Star Pupil, Dirty Mouth

MM Age-Gap Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Age Gap, Private Tutor/Student, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Slow Burn, Dirty Talk, Oral Fixation

He hired a tutor to fix his grammar. The tutor fixed his mouth in other ways.

Rafi Santos talks like the street, charms like a weapon, and is about to lose the best opportunity of his life because he can’t make his mouth behave in a formal interview. The promotion to Lisbon — the one that clears his mother’s debt — requires C1 fluency in ten weeks. His company hires him a private tutor.

Sebastian “Baz” Adler is precise, patient, and impossible to rattle. A former university lecturer who burned out on institutional politics, he now tutors professionals one-on-one in his lamplit home office. He’s seen every flavor of adult student. Rafi is a new category: raw talent, chaotic energy, and a whole body that lights up when someone he respects says good.

What starts as pronunciation drills and jaw corrections becomes something neither of them budgeted for. Baz discovers that praise — deployed with precision, withheld with discipline — unlocks something in Rafi that no teacher has ever reached. Rafi discovers that the only man who’s ever made his filthy mouth behave is the one who puts it to work.

With the exam clock ticking, the professional line burning, and a reward system that’s gone dangerously off-syllabus, they’ll have to decide what they’re actually earning — and whether the entanglement is the point.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Strict older tutor x chaotic younger student MM romance

✅ “Good boy” praise kink wired into the curriculum

✅ Age gap (26/38) with power dynamics that shift

✅ Dirty talk as an actual language lesson

✅ A grumpy/sunshine dynamic where “sunshine” has teeth

✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat — graphic, explicit, emotional

✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including oral, anal, and praise/denial dynamics), strong language, depictions of anxiety and self-doubt related to academic performance, and parental financial stress. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: Placement Test, Filthy Mouth

RAFI

I was twelve minutes late to the appointment that was supposed to save my life, and I’d spilled coffee on my shirt somewhere around minute eight.

Not a little coffee. Not a discreet, dab-it-with-a-napkin amount. A Rorschach blot of cold brew spreading across my chest like my own body was trying to sabotage me, which, honestly, would be on brand.

The building was one of those renovated brownstones where the buzzer panel had actual engraved nameplates instead of masking tape. S. ADLER — SUITE 2. I jabbed the button and tried to remember the breathing exercise Dee taught me, the one that was supposed to make me seem like a functional adult.

The door clicked open before I finished the first inhale.

The man standing at the top of the stairs did not look like any tutor I’d ever had. My tutors had been grad students with energy drink dependencies and dying laptops. This guy looked like he’d been carved out of a library. Tall — taller than me by a few inches that he somehow made feel like a foot — lean through the shoulders in a way that his rolled shirtsleeves were doing absolutely nothing to hide. Neat dark beard with the first threads of silver in it. Glasses. Forearms that belonged on a man who split firewood, attached to a man who clearly alphabetized his bookshelf.

“Mr. Santos.” Not a question. He looked at his watch — an actual watch, on his wrist, like a psychopath — and then back at me. “You’re twelve minutes late.”

“Traffic,” I said.

“You walked. I watched you come up the block.” He stepped back from the door. “Come in. We’ve lost enough of your hour.”

Your hour. Not our hour. Like the time was mine to waste and he was just the guy holding the stopwatch. I followed him in, already composing the story I’d tell Dee — he’s got this whole stern librarian thing, it’s a lot — and then I got a look at the office and lost my train of thought.

It was warm. That was the weird part. I’d expected something clinical, but the room was all wood and lamplight, two walls of books that had clearly been read, a heavy desk with exactly one pen on it, and two chairs facing each other across a small table like we were about to play chess for my soul. It smelled like vanilla and ink and something underneath that I couldn’t name and immediately wanted to.

“Sit,” he said.

I sat. My body did it before my brain signed off, which should have been my first warning about how the next ten weeks were going to go.

“I’m Sebastian Adler. You’ll have read the engagement terms—”

“Skimmed them.”

“—you’ll read the engagement terms tonight,” he said, without raising his voice, without even pausing, just absorbing my interruption like a wall absorbs a thrown sock. “Payment is handled. Scheduling is handled. What is not handled is whether you can pass a C1 oral proficiency interview in ten weeks, which, based on the assessment your employer forwarded me, is currently in serious doubt.”

“Wow,” I said. “You’re supposed to butter me up first. Tell me I have potential.”

Something moved behind the glasses. Not a smile. A recalibration.

“Everyone has potential, Mr. Santos. It’s the cheapest thing a person can have. Whether you have discipline is the question I’m paid to answer.” He slid a packet of paper across the table and set the pen on top of it, perfectly parallel to the edge. “Placement test. Forty minutes. Begin.”

“Don’t I get a—”

“Thirty-nine minutes and fifty-six seconds.”

I picked up the pen.

Here’s the thing nobody at my company understood when they dangled the Lisbon posting in front of me like a steak in front of a starving dog: I already spoke the language. I grew up in it. It lived in my grandmother’s kitchen and my mother’s phone calls and every argument I ever lost before age eighteen. I could flirt in it, fight in it, order food in it, talk a furious customer off a ledge in it — I did that last one professionally, forty hours a week, with a headset denting my curls.

What I could not do was make it wear a suit.

The test made that clear with humiliating efficiency. The vocabulary sections I tore through, smug, barely thinking. Then the register exercises showed up — rewrite this casual complaint as formal correspondence — and the grammar drills with their subjunctive traps, and somewhere around page six I could feel the whole thing turning on me, every answer a coin flip, my pen slowing down like it was wading through mud.

Adler didn’t watch me work. That was somehow worse. He sat at his desk reading something, completely still except for the occasional turn of a page, and the silence in the room had texture, had weight, and by minute thirty I was hyperaware of every sound I made — the scratch of the pen, my knee bouncing, the wet little click of me chewing the cap, which I didn’t even realize I was doing until I looked up and found him watching me over the top of his glasses.

I stopped chewing the cap.

He went back to his book.

I started chewing it again like ninety seconds later. I contain multitudes.

“Time,” he said finally, and I dropped the pen like it was hot. He came around the desk, collected the packet, and read it standing up while I sat there feeling like a kid outside the principal’s office, which was a feeling I’d had a lot of practice with and absolutely hated, and hated that some prehistoric part of my brain didn’t entirely hate.

He read for a long time. Long enough that I started cataloging him to keep from squirming. The veins on the backs of his hands. The way his thumb braced the pages. He had a habit of pressing his lips together — barely, just a flicker — when he hit something that displeased him, and by the second page I was watching for it like a weather report.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker-flicker.

“Okay, you’re making faces,” I said. “Just tell me. Scale of one to ten, how cooked am I?”

He set the packet down on the table between us, squared its edges, and sat in the chair across from me. Up close, with the lamplight on him, I could see his eyes were a kind of dark amber, and they were doing something I wasn’t prepared for, which was looking at me — actually at me, like I was a problem worth solving instead of a problem to be managed.

“Your vocabulary is in the ninety-fifth percentile of clients I’ve assessed,” he said. “Your idiomatic instincts are genuinely unusual. There were three constructions in here I’d expect from a native speaker with a literature degree.”

Heat crawled up the back of my neck. “I feel a but incoming.”

“Your register control is nonexistent. Your formal grammar is a ruin. You wrote a complaint letter to a fictional utilities company that included — ” he turned the page without looking down, like he’d memorized it — “the phrase ‘and that’s on you, respectfully.’”

“That’s a power move.”

“That’s a failing answer.” He leaned back. The chair creaked, intimate in the quiet. “Here is my assessment, Mr. Santos. You speak like someone brilliant who has never once been taught. You’ve been compensating with charm and raw memory your entire life, and it has carried you exactly as far as it can carry you, which is to this chair.” He let that land. It landed. “The interview panel will not be charmed. They will hear the street in your verbs inside of ninety seconds and they will score accordingly, and the posting will go to someone duller than you with better endings on his conjugations.”

I opened my mouth to fire something back and found the chamber empty. Because here’s the filthy secret: I’d been hearing versions of this since third grade — doesn’t apply himself, such potential, talks like the street — and every other time it came wrapped in pity or contempt. This was the first time anyone had said it like a mechanic reads a busted engine. No judgment. Just the diagnosis, and underneath it, impossibly, the thing nobody ever included:

“Fixable,” he said. “Completely fixable. In ten weeks, if — ” and here he leaned forward, forearms on his knees, close enough that I caught the vanilla-and-ink smell again and my pulse did something embarrassing — “you do exactly what I say. Every session. Every assignment. Done properly, on time, no shortcuts, no charm. Can you do that?”

Exactly what I say.

I want it on the record that I am twenty-six years old. I have rent, a 401(k) I don’t understand, and a mother whose debt I was going to erase with the Lisbon salary if it killed me. I am a grown man. And a grown man should not feel a sentence like that travel down his spine and pool somewhere south of professional, should not have to recross his legs in a tutoring office because a stern man twelve years older than him said exactly what I say in a voice like a locked door.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out rough. I cleared my throat. “Yes. I can do that.”

“We’ll see.” He stood, collected the packet, and the session pivoted into logistics — twice a week here, daily assignments by email, a mock interview every Friday starting week three. I nodded along, recovering, getting my swagger back up off the floor where it had been lying, and by the time he walked me to the door I’d almost convinced myself the spine thing had been low blood sugar.

“Mr. Santos.”

I turned in the doorway. He stood with one hand braced on the frame, sleeves rolled, lamplight behind him, and looked at me the way he’d looked at the test — like a problem worth solving.

“The promotion. Why this one? Lisbon’s a hard posting. There are easier ladders.”

I could’ve given him the LinkedIn answer. Instead, for reasons I’d be interrogating in the shower later, I gave him the real one. “My mom co-signed some things she shouldn’t have. For people who didn’t deserve it. The Lisbon package clears it in two years.” I shrugged like it was nothing. “Everyone’s always saying I’m wasted potential. Figured I’d finally cash some in.”

Something shifted in his face. Gone before I could name it.

“Ten weeks,” he said. “Go home, Mr. Santos. Read your engagement terms.”

“It’s Rafi,” I said. “Mr. Santos is my dad, and he also can’t conjugate for shit.”

The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. It was the rumor of a smile, the possibility of one, and I walked down those stairs feeling like I’d won something and lost something in the same transaction.

Dee was on my couch when I got home, eating my leftovers, because boundaries are for people whose best friends have their own HBO passwords.

“So?” She pointed a fork at me. “The fancy tutor. Is he going to fix your mouth?”

“He said my grammar is a ruin.”

“Oh, I like him already.”

“He’s — ” I dropped onto the other end of the couch and stared at the ceiling, hunting for the word and landing, annoyingly, on several. Precise. Composed. Forearms. “He’s a lot. Very strict-librarian energy. He timed me. He has a watch.”

“A watch,” Dee repeated, with appropriate horror.

“He looked at my test like — ” I stopped, because the sentence was about to come out wrong. Like I was worth reading carefully. “Whatever. He thinks he can get me through the interview. Ten weeks.”

“And you believe him?”

I thought about fixable. About exactly what I say, and the way my whole body had gone quiet and attentive when he said it, like a dog hearing its own name — a comparison I was choosing to never examine again as long as I lived.

“Weirdly,” I said, “yeah.”

At nine o’clock exactly — not 8:58, not 9:03, nine o’clock, I’d later learn this man’s emails could set atomic clocks — my phone buzzed.

From: S. Adler

Subject: Assignment 1 — due Thursday, 6:00 PM

Attached: a document long enough to have chapters. Register drills. Conjugation tables. A formal letter to write — no power moves, an actual parenthetical, (no power moves) — and at the bottom, beneath the bulleted instructions, a single sign-off line:

Do it properly. —S.A.

I read it three times.

Then I lay there in the dark with my phone on my chest, twelve minutes late to my own common sense, thinking about amber eyes and a voice like a locked door, and the long, specific list of things this extremely composed older man wanted me to do exactly.

Ten weeks.

I was so screwed.

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