Curved Grade
MM Dark-Academia Professor/Student Romance
by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Professor/Student, Age Gap, D/s Dynamics, Praise Kink, Bi Awakening, Dark Academia, Forbidden Romance, Secret Relationship, Consent King
He said “good” like it was a door opening. I walked through it.
Ethan Park is drowning. A 34% midterm, a scholarship on the line, and a family who sacrificed everything for a degree he’s about to lose. When his infamously strict statistics professor offers a private remediation contract — follow every instruction, meet every deadline, obey without question — Ethan signs before the ink dries.
Dr. Adrian Cole doesn’t bend rules. He doesn’t give second chances. And he absolutely doesn’t notice the way his failing student flushes when told to sit up straight. But Ethan’s combination of raw intelligence and desperate obedience hooks something Adrian buried years ago — the desire for willing, informed submission he never received from the mentor who broke him.
What starts as brutal academic drills in a locked office becomes something neither of them can control. The tutoring sessions turn charged. The obedience drills turn intimate. And the word good — spoken in a low voice, in a room where only two people can hear it — becomes the most dangerous word in the English language.
With a safeword called “baseline,” a contract with seventeen subsections, and a power imbalance that could destroy them both, Adrian and Ethan build something that shouldn’t work. Something that’s equal parts academic rigor and devastating heat. Something that requires Ethan to choose — not because he has to, but because he wants to.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Strict professor x anxious student MM romance
✅ Age gap (38/22) with genuine power-imbalance tension
✅ Praise kink, D/s dynamics, consent-king hero
✅ Bi awakening and first-time-with-a-man scenes
✅ Dark academia vibes with locked offices and after-hours sessions
✅ A safeword that gets used — and immediately respected
✅ Scorching heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including D/s dynamics), strong language, depictions of academic power imbalance within a consensual framework, internalized homophobia, bi-awakening anxiety, references to past mentor abuse, and detailed negotiation of kink dynamics. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Midterm Massacre
The fluorescent lights in Harmon Hall had a specific frequency of flicker that Ethan was convinced caused brain damage. Not the kind you could prove—nothing that would hold up in a lab—but the slow, cumulative kind. The kind that turned a reasonably intelligent twenty-two-year-old into the sort of person who stared at a probability equation for forty-five minutes and came away dumber than when he started.
He was sitting in his usual seat. Third row, four seats in from the left aisle. Close enough to seem engaged. Far enough to avoid direct eye contact with the man at the front of the room.
Dr. Adrian Cole.
Two hundred and twelve students were packed into this auditorium three times a week, and roughly two hundred and twelve of them would rather be anywhere else…
His forearms were a problem.
Ethan had identified this issue approximately six weeks into the semester and had been aggressively not dealing with it since. Dr. Cole had the kind of forearms that came from something deliberate—swimming, maybe, or rowing—ropy with tendon and dusted with dark hair, and when he rolled his sleeves, he did it with a precision that suggested he knew exactly what the effect was. Two folds. Even. Tight against the muscle. Every single class.
It was fine. Ethan had bigger problems.
He flipped the paper. The number was in red ink in the upper right corner, circled once in Dr. Cole’s precise handwriting.
34.
Ethan stared at it. The number didn’t change. He stared at it longer, as if sustained visual contact might rearrange the digits into something survivable. But the three sat stubbornly in front of the four, and the four sat stubbornly behind the three, and together they formed a number that meant Ethan’s scholarship was dead.
Not dying. Dead.
If he lost his scholarship, he couldn’t afford spring semester. If he couldn’t afford spring semester, he couldn’t graduate. If he couldn’t graduate, the three and a half years his parents had scraped and borrowed and worked overtime to fund would amount to nothing. His father, who drove for a delivery service from 5 AM to 2 PM and then went to his second job at a dry cleaner until close. His mother, who cleaned houses in neighborhoods where the people she cleaned for made more in a month than she made in a year. His sister, who was sixteen and watching, waiting, planning her own escape from the cycle, with Ethan’s degree as proof that it was possible.
Thirty-four percent.
He was going to be sick.
“Dr. Cole?”
“Office hours are Thursday, Mr. Park.”
Their eyes met, and Ethan felt it in his sternum—a physical jolt, like missing a step on a staircase. Dr. Cole’s eyes were gray. Not blue-gray or green-gray but actual gray, the color of lake water before a storm, and they assessed Ethan with a focus so complete it felt like being pinned.
“Thursday,” he repeated. Quieter.
Ethan nodded. Turned. Walked up the aisle and out the door.
Thursday. He had two days to figure out how to convince the most inflexible man on campus that Ethan Park was worth bending for.
He was so fucked.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Dedication — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Two years later. Adrian’s textbook is published. The dedication reads: “For E.P., who showed me that discipline is a gift, not a weapon.” Ethan finds the book before the launch party. Reads the dedication. Gets emotional. Gets creative. The control freak surrenders — the final evolution of their dynamic.
More from Jace Wilder
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Curfew & Chains
He enforced the rules. I broke every one. Then he made me beg to follow them.
Boss’s Favorite Problem
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Straight Label, Crooked Line
He wrote love songs about women. Then Eli Zhao picked up the drumsticks.
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