Flicker by Arreyn Grey

other people, she realized now that she had been starving.
                  Abruptly, Elise felt a touch on her shoulder, and whirled, her skirts flaring out from her legs. A girl stood there-- small, just a freshman, barely as tall as Elise herself. Her dark brown eyes were fixed on Elise's face, and she too reached out, yearning. They were all around her-- a round-faced boy, a girl with multitudes of braids, a girl wearing heavy makeup, a boy with too many freckles to count-- all begging to touch her, to be part of her, to have whatever she would give them, to give her everything they had. Elise stretched out her arms, laughing wildly, and accepted their passion.
                  “Elise!” A sharp voice came from behind her.
                  Elise turned reluctantly, and there he stood. She caught sight of his deep blue eyes, impossibly bright, and her focus snapped onto him, the only one who mattered, narrowing until he was the only person in the room. “Alex,” she whispered. Distantly, she was aware that the swelling bubble of energy had popped for everyone else-- the people around her suddenly lost their drive to interact, stopped shouting and pushing and went dazedly to sit down. She didn't care.
                  Alex was striding toward her, and she drew herself up to meet him, chin tilted up and hands held loosely at her sides, ready to grab him and pull him close. But he didn't give her the chance. As soon as he reached her, he seized her arm just above the elbow in a bruising grip that brought her anger simmering to the surface of her roiling emotions. Before she could strike out at him, though, he was pulling her, dragging her through the oblivious crowd so quickly she nearly had to run to keep her balance.
                  Alex made for one of the side exits, forcing her outside with him and into the warm fall air, not stopping until they were all the way down the length of the school building. Elise's fury at being manhandled peaked quickly, but it wasn't pure rage-- the emotion was confused by a tangle of lust and excitement and a little nervousness. Before she could decide which she wanted to act upon, Alex drew up by a small grove of trees by the edge of the football stadium. Her anger flared up again as he pulled her to a halt, and without thinking, never doubting that she could, she jerked free of his iron grasp on her arm.
                  “What the hell?” She faced off with him, hands balled into fists and chest out, everything about her screaming aggression.
                  He met her eyes, his expression carefully blank, but deep within him she thought she saw pain. She could also tell he was trying very hard to be calm, and something about his attempt at detachment drained away most of her rage. But in its wake came the tiny, critical voices in her head that sounded like her parents.
                  “The wrong kind of attention,” her mother whispered.
                  “Throwing away our sacrifices,” her father growled.
                  One day of deciding not to hide anymore, and she'd already gotten herself involved in some kind of riot-- or orgy, she wasn't sure which. What had she been thinking? Letting so many people just touch her like that-- and not all of them had laid their hands on her arms, she recalled with abject horror. It hadn't felt wrong at the time, though-- it had felt, somehow, perfect. She'd suddenly realized how terribly lonely she was, how starved she felt without any connection to other people-- just in time for her classmates to reach out for her.
                  But still, what would they think now? She tried to picture it objectively, without the rush she'd felt at their contact, and the image she came up with was something out of a nightmare-- some wanton slut just opening her body and letting everyone in the room reach out and grab her.