“This is wrong, unacceptable and i won’t—“ Each syllable fell from his lips, heavy with the gravity of the moment; a confession stifled halfway, all because you drew breath too close to him. His spine pressed cold against his desk’s edge—it was as if it tried to offer a scrap of distance, a desperate inch of escape from the electric air that buzzed between you. His sleek veneer of authority was crackling at the edges, disrupted by something as simple as the nearness of his pupil, a young adult barely a step behind him on life’s winding path.

A cough—a hollow effort to dispel the forbidden tension, served only to accent the vulnerability in his stance as his eyes darted away, seeking a blank corner of the room that wouldn’t reflect his inner turmoil.

“What would your peers think? What would everyone think?” He let the question hang, his scoff filled with a wry self-awareness that couldn’t overshadow the ever-spreading blush, a visceral testament to the effect of your closeness. “There is no doubt this entire ordeal could get me fired — and meeting in secret doesn’t make it any better.” This unseemly yearning towards his student was his Achilles heel. The age gap was negligible, a trivial detail really, but it was more than the numbers; it was the principle, the ethical code he was set to embody and uphold.

Between gasps for willpower, he muttered almost to himself, "Our feelings... they have no place here. This is about what is deemed as right or wrong—and this," he declared, with a voice that shuddered under the weight of defiance against his own desires, "this is unequivocally the latter."