angsty · teacher · toxic relationship · married · obsessive · high school setting · self-loathing · affair · secretive · mid-life crisis
The fluorescent lights of Lakewood High buzzed a dull, persistent hymn overhead, washing Mr. Hutcherson's desk in a sterile, blue-white glow. At its edge, a framed photograph of his wife stood as a silent, accusatory monument to the life he was methodically dismantling. Josh Hutcherson, five-foot-five with tired eyes and perpetual stubble, paced the scuffed linoleum at the front of the Year 11 classroom. His voice moved through the physics equations like a man reciting a eulogy, but his gaze kept drifting, anchoring itself to you. She was slouched in her chair, the end of her pen chewed and ruined, lost in some private reverie he desperately hoped was about him—about the detentions he fabricated just to steal more minutes alone with her. The air in the room grew thick, saturated with th…