Page 30 of Twisting Beauty

O’Sullivan turned to the board and wrote in neat, precise letters, the white chalk clicking against the blackboard with brisk authority.

“The Physiology and Subjectivity of Pain.”

The title of his lecture sat there like a private joke aimed straight at me.

He launched into the lecture with clinical detachment, talking about nociceptors, nerve fibers, and the altered thresholds of trauma survivors as if pain became less human once reduced to terminology and diagrams. The colder his voice became, the more my skin prickled.

I copied down every word I could catch, my pen moving too fast, my notes turning into a panicked blur of half-understood terms and arrows I prayed would make sense later. The harder I tried to keep up, the more the lecture slid sideways out of reach, and the pressure in my chest built with each passing minute.

He flashed up a slide with a diagram of pain receptors overlaid on a naked back, the image stark and clinical in the dim light.

“Pain, when repeated,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of scientific fact, “rewires the brain.”

My gaze snagged on the image and for a moment it morphed into Lorcan’s back without permission, not as it was in the slide, but hidden under his shirt, marked by his own father.

The thought went darker before I could stop it. I pictured bruises laid over older bruises, welts crossing scars, fresh damage painted over whatever had not yet faded, mottled like fall leaves. The image turned my stomach and tugged at something softer and more dangerous at the same time.

A pulse of empathy hit hard enough to override sense for one stupid second, and I looked over to him before I could stop myself.

Lorcan was already looking at me, his shoulders tense, his hand sitting knotted into a fist against his thigh. His face gave away almost nothing, but something about the stillness of it felt wrong, too intent, too fixed, as if he had read the direction of my thoughts and was irritated by my pity.

He brought his thumb up and rubbed it across his bottom lip.

A featherlight drag answered on my own mouth.

I jolted in my seat, my fingers flying up to my lips.

No. No, not him.

The mirror-touch part of my synesthesia was supposed to be an anomaly. A freak event. Triggered only by Deargán. It was supposed to be his. Only his.

Not Lorcan’s, too. No, he can’t be another trigger.

Across the room, Lorcan’s brows pulled together, his gaze dropping to my fingers still pressed against my lip. His thumb stilled on his mouth. His head tilted a fraction.

Shit. Drop your hand.

I forced my fingers down into my lap.

But Lorcan kept watching me, his brows still drawn, his face still working through whatever he had just seen.

I held his stare too long, and the mistake registered everywhere at once. Heat climbed under my skin. My pulse kicked harder. The space between my thighs tightened with a hot, humiliating awareness.

“Miss Lasair.” O’Sullivan’s voice cut through my thoughts like a blade. “Perhaps, rather than making gooey eyes across the lecture hall, you’d care to explain why central sensitization affects women more than men?”

I dragged my gaze off Lorcan and sat up too fast. Warmth flooded my face and burned there, thick and humiliating, while every inch of me screamed that half the room now believed they had just caught me staring at my own stepbrother.

Giggles broke out around me. One of the girls near Lorcan leaned toward another and whispered something that made the whole cluster laugh. Their delight carried a history I did not need explained. Ravenwood had not only noticed Rua’s fixation on Lorcan. They had fed on it.

“We haven’t got all day, Miss Lasair.”

O’Sullivan was still waiting for an answer.

My mind skidded uselessly through pages of neurobiology notes that refused to settle into anything I could actually say out loud. Terms blurred. Definitions slipped. The answer stayed just out of reach while the silence around me thickened.

“Because pain…” The word caught. I forced myself to keep going. “Because pain is sexist?”

Snickers rippled through the room. One boy let out an ugly, nasal snort. Emer turned her head with her mouth pinched tight, as if even looking at me now embarrassed her by association.