Quinn watches as the girl from the assembly carefully arranges her things inside her locker. She smirks a little at the sight, knowing God must have a sense of humor if he's placed the means for her complete destruction in the hands of a five-foot-two songbird in an argyle skirt, knee socks, and a purple sweater with a giant unicorn embroidered on it.
And yet, when Quinn looks at her, she sees past all that, sees straight through to something she doesn't completely understand yet, something pure, something that makes this girl beautiful in a way Quinn knows she herself will never be, no matter what she puts her body through.
In the background, she can hear Finn chattering away animatedly, but she's long-since learned how to tune him out. There are too many other voices in her head, constantly battling for her attention, for her to devote much energy to his ridiculously-detailed explanation of whatever video game he stayed up all night trying to beat.
Down the hall, the brunette goes up on her toes to reach for something at the top of her locker, and Quinn's eyes rake covetously over the girl's toned calves.
"Stop looking," she tells herself sternly. "Stop. Looking."
Without warning, a quiet groan slips loose from the back of her throat.
"You ok, babe?" Finn asks.
"Yeah," she jumps, hastily reassembling her self-control. She puts her right hand on her left shoulder and pretends to work out a tightened muscle. "Tough practice this morning; I'll be fine."
Finn nods uselessly. "Right. Well, I've gotta head to class."
She smiles at him, the same rehearsed way she always smiles at him. But when he leans in to kiss her, her head turns swiftly before she can stop herself, and his rough lips land on her cheek instead of her mouth. If he notices or is offended by it, he doesn't say so, but she's already chastising herself for the unplanned and unexpected reaction.
As soon as he walks away, she wipes his saliva from her cheek with the sleeve of her Cheerios jacket. The brunette gently closes her locker and looks over in Quinn's direction. She seems so delicate and helpless, clutching her notebook to her chest and smiling meekly. Quinn feels that burn again, that desire to touch, to be connected to this girl in whatever way she can. It's then that she realizes that she's waving, and the girl is waving back, her smile brightening. Quinn feels a little flutter in her chest at the sight, but then the bell rings, and as the hallway fills up with people, she realizes she's let things get out of hand.
She grits her teeth and balls the hand she has been waving with into a fist. If there's anything she's learned from the process of becoming Quinn, it's that there have to be consequences, punishments, for even the smallest of indulgences. She desperately wants to drive her fist into the metal door of her locker, for the skin to break and bleed, for the knuckles to crack and bruise. But she can't risk breaking the hand of the Head Cheerio; in fact, she can't really risk physical harm of any kind. Not if she wants to keep on being Quinn, unblemished, untouchable Quinn. She'd usually just plan on running it off later that night, but with how wound up she is right now, there's a good chance she'd run until she passed out somewhere, and that won't do either.
So instead, she decides to let Finn touch her breasts – over the shirt – when they make out later that afternoon. Her insides twist and turn in revolt as he gropes her, but she forces herself to stay in the moment, to feel it. She knows if she's ever going to be able to fix what's really wrong with her, she needs to learn how to accept this. Despite the screaming in her head, she manages to get through it without crying or pushing him away, and when he finally stops, she thinks perhaps the punishment actually worked.
But a few nights later, in the safety of her bed, the tiny brunette invades Quinn's thoughts yet again. The beast inside is snarling at her now, trying desperately to pull free from its restraints. And this time, she lets it happen. Lets all those pent-up images of eyes and lips, hands and legs, of skin and tongues, wash over her until she's panting hard and grinding her hips down into the mattress beneath her, fingers blindly fumbling against that delicious ache between her legs.
At first, it sort of feels like one of her panics, the way everything tenses and constricts. The way the ache spreads inside her, filling her the way it did when she heard her dream girl sing for the first time. Only this time it just keeps going, so much farther past anything she thought she could stand, until, at last, it explodes in a white hot blaze.
She wakes up the next morning feeling disgusted and defeated. She realizes now that none of the ways she'd normally punish herself are going to work anymore, not after this. They're all either impractical, or she's outgrown them. And there's only so much she's really willing to let Finn do to her.
Everything feels like it's unraveling around her, like the defect, the beast, could be revealed at any moment. And there's only one way to make it stop. She's got to keep that girl as far away from her as possible, no matter what it takes.