn.
Synopsis
Elle arrives at Oxford with her best friend and a lifetime of desire she’s never once let herself look at directly. Then the train ride, ends with a body found in the very carriage they just left.
Enter Professor Abraham “Abe” Raven. Quiet. Commanding, in a way that is unspoken. He flusters Elle in ways she can’t name, and it only gets worse once term starts, once his lectures on desire and control start feeling less like coursework and more like they’re written for her alone. There’s a student-professor line here, obviously, and there’s Professor Layla Ramos too, sharp-eyed and hostile for reasons that have nothing to do with rules and everything to do with history.
Abe isn’t safe, and the book never pretends otherwise. He’s capable of real violence, the kind that surfaces when he goes after men like Dominic, who prey on students too vulnerable to fight back. Elle must reckon with exactly who she’s falling for while she’s falling. And she does fall, shedding the repression she grew up carrying. She has always known she had an exhibitionist streak, and now she begins testing it, again and again, to see how far she’ll let herself be seen. Old fragments keep surfacing too. Something called the Waxworks. A half-memory she can’t quite outrun. The deeper Elle and Abe go, the more the secrets stack: the body on the train, Layla’s vendetta, the truth of who Abe is underneath the control.
At its core this is a book about the line between desire and danger, about what happens when a woman stops denying herself what she wants and starts reaching for it anyway.
A stranger died on the train Elle stepped off. A professor everyone is a little afraid of is teaching a lecture that feels written for her alone. Elle is about to learn that the most dangerous thing in Oxford isn’t the man who’s capable of violence. It’s what she does the first time she stops apologising for wanting him. Somewhere behind her memory, the Waxworks are waiting to be remembered.
Cruel Intentions meets Secretary. Campus power games colliding with repression coming undone in real time.
A brief synopsis, intended to give the flavour of the book. Not a full or final summary, and subject to revision.
Author’s thoughts
I wrote this one because I’d had my fill of romances where the woman stays small the whole way through, purely so the man has someone to rescue. Here, sex is sex, and the people involved are like actual people.
Elle doesn’t open the book broken. She’s spent her whole life being the good girl, and not because of some wound in her past, because someone raised her to hide before she’d even worked out what she wanted. The moment a woman realises that wanting something quietly, for years, was never the same thing as needing it out loud.
Layla Ramos very nearly walked off with the entire manuscript. She started as a foil and grew into something closer to a broadsword, and I ended up cutting whole chapters of her back just to keep the book from becoming hers. OnlyFans by way of Snow White’s stepmother.