Library Daddy Prof & The Book Club Lads

MM Polyamorous Dark Academia Romance

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Pairing: MM (M/M/M/M)

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap, Daddy Kink, Praise Kink, Polyamory (Why Choose), Dark Academia, Forbidden, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Cozy Mystery, Grief Recovery, Bibliophile Romance, Reverse Harem

Length: ~92,000 words

Series: Standalone

Three former students broke into the rare-books loft at midnight. The forty-eight-year-old curator changed the locks. He also made cocoa. He also wrote a chapbook about wanting them.

Professor. Widower. Daddy.

Elias Hawthorne has spent six years burying himself in Blackthorn University’s gothic rare-books wing — until three of his alumni book club lads break into his private reading loft after hours and end up face-down on his leather chesterfield instead.

Theo’s mouth is smarter than his morals. Riley reads Heathcliff like a threat. Jaxon picks the lock in sixty-one seconds and leaves bruises on Elias’s throat that nobody is supposed to be looking at.

Daddy has rules. Daddy has a schedule. Daddy has a locked drawer of erotic poetry no one is supposed to find.

And someone just stole it.

Now the rival curator who’s wanted Elias’s office — and Elias himself — for a decade is dangling the manuscript as blackmail, the tenure board is asking questions, and the only people Elias trusts with the truth are three mouthy twenty-three-year-olds who’ve decided he belongs to all of them.

He was supposed to catalog them.

They’re rewriting him.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

Silver-fox professor daddy with a Latin tattoo and a locked drawer of erotic poetry
Why-choose / polyamorous MM romance where all four men are written as full partners
Praise kink, light binding play with leather book-straps, and a safe word that’s actually used on-page
Cozy dark academia — gothic library, stained-glass loft, midnight cocoa, leather-bound first editions
A villain who deserves it (and a tenure committee meeting that delivers)
A widower learning to want again, and a dead wife who’s honored, not erased
Found family that includes an honorary aunt and a sixty-one-year-old Irishwoman with extremely strong opinions

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⚠️ Content Notes

High-heat polyamorous MM romance with explicit on-page sex, age gap (forty-eight / twenty-three), praise kink, daddy kink, light binding play with leather straps, group sex with explicit on-page consent and an enforced safe word, and references to grief, widowhood, and academic abuse of power. All four men are written as full partners.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: The Reading Loft, After Hours

The library is quiet the way only a library built in 1897 can be quiet—which is to say, not at all. It hums. Oak floors settle. The radiator in the main reading room ticks through some private grievance with the boiler. Somewhere in the ceiling, a mouse I have been pretending not to notice for three years is doing its rounds.

At 9:47 p.m. on the last Thursday of October, I lock the front doors of the Hawthorne Collection and lean my forehead against the wood until the cold settles into my skin.

Six years.

Six years this month.

The calendar does not let me forget and neither does my body, which has been tightly wound since sunrise for reasons it will not explain to me. I press my thumb into the hollow beneath my collarbone where the ache lives and tell it, as I tell it every year, not tonight.

The ache has never once listened.

I push off the door. My coat goes on the brass hook by the circulation desk. My scarf coils over itself in the same figure-eight I have made a thousand times. I check the stacks lamp by lamp, green shade by green shade, the way Margaret taught me to close down the Bodleian section when we were twenty-nine and thought we had the rest of our lives to switch off lights together.

Mortui vivos docent, says the tattoo on the inside of my forearm. The dead teach the living. The dead, it turns out, teach us mostly about inventory.

In the alcove by the east window I pour cocoa from the copper pot I’ve been nursing since seven. The cocoa is correct. Too sweet is a failure of character; not sweet enough is a failure of nerve. I pour for one and I carry the mug and a battered copy of the Keats—annotated, the Longman edition, the one with my twenty-year-old handwriting crawling up the margins in ink gone brown—and I begin to climb the spiral stair.

The Hawthorne Collection has three floors. The first is public. The second is restricted. The third, the reading loft, belongs to me. Forty-three steps. I am on step thirty-one when I hear the book fall.

It is not a loud fall. It is a muffled, textile-cushioned fall, the sound of something heavy meeting a rug, and then—beat of silence—a voice.

“Fuck.”

A male voice. Low. Young. Theatrical in its restraint. I stop climbing.

“Shh—” Another voice. Quieter. Warmer. A voice like a hand against the small of a back.

“You shh.” A third voice. This one melodic, tuned, the clean vibrato of someone who has been paid to read aloud for money.

Three voices. I know them the way a man knows the three locks on his own front door.

I should be furious. I am furious. But beneath the fury, under it the way groundwater runs under stone, is something else—a small animal sound I do not let into the front of my mind. Something that has not moved in six years and has just, without asking, opened its eyes.

I climb the last twelve steps slowly. I climb them the way I would climb toward a sleeping stag in a meadow. I round the corner. I find it.

The reading loft is perhaps fourteen by twenty feet. The stained-glass dome above is a kaleidoscope of late-Victorian piety—saints and scholars and a peacock no one has ever been able to explain. On the floor, a Persian rug so old the reds have gone to rose. The leather chesterfield—chestnut, cracked, older than me by decades. The writing desk where I have sat every night for six years and written things I was not supposed to write. The fainting couch in the corner no one but me is supposed to know about. The wood stove. The kettle. The intruders.

They have arranged themselves, unknowingly, into a composition. If I had a pencil I could not improve it.

Theo—Theodore Lang, twenty-three years old, on a scholarship, mouth like a loaded pistol—is frozen halfway through a step, one hand still lifted above the low table, the other clutching a small leather-bound volume that is absolutely, unequivocally, a first-edition copy of Wuthering Heights that has not left the locked case in twelve years.

He is wearing a cable-knit sweater three sizes too large for him, his raven curls are a complete insurrection, and his green eyes have gone the size of saucers, and his mouth has fallen open in the exact configuration of a man caught mid-heist.

The mouth closes. The mouth opens again.

“Professor.”

He says it on a breath.

Riley—Riley Kane, six feet of Kansas corn and quiet—is behind the green-shaded floor lamp to the left of the chesterfield. He is, to his credit, trying to get behind it. The lamp is not saving him. He is tucked into it the way a man tries to hide behind a bookmark. His hazel eyes are fixed on the rug. His ears are red.

Jaxon—Jaxon Maddox, five-foot-nine of compact powerlift, theater-trained voice, an ass I have been politely refusing to notice since 2022—is on my chesterfield. Not near my chesterfield. On it. Cross-legged. Shoes off. Shoes lined neatly beside the chesterfield as if he had been invited. A mug—my mug, the blue one with the chipped rim—is on the end table beside him, half-empty, steam rising. He has been going through my cocoa.

Jaxon meets my eyes. He does not flinch. The corner of his mouth, which is full and serious and extravagantly shaped, pulls up a fraction of an inch.

“Hi, Professor,” he says.

His voice does the thing his voice does. The loft goes very still.

I am aware of being looked at. Not the way a student looks at a lecturer. The way a person looks at another person in the last second before they do something the floorboards will remember.

I push my glasses up with my knuckle.

“Out,” I say.

Three things happen at once. Theo, who has never in his life met a silence he could not make worse, says, “In my defense—” Riley, who is still trying to get behind the lamp, finally gives up and steps out from behind it with both hands raised in surrender. Jaxon sets down the mug, uncurls from the chesterfield as if he owns the chesterfield, and pads across the rug in his stocking feet toward me as if he intends to hand me his homework.

“Stop,” I say. All three of them stop.

I have never had three grown men freeze for me at once before. I have a passing, unhelpful thought: I could get used to this. I shelve it. The shelf is labeled Things I Do Not Say Aloud. The shelf is the fullest in the building.

I set the cocoa on the writing desk. I turn to Theo.

“The book.” He looks down at the Brontë in his hand as if he has only this moment become aware of it.

“Oh,” he says. “Fuck. Yeah. Oh no.”

“Two hands.” “Two hands?” “Two hands, Mr. Lang. Like I taught you in the seminar. Thumb below the spine, palm flat beneath the endpapers, do not—stop gripping it by the covers, you absolute menace—”

He is gripping it by the covers. I cross the rug in three steps. He has time to look up, to register my face, to draw in a small sharp breath, and then I have my hand under the book, cradling the endpaper the way a midwife catches a newborn. His hand is still on it. My hand brushes his hand. His fingers are cold. My fingers are not cold.

I lift. He releases. The transfer is seamless in a way I resent.

“How,” I say, carrying the Brontë past him to the desk, setting it down on the felt pad I keep there for exactly this purpose, “did you get in.”

From behind me, Riley clears his throat. “Sir,” he says.

I close my eyes for one long second. I have not been sir’d in this loft in six years. I did not realize the word had such a pronounced physical effect on the back of my neck. I have some observations about that. I will be examining them later, in private, at length, possibly for several days.

“You picked the lock,” I say.

Three heads incline, almost in unison, toward Jaxon. Jaxon does not blink. He does not apologize. He tilts his head a quarter-inch.

“Theater tech,” he says. “I pick locks for a living, Professor. Well. Not for a living. For a paycheck, sometimes, when a prop trunk locks up. I can teach you, if you want.”

The boy is flirting. The boy is looking at me from under lashes I did not know were that long and flirting, in my reading loft, at ten at night, two feet from a first edition of Wuthering Heights that he helped his friend fondle with bare thumbs, and I am— I am letting him.

I turn back to the desk. I take a steadying breath, which I disguise as an irritable one. My chest feels tight in a specific way, low, under the ribs, an old rope loosening half a knot.

“The book club,” I say, “meets on Tuesday evenings. In the seminar room. It has done so for four years. There is no scenario in the entire history of Blackthorn University in which that book club is scheduled to meet on a Thursday night, in my reading loft, with the lights off.”

Riley says, “Professor. We—we re-formed the club. This semester. Just the three of us. We wanted to ask you. If you’d host us.”

“You wanted to ask me,” I say slowly. “So you broke into my loft.”

“We wanted,” Jaxon says, “to ask you persuasively.”

I turn around again. Jaxon has put his hands in his back pockets, which has the effect of pulling his shoulders back, which has the effect of— I do not let the sentence finish.

“Mr. Maddox,” I say, “get out of my loft.”

“Yes, Professor.” He does not move. He walks past me, close enough that I smell his shampoo—something warm, sandalwood and something sharper—and sits on the edge of the chesterfield and begins, without hurry, to pull on his left boot. His amber eyes flick up once, through the lashes, to check on whether I am watching him. I am watching him. I stop watching him.

Theo, who has been quiet for fourteen full seconds and has therefore reached the end of his emotional range, says, “Because you haven’t answered, Professor. About the book club.”

“Mr. Lang—” “And before you say no, Professor, which I can see forming behind your face in real time, let me stipulate that we are not your students—former students, alumni, members in good standing of the Blackthorn graduate community, meeting in a voluntary capacity with a faculty mentor who would be, professionally speaking—”

“Theodore.” Theo stops. He does not often stop. When he does, it is because I have used his full name in a tone I did not know I still had. His mouth closes. His eyes go wide and, God help me, his freckles stand out against a face that has gone a shade paler.

I have their attention. I have, it occurs to me, had their attention for some time. I sit down at the desk. I lace my fingers over my waistcoat. I look at them, one, two, three, over the tops of my glasses.

I have a long, quiet second in which I understand, in the back of my mind where I store the things I refuse to examine, that I am not going to say no. I am going to make them think I said no. I am going to make myself think I said no. But I am not going to say no. This is a problem for a different man.

“I have not,” I say, “agreed to host your club.” “No, sir.” “I have not agreed to host it in this loft.” “No, sir.”

“I will, however, be considering your petition. In the morning. After I have slept. After I have had my coffee. After I have determined whether any of you are on the verge of expulsion from the alumni association. Get out of my loft. Now.”

They stand. They file past the desk. Jaxon is last. He walks past the desk and stops three steps past it, turns, and looks at me over his shoulder with the uncomplicated curiosity of a cat.

“Professor,” he says. “Mr. Maddox.” “If you don’t answer about the club by Tuesday, we’ll assume it’s a no. And if it’s a no, we won’t come back. We won’t come back here,” he adds, with a small, specific tilt of the head that includes the loft, the chesterfield, and possibly the entire Hawthorne Collection.

“Goodnight, Mr. Maddox.” He smiles. I do not know what to do with the smile. He takes it down the stairs with him.

The loft is quiet. The stove ticks. I do not move.

I sit at the desk for a long time. I am thinking about the shelf in my chest labeled Things I Do Not Say Aloud, and I am thinking about Margaret, and I am thinking about the way my body is currently conducting itself without asking my permission first. I have not been hard in a loft in six years.

I cross the rug. I pick up the blue mug. It is still warm.

I walk to the narrow door behind the writing desk that leads to the small alcove where my private papers are kept. I fit the key. I open the second drawer down. Inside is a small, hand-bound volume in oxblood leather. The chapbook. Sixty-four pages, hand-sewn, thirty-one poems I have written in the last three and a half years and have never once considered showing to another person. It is the most honest thing I have ever made.

I turn it over in my hand. The ribbon marker is tucked into page— the wrong page. I stop. I stare at it. I know exactly which page I left the ribbon on. The ribbon is not on that page. It is three pages further on.

I stand very still in the alcove with my thumb on the ribbon, and my hand has gone cold, and the back of my neck has gone colder, and somewhere under the surface of the cocoa-warm thing I had been cultivating since Jaxon smiled at me over his shoulder, something else is rising—something that has nothing to do with the lads and everything to do with a lock that was not actually locked on Tuesday night, either.

I can think of one person at Blackthorn University who knows where every sensor in this building is. I can think of exactly one.

On the second floor of Modern Manuscripts, third window from the left, a light is on. Victor’s office. It is 10:04 p.m. A figure passes briefly in front of the window. Too quick to identify. Then the shade comes down.

I climb back up the spiral. I sit at the writing desk. I pull a sheet of paper toward me. I write, in the hand I have been cultivating my whole life, three names. Theodore Lang. Riley Kane. Jaxon Maddox.

I do not know yet what they are. A variable. A trap. A group of boys I taught once who have grown up into something my body has been trying not to notice. Possibly a liability. Possibly the first interesting thing to happen in this building in six years. Possibly all of it at once.

I press my thumb, once, into the hollow beneath my collarbone. The ache is still there. It is, for the first time in a long time, doing something other than aching. Tuesday, I think. I lock the door.

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An Exclusive Bonus Chapter

A bonus chapter set the weekend after the epilogue, at Elias’s lake cottage in the Adirondacks, with a fireplace, four men in one bed, a pot roast from a 1996 recipe in Margaret’s hand, and the loons calling at dawn.

Read “The Cottage Weekend”