Disclaimer: "Never Been Kissed" is the property of 20th Century Fox and any and all characters and situations originating therefrom belong to them and not I who use them without permission or intent to profit.

"Don't Stand So Close To Me"
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'

Samuel Coulson had a problem. As a teacher and, if he could say it without being considered egotistical, a decently attactive man, he was used to being the subject of student crushes. The situation he was facing now, however, was much different and quite possibly a lot worse.

He had never thought that he would be the one attracted to one of his students.

When she had walked into his classroom, his first thoughts were annoyance at being stuck teaching yet another bottled blonde - did she really think no one saw the darker roots? - whose only real experience in literature was reading whatever the current popular supernatural romance series was and arguing over which of the prospective suitors of the female lead she would most like to be with herself. That lasted only until she raised her hand and opened her mouth, then he was hooked.

He had never cared for fishing and now he probably never would since he now wondered if this was how a fish felt after it was hooked, being pulled unavoidably to its doom. The problem was that the metaphor broke down when he thought about it and realised that at least the fish would fight, he wanted it and that was part of the problem. He wanted it and he shouldn't. He knew he shouldn't. She was his student, ten years younger than him. Despite the current troubles in their relationship, he already had a girlfriend.

And, of course, there was the fact that she was his student; he had to keep reminding himself of that fact as it was the more important one of them all. She was his student, she was ten years younger than him, she was seventeen, she was underage. No matter how he phrased it in his mind, it couldn't change one simple fact; he was smitten. Lovestruck. Enticed. Entranced. Entangled. He was all this and more and it was all because of one girl.

Josephine 'Josie' Geller.

It was almost enough to make him cry. When he was getting his teaching degree, he had sworn never to be one of those teachers that gave the profession a bad name, one of those teachers that made the six o'clock news by sleeping with their students or their students' parents, or their own co-workers or bosses. He intended to have more respect for himself and for the job than that. Where had he gone wrong?

He knew the answer to that question, in his own classroom, roughly three seconds after she had defined and given the etomology of the word 'pastural'.

It awoke something in him that he had begun to think was dead. A long-abandoned hope that he might someday find someone who loved the written word as much as he did, who didn't need something to involve celebrity gossip or court motions to want to read it, but instead would want to read it simply because it was there to read; someone who didn't care about the legal precedent or the effect it would have on a television show, just that it was good literature.

Literature, books, reading, words, that was a large part of what it all came down to. All the way back to when he was younger, the books he read that involved the hero - battered, bloodied, but unbeaten - leaving the site of the final battle to return home to the woman he loved, usually followed by a scene with the two of them talking about where they would go and what they would do in the future now that the world had been saved and lovers had finally found each other. Even more recently, the sappy romance novels that he had enjoyed as a guilty pleasure while in college, story after story with the same plot, but he had read dozens of them. As a teacher, he might need to be a realist to get students to listen and understand that literature wasn't dead words on paper pages, but something that was alive and around them every day; but, as a person, he was a romantic, he wanted to believe in two people meant for each other, to believe in 'happily ever after' and 'love conquers all'.

As a teacher, he was not supposed to feel this way for one of his students.

As a person...

Sam walked around the living room of his apartment, not sure he wanted to finish that thought, not sure he wanted to deal with the truth he'd have to confront if he finished that thought. Idly as he walked, he ran his hands across the spines of the books on his bookcase, each one a story he had read and enjoyed, a book he loved to read and reread whenever the mood took him. Suddenly, Sam stopped and turned his eyes to the bookshelf. As his eyes focused, he saw one of the books on his shelf and reacted in anger, pulling it from the shelf and physically throwing it across the room to hit the wall. The name of the author and title of the book glaring accusingly up at him from the floor where it landed.

'Lolita' by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov.