It’s hard making new friends. Unless you’ve got a little help.
guest story by Zyzzyva
tags: mind control, nsfw
art by kelbremdusk
Samirah stood awkwardly in her dorm room, suitcases piled up on the floor. It was her first time moving anywhere—her first time living anywhere other than her bedroom in her parents’ house, even, if you didn’t count the occasional hotel room shared with her family on summer vacations. It was tiny, and sterile, and impersonal, white drywall and cheap pine furniture. It was going to be her home for the next eight months.
Worse than that, she thought, as she started unpacking clothes into the little dresser the room came equipped with. She’d grown up with the same friends, stuck with at least some of them the entire way through grade school. Now she wasn’t just moving out alone for the first time, but she really was alone—none of her close friends were at Robert Borden University, barely anyone she knew from her hometown at all. She was proud of getting in, it was a good school with an excellent political science program. She was happy to be here. But she’d have to make new friends all over again, or be even more isolated than she already felt.
She could do it, she told herself as she finished her clothes and started into her extras bag. A laptop and a tangle of peripheral chargers and cables, a picture of her and her parents in Athens two years ago, a few non-fiction books: all piled on the small desk crowded into her room. A few more fiction paperbacks, and a picture of her and her brother at his high school graduation three years back, went on the dresser. Finally, her grandmother’s graduation gift to her, a tiny clay idol of Inanna, carefully packed at the bottom of her bags and set atop a small white cloth on a cleared space on the dresser. As she set it into place, the air around it began to thrum imperceptibly.
Samirah popped her laptop open and started looking for Orientation Week activities where she could start meeting people.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Catherine walked nervously towards the showers, towel and toiletries and clothes all bundled up in front of her. Why did she have to get one of the old residences, the ones with communal bathrooms? It was bad enough having to live in a concrete cubicle, but that she had to walk down the halls every morning and shower with everyone else—it was awful.
She pushed open the bathroom door and a susurrus of conversation hesitated, confirming all her worst suspicions. Four girls were clustered in front of the sinks, doing makeup and chatting, and every one of them was taller and skinnier and hotter than Catherine. She kept her head down and moved towards one of the shower stalls.
“Hey,” called one of the girls, behind her. “Welcome to, uh, Woodroffe Court first floor, uh, east bathrooms, I guess.” The girl giggled at the way the sentence had gotten away from her. Catherine didn’t look back. After a moment, with the shower stall door shut behind her, she heard their conversation pick back up.
She started the shower right off, in case it took a while to get the hot water going—it heated up almost immediately, thankfully, but it also washed out the sound of the others talking. She didn’t want to hear what they were saying. Maybe they were talking about the ugly fat chick who’d just come in and maybe they weren’t; but this way she could at least imagine they weren’t and concentrate instead on figuring out how to hang up her stuff so that they didn’t touch the cracked tile floor. With only two hooks for her towel and all her clothes, it was more difficult than she had been expecting. Stupid communal bathrooms, she thought again.
The shower was hot and refreshing, and she felt a little better by the time she was done. When she turned it off, she could hear at least one more shower running down the row but no talking, so hopefully they’d all left. She put on her clothes and opened the stall door.
The girl who’d spoken to her on the way in was there.
She was in skinny jeans—tight skinny jeans—and a tight black tank top with a deliberate little gap between them. Her nails were red, and her lips were red, and her hair was red and braided tightly down past her shoulders. She was everything Catherine wanted and knew she wouldn’t ever be. But instead of the usual hot rush of self-loathing, she felt… appreciative?
“Hello,” said the girl. “Just wanted to introduce myself properly. I’m Abby.” She sounded more nervous than Catherine gave her any right to be.
“Catherine,” said Catherine.
“Cool, cool. I’m in biomed. Do you think we have any classes together?” Abby flushed a little, as if the question had slipped out.
“… French, so, uh probably not?” replied Catherine, confused.
“Right, right. Big school. Well, we’re on the same res floor, at least,” said Abby. A pause. “I was going out for breakfast before classes start with some other people from the floor and wondered if you want to come along.”
“Why me?” asked Catherine, very out of her normal depth.
“Well, because we’re all new here, and you never know who’ll turn out to be good friends with unless you try around! And you have the most gorgeous eyes.” Abby flushed again. “And tits to die for,” she hastily added, as if that was somehow less personal than what she’d said first.
So Abby’s a lesbian with a thing for fat chicks? thought Catherine. Or this is some kind of cruel joke? But the latter thought somehow didn’t seem to have staying power. She didn’t want to lead someone she wasn’t interested in on, but she wanted very much to be this hot, kind, somehow shy girl’s friend. And if it went somewhere else, it went somewhere else, she thought, and that thought seemed unexpectedly warm and inviting.
“Okay,” she said.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“Loser sucks the winner’s cock,” said Tom, to a chorus of appreciative laughter, and Elijah flinched. Homophobic fuck, he thought unhappily, I’d get up and leave right now if there was any way that wouldn’t just make things worse. He’d hoped the people at university would be less awful than at high school, and had gone down to the residence common room to mingle; when it turned out to have a console already set up to the tv he figured it might be a painless way to meet his new floormates. And it was, sort of: he was meeting them, and discovering they were as toxic a bunch of assholes as the ones he’d left behind.
“Three! …Two! …One! …Go!” chanted the game, and Elijah tried to get his head back in the zone. It took a minute or so and one humiliatingly fat-fingered death, but Tom turned out to clearly have much less experience than Elijah did and once he got properly focused back down into the world of blocks and jumps and special attacks, he was able to knock off Tom’s last three lives in quick succession. The small crowd that had gathered behind the couch cheered his victory.
“Best of three?” asked Tom.
“Nah, I’ll let someone else have a turn,” said Elijah, although he mostly just wanted to get away from the common room. He passed off the controller, watched the next round for exactly as long as it took for everyone else’s attention to be absorbed in the fight, and quietly snuck out.
Well, he’d made it through high school, he could make it through here, although it was an ungodly dispiriting thought. Robert Borden had an LGBTQ centre, so that was one step up at least, and he could always spend as little time in the dorm but not in his room as possible. He was almost back to its safety when he heard Tom call his name behind him.
“Yes,” he said, uncertainly. Tom was hurrying after him, down the mostly-deserted passage that Elijah’s room lay on. “what do you want?”
“I just wanted to say you played well! Good game, man.” He was close enough now for Elijah to see him licking his lips nervously. “And, you know, you won, so I owe you.”
It took him a second to realize what Tom was talking about, not least because it was too absurd to be credited. “God almighty, man, you don’t owe me fucking anything like that—”
“I know,” said Tom. “But I—want to.” He licked his lips again, not entirely from nervousness this time.
Elijah was dumbstruck. This was ridiculous. Tom was sort of his type—tall, solidly-built, big hands and broad shoulders—but thirty seconds ago he would have been certain Tom was straight (which wasn’t his type) and an asshole (which very much wasn’t). This was just a queers-trap, wasn’t it? But, despite four bad years of high school to hone his flight reflex, the possibility somehow didn’t seem real, now. There was something gleaming in Tom’s eyes that Elijah hadn’t seen in a while, and the front of his pants was tenting a little. You couldn’t fake lust like that.
Elijah made a stupid decision and somehow couldn’t think of it as stupid. “All right, just in here,” he said, opening the door to his room.
He’d barely shut the door again before Tom was on his knees, fumbling with the buckle of Elijah’s belt.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The walls in Woodroffe Court buzzed. The air in Woodroffe Court buzzed. Unnoticed and unremarked, power crackled and pulsed.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“OK, then, proximate cause for the French Revolution,” said Irina.
She was lying on her bed, a sheaf of ruled-paper notes spread out across her pillow. Maddy was sitting at the end of the bed, laptop in lap.
“Kingdom couldn’t service its debt, and the upper classes wanted a say in how taxes were being raised before they’d agree to it.”
“Yup. Your go.”
“OK, uh—definition of a group.”
“A set with a binary operation over it, and it’s associative and has an identity and inverses.”
“That’s it? What about closure?”
“That was implied when I said ‘binary operation’.”
“Not according to your notes here it isn’t.”
“It absolutely is! Look, we’ve been studying too long, we’re getting tired and worked up.” Irina spun around on the bed and slid her hands up under Maddy’s shirt.
“We’re—two questions in!” protested Maddy, but when she grabbed Irina’s hand it was not try and remove it, but to direct it down to her quickly wetting pussy.
“Have it your way,” purred Irina, as she pinched Maddy’s hard nipples with one hand and slid the ring finger of her other back and forth over Maddy’s swollen clit. “You sexy hot beast, tell me why Napoleon’s coup in 1799 was so popular.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The door to one of the shower stalls in the second floor west men’s bathroom didn’t shut properly, and wouldn’t lock. In the middle of October maintenance took it off entirely to get replaced, but the weeks slipped by and nothing happened. Eventually someone graffiti’d the words “EXHIBITIONIST STALL” onto its wall, and that didn’t get cleaned up either.
In practice, though, everyone just called it the Fuck Stall.
Steve arrived in the bathroom horny and still stiff with his morning wood. His plan had been to have a shower and jerk off, but he could always hope to get lucky. It was morning, prime shower time. Sure enough, when he came in, there was a man whose face he couldn’t see pounding a woman he didn’t recognize up against the back wall of the Fuck Stall.
They were really going at it, too—the woman’s arms and legs wrapped around the man’s muscular back, him slamming her against the wall with every stroke. Her face was screwed up in an expression of bliss. “Wow,” said Steve, his half-erection rocketing immediately back to rock-hardness. The man didn’t stop his aggressive fucking, but the woman opened her eyes for a moment, saw Steve over the man’s shoulder, and winked at him. Then she looked away with an ecstatic little yelp as the next drive of the man’s cock rammed into her.
Well. Steve had been undecided on what order he performed his ablutions in when he left his room, but this kind of made up his mind for him. He pulled down his boxers, leaned back against the wall opposite the Fuck Stall, and began stroking himself in time with the pair’s fucking. He had time to get off several delicious times before they were done.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Leo walked down the hallway of the women’s side of Woodroffe Court, looking for room 1317. Julia from his freshman English class had invited him over, and he was looking forward to hanging out with her. Although if her room was as small and spartan as his was, they’d probably have to hang out somewhere else going forward.
A woman, hair dripping onto her shoulders and a towel wrapped around her, padded barefoot down the hall towards him. Leo gave her a smile as they passed. “Lookin’ hot,” he said, politely.
“Thanks,” said the woman, smiling back. “But I look even hotter without the towel.” She reached behind her and unstuck it to demonstrate.
She really was. Big, firm tits, just the right size to heft in a hand; a belly curved with beautiful fleshy softness; a swirl of black hair drawing the eye down to the warm, inviting pink-brown lips of her cunt.
Leo certainly felt invited. He knelt down in front of her—the discarded towel, conveniently, cushioning his knees—and began to gently nuzzle her crotch. Her hand slipped behind his head and her long nails began to gently caress it.
Leo had only just gotten his tongue to her clit—you have to take your time with these things – when he heard Julia speaking behind him. “I see you got distracted finding my room,” she said. As Leo might have expected, her voice was amused and more than a little turned-on.
“You’ve—oooh—got a keeper here, Jules,” said the woman. Leo kept gently licking as the two women began to kiss, somewhere over his head. I really should find out her name, too, he thought.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The air and brick of Woodroffe Court rippled and distorted like bad glass. Resonant waves enfolded the building in concentric shells of imperceptible pressure.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Etaine’s dick was the pride and envy of first floor, north wing. Since moving down from the men’s floor she’d somehow been assigned to at the start of the year, her breasts, biceps, and confidence had grown apace. But it was her thick, throbbing cock that her floormates wanted the most, and the new enthusiastic swole chick Etaine was plenty happy to put it and them through their paces.
Right now she was railing Cass’ boyfriend Faisal, who Cass had promised a ‘hot and dirty surprise’. She was holding him trapped by the wrists and bouncing his ass off her lap, and with every stroke his moans grew louder. “Oh god yes oh god yes oh god YES!”
Etaine really is a treasure, thought Cass. And so is her magnificent cock.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The laundry room was always busy, in a residence this size. Jelani had stopped bringing a book to read while he waited; there was enough to do for the 120 minutes it took for a load of laundry to work its way through the machines. Today, for instance, Laura was riding Carl’s face and Mel was riding Carl’s cock and leaning forward to suck Al’s cock, and all four of them (ignoring the increasingly plaintive warnings posted on the walls) were doing it on top for a running bank of washers, letting the rumbling vibrations make everything so much better.
Jelani loaded up a washer of his own, swiped his card, and moved to take his place in the chain. As he did so, another washer beeped and Mel said, with good-humoured annoyance, “that’s mine.” She slid herself off Carl with a wet, organic pop, and climbed down to move her clothes into a dryer. Jelani shrugged at her – she stuck out her tongue at him – and he climbed up onto the washers and onto Carl to take her place and wile the next two hours away.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Lisa was tied spread-eagle to her bed, gagged and blindfolded. There was no discernible noise coming from the someone or several someones in the room with her, which just left her sense of touch. She was concentrating very hard on her sense of touch.
She could feel fingertips tracing over her body, softly. Sharp nails dragging down her arms and sternum. Tongues, sometimes, slick and soft and wet and warm. The sensations were unbearably erotic, even without the vibe carefully mounted in her pussy to edge her unsatisfiably forever.
She’d been here for hours, she thought, probably days. It couldn’t be the same three friends who’d started out in here; her door must be open and there was a sign pointing in, probably saying “TEASEABLE FUCKTOY use her abuse her”. That had to be how so many people had found her and teased her, for delicious agonizing weeks on end.
If there wasn’t a sign, she thought, she was going to make one, for the next time she did this.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The RAs had arranged a residence-wide party to celebrate the last day of classes, in the common room for first floor east wing. The room normally barely had enough space to hold just the girls from that wing, but for the end-of-term party it was worth putting in a little more effort. And besides, being pressed up against each other was the point, tonight.
The common room was packed tight with flesh. Hands, feet, lips, tongues, breasts, bellies, cocks, cunts. Of every shape and size and colour, touching and pressing and holding and squeezing and stroking and licking and fucking and fucking and fucking. Orgasm rolled through the room like a wave, over and over again, pants into gasps into cries into screams and back into quiet breathing, without ever cooling down or pausing. Woodroffe Court fucked itself, and came, and fucked, and came, and fucked and came and fucked and came and came and came and came.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Samirah smiled as she packed her bags. Her first two terms at Borden had been much more successful than she’d imagined. She’d passed all of her classes—her intro calc elective by the skin of her teeth, but all of them—and she felt confident about her major going into her second year.
And, she reflected, as she unpinned a Black Sunrise concert poster off her wall, she’d made a lot of new friends. She knew most of the people in her residence and several of them were good, close friends now. She’d gone to the concert with Kari and Su-Jin, and to another two she didn’t have posters from besides, and plenty of nights out at the campus pub or the dozens of other clubs that crowded the streets around the campus. (Probably she should have slacked off on those a little more around calculus exam time.)
She packed off the tangle of cables surrounding her laptop—somehow there seemed to be a lot more of them than when she’d first set up here, eight months before—and swept her books and the numerous new textbooks she’d bought into their own plastic bin. Last, but not least, she carefully wrapped up her little idol of Innana for safe travels in its white cloth. As she picked it up, an imperceptible hum imperceptibly stopped.
She could only hope her flatmates at her summer-job sublet were as friendly.
Author’s Note: This story was written about eighteen months before the publication date, as anyone who’s been to a university since the plague rolled in could tell you. I still think it’s a worthwhile concept, though. The residence, obviously, is based on a mashup of my first year residence and the other on-campus housing my friends lived in. The people are likewise a mashup of real schoolmates and invention. The plot, um, didn’t happen like that the year I was in residence, anyways.
Not sure what kind of maniac school lets fresh-out-of-high-school students take Groups in the 1A term, though.