They must have hit something.
As they laughed the PC slipped onto the ground, and with it I suddenly had freedom. I didn’t wait, lunging for the machine, only to bounce off an invisible wall. It was like rubber, but my ass hit the floor with a thud.
“Oh god, he actually thinks we are that stupid!” Layla laughed. She ruffled my hair, and when I tried to swat it away my hand bounced off. “Dipshit, we have been planning this thing for week, you have been unable to touch us for days, dork.”
Layla was never a friend. She was a red-headed glee-clubber, the kind that act all nice on the surface, but are bitter underneath. Last time we talked it was an argument, over who got to operate the communal 3D printer. I had won then, and that victory had come back to haunt me. Moving in, she pressed one of her dainty hands on my shoulder, pushing me over with violent force.
“Please, Anna.” I said, trying to stay away from them. There was another wall behind me, this one very real. “I haven’t done anything, please, I just wanna go home. I swear I will…”
“There isn’t anything you can offer me.” Anna replied. She had taken back the laptop, picking it up from the floor. After fixing a few things she proffered it back to hayley, only for Layla to take it for herself, getting in close once more. “The vac does pretty much everything. I mean, it sucks at making food and stuff, but we can just make you make us food.”
They began chatting about food, all but for Layla, who scooched in closer and closer. More excited than the rest, she already looked like she was plotting something cruel.
“Please, please Layla.” I begged in hush tones. She didn’t seem to care, flopping onto her back and looking up at Anna, the queen bee herself.
“So he is all set up now.” Layla smiled. “I have uploaded our fantasies, and categorised them in order of how much they are likely to stuck for him, and how likely they are to please us. Michelle, mind running us through them?”
Michelle was the smallest of the group, a late-blooming asian woman, and another that I thought was my friend. She and I worked together, and often talked about how evil the world was. Looking at her, I thought for a moment this might be a ruse, that she might be looking out for me, as I couldn’t believe she would go along with this. All those talks of injustice, of evil men, surely…
She kneeled at my side, face inches away. She put a hand on my cheek, pushing the sweat off, stilling my shakes of terror. I didn’t know what to say, what to do, but a moment later it came to an end.
“I can’t believe this is actually happening.” She said to Layla. “I’m so horny.”
My heart sunk again, as the room burst into more laughter.
“Okay, so Mark thinks he is a pervert, thinks.” She explained, standing over me. I groaned, tears forming in my eyes. “In the grand scheme of things he’s really not, but he has been brought up in a Christian family. While he no longer practises, nor do his parents, there is a lot of people that do in his broader family, and a lot of Christian hang-ups too. As a result, he does have a very conflicted view of sex, meaning he feels ashamed he looks at porn, and gets off on missionary. He is cis, but he isn’t THAT cis. He often wonders what being a woman would be like, though he is deeply embarrassed about that.”
It took me a moment to realise that she wasn’t just gesturing into the air, that there was something that they were seeing that I wasn’t. An invisible screen wasn’t too out of the ordinary, considering everything that was happening, but it only made my heart sink further. If my suspicions werre right, they could learn everything there is to learn about me.
“Meanwhile, our interests have started to merge.” She chuckled, a joke lost on me. There was a shift of energy in the room, the girls sharing more looks with one another, huddling close. The air beside Michelle aws still empty to me, but now I got the impression it was their profiles on display. “Hayley and I have always been BL fans, Anna was into light domming, and Layla started - drumroll please - as a sadist!”
“God, fuck.” I gasped, as the girls burst into laughter once again. That laughter, that shrill, slightly nervous, cackling laughter was starting to drill into my brain. It's the laughter a bully makes, a kind of shrill assault at the misery at others, but their body language was all gentle, relaxed. They were literally patting each other on the back, telling each other that it was okay, as the slightest blush emerged on each other’s cheeks. They were more concerned with embarrassing each other than what they were going to do to me.
“All this is the past now, and thanks to Layla, queen bee, we have all found something new to like.” She waved her hand, and the room gasped and chattered with revelation, eyes darting back and forth between an unseen screen, and me. Smiles crept onto they face, broad and malevolent, Anna more than the rest.
“Okay girlies, it looks like we know what to do with Mark.” Anna beamed, as at last she decided to show my the screen.