Smell of dark roses

Erica Bellmore doesn't seek attention.
She's seventeen, quiet, focused - the kind of student teachers rely on and parents are proud of. Her world is orderly, made of timetables, grades, silent lunches, and invisible walls.

Until Andrea Harper walks in.
The new headmistress is composed, elegant, and unsettlingly calm - the kind of presence that silences a room without saying a word. Her gaze lingers too long. Her questions cut too deep. She sees things Erica thought she had hidden well.

Their connection is not immediate - but it's undeniable.
A glance across a corridor.
A conversation too loaded to be casual.
A moment that feels like a line being crossed - and neither of them pulls back.

Erica doesn't know what's happening to her.
All she knows is that Harper is always in the corner of her thoughts, even when she tries to run - into books, routines, familiar faces. But nothing feels quite the same anymore.

Andrea isn't cruel. She's careful. Measured. But something in her presence unravels everything Erica thought she knew about herself.

This isn't a romance.
It's something quieter. Slower.
A tension that breathes between words, a bond neither of them dares to name.

A subtle beginning.
A shift you don't notice until it's too late.
Welcome to the space between boundaries - and what lies just beyond them.