
The Penalty Box Tutor
sunsationaldee · Ongoing · 182.0k Words
Introduction
That’s what the sign hanging on Taylor Wilson’s dorm room wall says.
Too bad she knows it’s a lie.
Because real life doesn’t work that way. You don’t wake up magically prettier, thinner, more confident, or suddenly become the kind of girl people notice.
You wake up as you.
Same body. Same insecurities. Same loneliness waiting exactly where you left it.
Taylor has spent her entire life blending into the background behind oversized hoodies and awkward silences, convinced if people look at her too long, they’ll only find something to laugh at.
Especially guys like Marco Jennings.
Cocky. Gorgeous. Star hockey player. Campus obsession.
The kind of guy who’s never had to wonder if he was enough a day in his life.
And definitely not the kind of guy who notices girls like Taylor.
Until he does.
When Marco starts failing philosophy and risks losing his eligibility to play, the quiet pre-med student he’s never paid attention to suddenly becomes the only person who can help him.
What starts as reluctant tutoring quickly turns into late nights, tension-filled banter, jealousy, unexpected vulnerability… and feelings neither of them know what to do with.
Because beneath Marco’s ego is a guy carrying more pressure than anyone realizes.
And beneath Taylor’s oversized hoodies is a girl who’s spent so long hiding that she doesn’t know how to be seen.
But falling for the campus hockey king doesn’t erase years of insecurity overnight.
And Taylor knows how stories like this usually go.
Guys like Marco Jennings don’t fall for girls like her.
…Right?
Chapter 1
Taylor
The shrill buzz of my alarm shattered the silence of my dorm room.
I groaned and blindly reached across my nightstand, knocking over a pen before finally finding my phone. The noise stopped, leaving behind the kind of quiet that somehow felt even louder at six-thirty in the morning.
For a few seconds, I just lay there.
Same ceiling.
Same tiny crack running across the corner that looked suspiciously like Florida if you squinted hard enough.
Same faint shadow from the air vent.
Same room.
Same life.
Nothing had changed while I slept.
With a sigh, I pushed the blankets aside and sat up. The floor was cold against my bare feet, and I immediately regretted every life choice that had led me to an eight o’clock philosophy class.
My gaze drifted toward the wall across from my bed.
The sign was still there.
New Day, New Beginnings.
I stared at it.
It stared back.
Every morning we had this little silent argument.
A bitter laugh escaped me as I rubbed my eyes.
“Yeah, okay.”
I wasn’t even sure why I’d bought it in the first place. Probably because it had looked cute hanging in the store. Or maybe because some hopeful version of me had actually believed it.
That girl was apparently an idiot.
Because life didn’t work that way.
There was no magical reset button waiting for you when you fell asleep.
No fairy godmother sneaking into your room overnight.
No dramatic movie montage where you woke up transformed into a completely different person.
You closed your eyes as you.
And you woke up as you.
Same face.
Same body.
Same insecurities.
Same problems waiting patiently for you exactly where you’d left them the night before.
I stood and shuffled toward the bathroom.
The overhead light flickered on, blinding me for a second before reality hit me square in the face.
Literally.
The mirror didn’t sugarcoat anything.
My long brown hair hung around my shoulders in limp waves that never seemed to cooperate. I ran my fingers through it, attempting some kind of miracle rescue.
Nothing.
It settled right back into place.
I leaned closer.
Still tired.
Still average.
Still looking like I lost a fight with my pillow.
And the rest of me?
Well.
No overnight miracle there either.
My gaze dropped before I quickly looked away again.
Not because I didn’t know what I looked like.
I knew exactly what I looked like.
Curvy.
Soft.
Definitely not the kind of body social media liked to reward.
Not the kind that made heads turn when I walked into a room.
I wasn’t one of those girls.
The ones who somehow looked effortlessly beautiful while claiming they “just threw something on.”
The ones who woke up looking camera-ready.
The ones who didn’t spend half their lives wondering if people noticed the extra weight they carried.
I knew what people saw when they looked at me.
Which was exactly why I preferred when they didn’t look at all.
“New day, my ass,” I muttered, grabbing my toothbrush.
An hour later, I was sitting in Philosophy 101 questioning every decision that had led me to this moment.
The classroom buzzed with conversation as students filed inside. Laughter bounced off the walls. Someone near the front was talking way too loudly about a party from the weekend.
I slipped into my usual seat near the back.
Nobody had assigned it to me.
Nobody would have cared if they had.
But after the first few weeks of the semester, it had unofficially become mine.
Maybe because I always sat there.
Or maybe because nobody noticed me enough to sit there first.
Honestly, either option felt equally believable.
I set my notebook on the desk and glanced around the room.
Big mistake.
A group of girls sat near the front chatting and laughing together.
They looked perfect.
Not Instagram perfect.
Real-life perfect.
The kind of beautiful that made other girls immediately start comparing themselves without even meaning to.
Their hair was glossy.
Their makeup was flawless.
Their clothes fit exactly the way clothes were apparently supposed to fit.
Meanwhile, I’d spent fifteen minutes deciding whether my sweater made me look slightly less round than my other sweater.
Spoiler alert.
It didn’t.
I looked away before I could continue spiraling.
That was another bad habit of mine.
Comparing.
I always lost.
My attention shifted back toward my notebook just as movement near the doorway caught my eye.
And then he walked in.
Marco Jennings.
Of course.
A sigh slipped out before I could stop it.
The annoying thing about Marco wasn’t that he was attractive.
The annoying thing was that he knew he was attractive.
There was a difference.
He carried himself like someone who had never doubted his place in a room.
Tall. Confident. Relaxed.
Like the world naturally made space for him wherever he went.
The reaction was immediate.
Girls glanced up.
A few whispered to each other.
One girl actually sat up straighter.
Which was honestly ridiculous because this was philosophy, not a meet-and-greet.
Marco didn’t seem to notice.
Or maybe he noticed and just pretended not to.
Either way, he kept walking like he owned the place.
Which, to be fair, wasn’t that far from the truth.
Star hockey player.
Campus celebrity.
Future professional athlete if the rumors were true.
And, in my personal opinion?
A complete asshole.
He’d been that guy in high school too.
The golden boy.
The one everybody loved.
The one teachers adored and students followed around like lost puppies.
We’d attended the same school for years.
Walked the same hallways.
Probably sat in some of the same classrooms.
Yet I could practically guarantee he had no idea who I was.
Why would he?
People like Marco didn’t notice people like me.
Our worlds had never overlapped.
Not really.
Still…
There was a tiny part of me that hated how good-looking he was.
A tiny, embarrassing part that noticed every time he walked into a room.
A tiny, stupid part that had carried around a crush for longer than I’d ever admit out loud.
Not that it mattered.
Because reality wasn’t a romance novel.
The popular hockey star wasn’t going to suddenly discover the quiet girl in the back row and realize she’d been the love of his life all along.
That wasn’t how real life worked.
Marco liked girls who looked like they belonged on fitness magazine covers.
Girls with toned legs and flat stomachs.
Girls who wore confidence as naturally as breathing.
Girls who looked nothing like me.
I leaned back in my chair and stared toward the front of the room.
The professor hadn’t even arrived yet, and somehow I was already exhausted.
Maybe that was why the sign in my dorm bothered me so much.
Because it promised something life never delivered.
New Day. New Beginnings.
I almost laughed.
Maybe one day I’d finally take it down.
Because as far as I could tell, this day was shaping up exactly like every other one.
And nothing about my life was about to change.
Last Chapters
#139 Chapter 139 Chapter 139
Last Updated: 8/26/2026#138 Chapter 138 Chapter 138
Last Updated: 8/25/2026#137 Chapter 137 Chapter 137
Last Updated: 8/24/2026#136 Chapter 136 Chapter 136
Last Updated: 8/21/2026#135 Chapter 135 Chapter 135
Last Updated: 8/21/2026#134 Chapter 134 Chapter 134
Last Updated: 8/20/2026#133 Chapter 133 Chapter 133
Last Updated: 8/20/2026#132 Chapter 132 Chapter 132
Last Updated: 8/18/2026#131 Chapter 131 Chapter 131
Last Updated: 8/18/2026#130 Chapter 130 Chapter 130
Last Updated: 8/17/2026
You Might Like 😍
A Queen Among Darkness (Book 4 in the Gods' Saga)
For centuries, she has been on the run, helping the supernatural community under the cloak of anonymity while she works to clear her name and save the very people after her from destruction.
Enemies are closing in, but an unexpected complication befalls her when she realises she’s been fated to someone who wants her species exterminated. After all, an evil chance seldom comes alone.
A Queen Among Darkness is the 4th book in the Queen Among Series/The Gods' Saga. This is an interconnected series. To see how it ends, I recommend reading the full series.
Books in the series in order:
A Queen Among Alphas - Book 1
Bite-Size Luna - A Queen Among Alphas Prequel (available under book 1)
A Queen Among Snakes - Book 2
A Queen Among Blood - Book 3
A Queen Among Darkness - Book 4
Whole Again - A Queen Among Alpha's spin-off (available under book 1)
A Queen Among Tides - Book 5
Valor, Virtue, and Verve - Tides Prequel Spin-off (will be available under book 5)
A Queen Among Gods - Book 6
Runaway Empress - A Queen Among Snakes Prequel (will be available under book 2)
A Queen Among Tempests - Book 7
Dark Vocation - Darkness spin-off (will be available under book 4)
A Court of Arcane Souls Anthology (side character short stories exclusive to Ream)
Royal Shadow Series (Next Generation Coming Soon)
Reborn 14 Years later: Fix My Broken Family
At least, that's what everyone believed.
One moment, she was trapped inside a sinking car beneath the icy waters of the Hudson River. The next, she woke up in her own bathtub and somehow fourteen years in the future.
Her husband is no longer the warm, easygoing man she remembers.
Her five-year-old son is now a nineteen-year-old stranger who looks at her with suspicion.
Her twins barely remember the mother they lost—one forever chasing affection, the other keeping the entire world at arm's length.
And the family she left behind has become something broken, distant, and unrecognizable.
Now Isabella faces an impossible challenge: rebuilding a family that never truly recovered from losing her.
Fourteen years have left scars on everyone.
Unfortunately for those causing the damage, Isabella Winston has returned to set things right.
BROKEN TRUST
Neither of them knew she was carrying his child.
Emily’s affair didn’t just end her marriage—it erased the life she thought was guaranteed. Ryan left without looking back, carrying his anger like armor and leaving Emily alone with regret she would never outrun. Three years later, fate drags them back into each other’s world, along with a little girl who has Ryan’s eyes and a truth that shatters everything he thought he knew.
Old wounds reopen, grief masquerades as rage, and love refuses to stay buried. As parenthood binds them together and the past demands accountability, Emily and Ryan must face the question neither of them is ready to answer: is broken trust the end of their story… or the beginning of a love forged through loss, forgiveness, and brutal honesty?
The Alpha King's Human Mate
“I have waited nine years for you. That’s nearly a decade since I’ve felt this emptiness inside me. Part of me began to wonder if you didn’t exist or you’d already died. And then I found you, right inside my own home.”
He used one of his hands to stroke my cheek and tingles erupted everywhere.
“I’ve spent enough time without you and I will not let anything else keep us apart. Not other wolves, not my drunken father who’s barely holding himself together the past twenty years, not your family – and not even you.”
Clark Bellevue has spent her entire life as the only human in the wolf pack - literally. Eighteen years ago, Clark was the accidental result of a brief affair between one of the most powerful Alphas in the world and a human woman. Despite living with her father and her werewolf half-siblings, Clark has never felt like she really belonged in the werewolf world. But right as Clark plans to leave the werewolf world behind for good, her life gets flipped upside down by her mate: the next Alpha King, Griffin Bardot. Griffin has been waiting years for the chance to meet his mate, and he's not about to let her go anytime soon. It doesn't matter how far Clark tries to run from her destiny or her mate - Griffin intends to keep her, no matter what he has to do or who stands in his way.
A pack of their own
Accidentally Crossing the Tycoon
Four years ago, the Bailey family faced a devastating financial crisis.
Just when bankruptcy seemed inevitable, a mysterious benefactor emerged, offering salvation with one condition: a contract marriage.
Rumors swirled about this enigmatic man—whispers claimed he was hideously ugly and too ashamed to show his face, possibly harboring dark, twisted obsessions.
Without hesitation, the Baileys sacrificed me to protect their precious biological daughter, forcing me to take her place as a pawn in this cold, calculated arrangement.
Luckily, in those four years, the mysterious husband never asked to meet in person.
Now, in the final year of our arrangement, the husband I've never met is demanding we meet face to face.
But disaster struck the night before my return—drunk and disoriented, I stumbled into the wrong hotel room and ended up sleeping with the legendary financial mogul, Caspar Thornton.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
Cursed Fates
Falling for my boyfriend's Navy brother
"What is wrong with me?
Why does being near him make my skin feel too tight, like I’m wearing a sweater two sizes too small?
It’s just newness, I tell myself firmly.
He’s my boyfirend’s brother.
This is Tyler’s family.
I’m not going to let one cold stare undo that.
**
As a ballet dancer, My life looks perfect—scholarship, starring role, sweet boyfriend Tyler. Until Tyler shows his true colors and his older brother, Asher, comes home.
Asher is a Navy veteran with battle scars and zero patience. He calls me "princess" like it's an insult. I can't stand him.
When My ankle injury forces her to recover at the family lake house, I‘m stuck with both brothers. What starts as mutual hatred slowly turns into something forbidden.
I'm falling for my boyfriend's brother.
**
I hate girls like her.
Entitled.
Delicate.
And still—
Still.
The image of her standing in the doorway, clutching her cardigan tighter around her narrow shoulders, trying to smile through the awkwardness, won’t leave me.
Neither does the memory of Tyler. Leaving her here without a second thought.
I shouldn’t care.
I don’t care.
It’s not my problem if Tyler’s an idiot.
It’s not my business if some spoiled little princess has to walk home in the dark.
I’m not here to rescue anyone.
Especially not her.
Especially not someone like her.
She’s not my problem.
And I’ll make damn sure she never becomes one.
But when my eyes fell on her lips, I wanted her to be mine.
The Spy Who Left
"I still can't believe she actually did it. Aria Hart, filing for divorce. Who saw that coming?"
"How long do we think it'll take before she comes crawling back?" Another voice joins the conversation.
"Three days," Victoria declares. "Five at most. She has no money, no skills, no family. Where's she going to go?"
When Aria Chen divorced billionaire Leon Hart, New York's elite sneered, betting she'd crawl back within days. She never did.
Three years later, the world is rocked when Dr. Aria Vale, CEO of a revolutionary cybersecurity empire, steps into the spotlight. The mysterious genius who built a billion-dollar company from nothing is none other than Leon's discarded wife, the woman everyone thought was just a pretty ornament.
Now, every powerful man wants the queen Leon threw away a renowned scientist seeking partnership, a financial titan proposing an empire, and an actor offering devotion. Each sees the brilliance Leon ignored.
Then Leon discovers the truth: Aria's sacrifices, her secret double life, and the daughter she's been raising without him. For the first time, the man who once took her for granted must fight for her love. But can he compete with men who valued her from the beginning?
A story of love, betrayal, and power where the king must kneel before the queen who never needed saving.
The Pack: Rule Number 1 - No Mates
"Let me go," I whimper, my body trembling with need. "I don't want you touching me."
I fall forward onto the bed then turn around to stare at him. The dark tattoos of Domonic's chiseled shoulders, quiver and and expand with the heave of his chest. His deep dimpled smile is full of arrogance as he reaches behind himself to lock the door.
Biting his lip, he stalks toward me, his hand going to the seam of his pants and the thickening bulge there.
"Are you sure you don't want me to touch you?" He whispers, untying the knot and slipping a hand inside. "Because I swear to God, that is all I have been wanting to do. Every single day from the moment you stepped in our bar and I smelled your perfect flavor from across the room."
New to the world of shifters, Draven is human on the run. A beautiful girl who no one could protect. Domonic is the cold Alpha of the Red Wolf Pack. A brotherhood of twelve wolves that live by twelve rules. Rules which they vowed could NEVER be broken.
Especially - Rule Number One - No Mates
When Draven meets Domonic, he knows that she is his mate, but Draven has no idea what a mate is, only that she has fallen in love with a shifter. An Alpha that will break her heart to make her leave. Promising herself, she will never forgive him, she disappears.
But she doesn’t know about the child she’s carrying or that the moment she left, Domonic decided rules were made to be broken - and now will he ever find her again? Will she forgive him?
Pregnant by My Husband's Rival Alpha
Those words should have destroyed me, but the truth was worse: I'd been used as a broodmare by the man who swore to love me, set up in a hotel room with a stranger because My husband Alexander Cross couldn't father children himself, and now I carried the secret babies of Damon Lester—the most powerful and dangerous Alpha in San Loris—while my own family replaced me with the daughter they'd always wanted. But when that same stranger's doctor appeared at my door, when twenty million dollars exchanged hands over a fake perfume bearing my secret identity, and when Damon's gray eyes locked onto mine with recognition I couldn't afford, I realized my carefully hidden life as the legendary perfumer Vera was colliding with a pregnancy that could cost me everything.
Could I protect my babies from the husband plotting my death, hide my true identity from the Alpha who's been hunting me for years, and reclaim the freedom I'd buried along with my dreams—even if it means standing alone against the wolves who see me as nothing more than a womb to be used and discarded?
After One Night with the Alpha
I thought I was waiting for love. Instead, I got fucked by a beast.
My world was supposed to bloom at the Moonshade Bay Full Moon Festival—champagne buzzing in my veins, a hotel room booked for Jason and me to finally cross that line after two years. I’d slipped into lacy lingerie, left the door unlocked, and lay on the bed, heart pounding with nervous excitement.
But the man who climbed into my bed wasn’t Jason.
In the pitch-black room, drowned in a heady, spicy scent that made my head spin, I felt hands—urgent, scorching—searing my skin. His thick, pulsing cock pressed against my dripping cunt, and before I could gasp, he thrust hard, tearing through my innocence with ruthless force. Pain burned, my walls clenching as I clawed at his iron shoulders, stifling sobs. Wet, slick sounds echoed with every brutal stroke, his body unrelenting until he shuddered, spilling hot and deep inside me.
"That was amazing, Jason," I managed to say.
"Who the fuck is Jason?"
My blood turned to ice. Light slashed across his face—Brad Rayne, Alpha of Moonshade Pack, a werewolf, not my boyfriend. Horror choked me as I realized what I’d done.
I ran away for my life!
But weeks later, I woke up pregnant with his heir!
They say my heterochromatic eyes mark me as a rare true mate. But I’m no wolf. I’m just Elle, a nobody from the human district, now trapped in Brad's world.
Brad’s cold gaze pins me: “You carry my blood. You’re mine.”
There is no other choice for me but to chose this cage. My body also betrays me, craving the beast who ruined me.
WARNING: Mature Readers Only












