Page 66 of Twisting Beauty

I moved before I decided to.

He saw me coming and dodged, springing back off the bench with a laugh.

I lunged again, reckless now, shame burning through my chest and behind my eyes.

We collided and went down hard onto the grass.

We rolled, his laughter pressing close against my ear, and I ended up on top of him with my thighs bracketing his hips and my breath coming in ragged pulls and the whole school watching.

His eyes met mine from underneath me. He wasn’t laughing anymore.

For one suspended, terrible second, the performance dropped completely. There was nothing in his expression but something raw and unguarded, something that looked almost like hunger stripped of cruelty, and it was directed entirely at me.

I forgot, for that second, that the whole school was watching. It was just my body on top of his.

I think he did too. Then it was gone, buried so fast under the smirk that I almost doubted I’d seen it, and he kept reading.

He flipped us.

One smooth, practiced movement and suddenly he was above me, his hips pinning mine to the cold ground, one hand holding the page out of my reach while the other pressed flat against my wrist.

He lowered his head slowly, deliberately, until his lips brushed the shell of my ear. “You don’t get to pretend you don’t want me.”

He pulled back just enough to look at me, a cruel, justified look in his eyes.

Then realization hit, cold and clear underneath all the shame and the heat and the noise of the crowd.

This wasn’t just hatred. Wasn’t just cruelty.

This was punishment for the courtyard. For walking past him with my chin up and my eyes forward while his friends laughed. For making him look like someone a girl could ignore.

“I imagine what his perfect cock would taste like.”

I fought him. I kept fighting him. My face blazed and my thighs were pressed together and shame sang through my bloodstream like something poisonous, but underneath it, underneath all of it, an unwanted heat burned low in my belly and I hated it, hated him, hated the way my body had apparently decided to have its own opinion about this entirely separate from my own.

The crowd had gone quiet, everyone holding their breath.

“What it would feel like stretching my needy⁠—”

I got a hand free and seized the page.

Lorcan let me have it, which told me everything.

I shoved him off and rolled upright and scrambled to my feet, grass stains on my dress and my hair falling loose and my cheeks burning so hot I thought the air around me might scorch. I crushed the page in both fists.

“That’s a photocopy, sis.”

He was still on the grass, propped back on his elbows, completely at ease, watching me with those pale eyes that gave nothing away and took everything in. Then, slowly, deliberately, he grabbed himself through his trousers and thrust his hips up at the empty air.

“Oh, Lorcan,” he moaned, and the impression of my voice, of Rua’s voice, was close enough to make my stomach heave. “Harder, big brother, harder⁠—”

The laughter that erupted was the loud, ugly kind. It crashed over me in a wave. Someone was pointing at me. Someone else had their phone out.

My legs moved on their own.

I turned and broke into a run, the laughter chasing me across the courtyard and through the archway and out into the corridor beyond, and I told myself as I ran that he was cruel. That any softness I’d glimpsed in him was a mask he put on and took off at will. That the heat in my belly was just biology, just the body’s stupid animal response to proximity and danger and it meant nothing.

I told myself all of that. My eyes were burning. I kept running.