lilianaxspam
Shelby Myers is a 20-year-old college student with a quiet intensity that most people overlook. With her striking red-and-black hair, porcelain skin, and sharp blue eyes, she moves through the world like a shadow-unnoticed, except by those who take the time to really see her. Dressed in dark academia attire-tweed skirts, high-necked blouses, and vintage cardigans-she looks like she stepped out of an old Gothic novel. Her ears are lined with delicate piercings, each one a small act of rebellion against her own timid nature.
Shelby is painfully shy, her anxiety a constant companion that makes social interactions exhausting. The only person who truly understands her is her outgoing, vivacious roommate, Charlotte Wilson-a party girl with reddish-brown hair, warm brown eyes, and a sun-kissed glow that contrasts Shelby's ghostly pallor. Charlotte drags Shelby out of her shell, but even she doesn't know the deepest secret Shelby keeps locked away: her obsessive, all-consuming love for her enigmatic literature professor, Alexander Gardner.
And Alexander feels it too.
Through dual POVs, we see their forbidden attraction from both sides-Shelby's obsessive longing and Alexander's internal battle between desire and morality. He knows he should resist, but the way she looks at him, the way she understands him in a way no one else does, makes restraint impossible. Their relationship is a slow-burning fuse, threatening to ignite everything in its path.
Told through Shelby's introspective and sometimes unsettling perspective, each chapter ends with an entry from her diary-*The Secret Pages of Shelby Myers*-where she confesses her darkest thoughts, her spiraling obsession, and the terrifying realization that love and obsession might be the same thing.