Twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Marcus Monroe has spent his entire life fighting for control. After earning his doctorate in chemistry, he lands a prestigious teaching position at an Ivy League university where one mistake could destroy the career he sacrificed everything to build.
Then he meets Damian Cross.

Twenty-three, rich, reckless, and infamous across campus for his boxing career and brutal arrogance, Damian is the kind of student Marcus should avoid at all costs. He skips lectures, starts fights, breaks rules, and treats authority like a personal challenge. Beneath the charm and expensive suits, though, Damian is brilliant - and Marcus realizes that far too quickly.

Their relationship begins with arguments.

Then fascination.

Then obsession.

As Damian starts pushing deeper into Marcus's carefully controlled life, the tension between them becomes impossible to ignore. Forced together through late-night lab work, academic conferences, boxing matches, and growing campus rumors, the two men become trapped in a dangerous game of restraint neither of them knows how to stop.

But at a university built on reputation and power, their connection could ruin everything:
Marcus's career.
Damian's future.
And the fragile versions of themselves they only reveal to each other.

What starts as intellectual rivalry slowly turns into a secret relationship fueled by tension, vulnerability, jealousy, and desire - forcing both men to confront whether love is worth destroying the lives they built without it.

A dark academia slow-burn romance full of chemistry, obsession, emotional tension, and forbidden desire, Catalyst is about two men trying desperately not to fall in love... while becoming each other's safest place anyway.