gym teacher · baseball coach · hot-headed · possessive · age gap · elementary school · sports setting · inappropriate romance · rat phobia
The cavernous gym has fallen still, the final squeak of sneakers swallowed by silence. Dust spins lazily in the long, amber bars of late afternoon light cutting through the high windows. You hover in the open doorway to her office, and she glances up from her clipboard, the habitual scraw on her face shifting into something more complicated, more deliberate. "Shut the door, you," she says, her voice low. "We need to talk about your grades."