Office Hours, After Dark

MM Contemporary Romance · Dark Academia · D/s Dynamic
by Jace Wilder

Available at your favorite retailer

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Professor x Student, Age Gap (14 years), Praise Kink, D/s Dynamic, Dark Academia, Forbidden Romance, Secret Relationship, Grumpy/Sunshine, Slow Burn, Forced Proximity, Power Exchange, Hurt/Comfort, He Falls First

He wrote the fantasy. His professor became the reality.

Aiden Cho is a first-year PhD student with an anonymous praise-kink blog, fourteen thousand followers, and a growing obsession with his new professor. The blog is fiction. The wanting is not.

Dr. Marcus Hale is the most demanding, most brilliant, and most devastatingly precise man Aiden has ever met. He grades with a red pen, lectures on power dynamics, and rations his approval like water in a desert. When he says “Develop that,” Aiden’s entire nervous system stands at attention.

Then Marcus finds the blog. Recognizes his office, his voice, his red pen in every entry. And instead of running, he says the most dangerous thing possible: “I wasn’t unaffected by what I read.”

What follows is seven weeks of excruciating restraint, a carefully negotiated D/s dynamic built on typed syllabi and safewords, and the slow, devastating discovery that the fantasy was just a rehearsal — and the real thing is better than anything either of them has ever written.

But academia runs on gossip, the blog is going viral, and a charming colleague is collecting leverage. When the institutional walls close in, Aiden and Marcus will have to decide: protect their careers, or fight for the only thing that’s ever felt like home.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Professor x student MM romance with real ethical stakes
✅ Praise kink as the central emotional and erotic engine
✅ D/s dynamics that are negotiated, structured, and genuinely hot
✅ A slow burn that builds for seven weeks and explodes on a desk
✅ Dark academia vibes — amber lamps, red pens, loaded seminars
✅ Hurt/comfort that earns its tears
✅ A safeword scene that changes everything
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including D/s dynamics, praise kink, orgasm control, light bondage, and possessive/marking scenes), strong language, depictions of anxiety, impostor syndrome, and institutional power dynamics. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: First Seminar

The syllabus was going to kill him.

Not metaphorically. Aiden Cho was fairly certain that when they found his body slumped outside Room 412 of Whitmore Hall, the coroner would list cause of death as “acute exposure to Dr. Marcus Hale’s reading list” and no one in the English department would bat an eye.

He’d read the thing three times now, sitting on the cold wooden bench in the corridor, his backpack wedged between his feet and his third coffee of the morning going tepid in his hand. Fourteen weeks. Forty-two assigned texts. One seminar paper, one oral presentation, weekly reading responses that were to be “rigorous, concise, and mercilessly honest — three qualities most graduate students have never been asked to demonstrate simultaneously.”

That last line had a footnote. The footnote read: If you disagree, your previous program failed you. We’ll correct that here.

Aiden took another sip of his coffee and tried to remember why he’d moved across the country for this.

Right. Because Dr. Marcus Hale’s work on power structures in Victorian fiction had fundamentally rewired his brain at twenty-two, and because getting into this PhD program had felt like the first time in his life someone looked at his application and said yes, you belong here, and because his mother had cried on the phone — actual tears — when he told her, which was the closest thing to “I love you” the Cho family had managed in a decade.

So. No pressure.

The hallway smelled like old wood and lemon floor polish, the way all the humanities buildings did at this university. Whitmore Hall was one of the original campus structures — stone exterior, arched windows, the kind of building that photographed beautifully in the admissions brochure and functioned terribly as a modern workspace.

Aiden did not feel like a serious person. He felt like a kid wearing his dad’s suit.

“You look like you’re reading your own autopsy report.”

He looked up. A woman his age was standing over him — dark hair pulled back in a clip that was losing the battle, oversized blazer over a Fleetwood Mac t-shirt, brown skin, sharp eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. She was holding a coffee cup roughly the size of a fire hydrant.

“I’m reading the syllabus for Hale’s seminar,” Aiden said.

“Same thing.” She dropped onto the bench beside him. “Sana Mishra. First-year. Victorian and postcolonial. Please tell me you’re also in this seminar so I don’t have to suffer alone.”

“Aiden Cho. First-year. Contemporary and queer theory. And yeah, I’m in it. I’m also TAing for it.”

Sana’s eyes went wide. “You’re his TA? Voluntarily?”

“It was assigned.”

“That’s what they say about prison sentences.”

Aiden laughed — a real one, unexpected, and it loosened something in his chest. “Have you had him before?”

“Nobody has Dr. Hale. Dr. Hale has you.” Sana took a long pull of her coffee. “My friend from the cohort above us — Priya — she took his Brontë seminar last year. Said he cold-called her on the first day, asked her to explain the function of the moors as psychosexual landscape in Wuthering Heights, and when she gave a halfway decent answer, he said ‘Adequate’ and moved on.”

“Adequate?”

“That’s the highest praise she got all semester. She said she still thinks about it.”

The full first chapter continues — introducing Dr. Marcus Hale, his devastating seminar, Aiden’s first blog entry, and the moment everything begins. Keep reading in the book.

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Independent Study — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Aiden finds Marcus’s secret journal — forty-nine days of handwritten fantasies, written during the seven-week wait, never shared. What happens when he reads it aloud involves the desk, the red pen, and the most explicit scene in the series.

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