5. Degrees
She doesn't fall for him straight away. It's not as though she looks at him for the first time and feels a fluttering in her stomach, with her heart palpitating wildly in her chest. When he first arrives in school, in her class, she barely notices him.
And then everything changes when Kyle Stack's dog attacks her. Jonah is strong and brave and protects her so well. His arms around her…they feel right.
She would have been blind not to notice his affections after that. The little smiles that he casts her way, the way that his eyes follow her around the classroom. She tries to ignore the butterflies that are beating their wings insistently against her insides.
Because, little by little, degree by degree, she is falling for him.
She knows she is wrong to. She knows that she can't. She is his teacher. He is her pupil. And yet she is drawn to the way his dark eyes smile when he is happy; a moth helplessly attracted to the flame. He is gentle and kind and mature and so unlike any other teenaged boy that she knows. His arms…she knows they are strong and muscular, a quiet strength hidden beneath the layers of his school uniform. She catches herself staring at his mouth, her mind conjuring up images of what it might be like to kiss them. She berates herself harshly for those thoughts, then attempts to push him away in an effort to keep their relationship professional.
When he kisses her for the first time, she is lost. Helpless. Defeated. Her head is filled with his scent and his touch and the softness of his mouth. Her life, which has been tipping precariously towards the full one hundred and eighty degree tilt, falls forward quicker than a roller coaster descending from its zenith. She is hurtling towards the finish line with no way of stopping herself, no hope of saving herself.
Because now the truth is undeniable: she is irrevocably in love with a pupil.
A/N: And this is the last one. It was, to some extent, inspired by the Dowager Countess' quote, ...Sometimes we must let the blow fall by degrees, in the series Downton Abbey as this was the first thing that sprang to mind when I read what the prompt was for this one.
Hopefully these have been enjoyable. Thanks for reading.