✅ A Dose of Humiliation

55. Proportionate Response

I couldn't do anything to stop the pee streaming down my legs. And seconds later I couldn't fight the tears, either. After the spanking, and all the harsh words she'd used to put me down, this was the final straw. And I was almost as ashamed of losing control and crying as I was peeing my pants; maybe I was still the little baby she was calling me.

"And you just said that it would never happen again," Mrs Miller crowed. "I didn't trick you this time, and you already agreed to face whatever punishment–"

There weren't many things that could stop Marcie's mum mid-tirade, we already knew that. But apparently one thing that could was someone's forehead colliding with the bridge of her nose. We all stared in surprise; nobody wanted to say anything. But as Mrs Miller opened her mouth to continue the verbal abuse, Elspeth apparently decided that she should stay silent, and followed up with a fist.

"Damn, that felt good," she said, and then seemed to notice everyone else's surprise. "Okay, not the best idea. But I couldn't let her keep going on like that. Could I?"

"You're probably okay," Serena was the first to reply. "Using the Punishment Pill without due cause counts as indecent assault, so you were just defending your friend. Pretty sure there's not going to be any legal repercussions for that."

"You knocked out my mum," Marcie said, and put her arms around her girlfriend. "You wouldn't believe how long I've been waiting for someone to do that. Thank you. And now I'm moving out, I don't even have to be scared of what she's going to do to me next. You really meant that, Serena? About letting us stay?"

"Yeah. Nobody should live with that from their parents. But we should leave her a note or something, maybe."

"I'll ask Luca to check on her in a couple of minutes," Marcie said. "Make sure she's okay. She knows that we just recorded her breaking the law, so she'd have to be really stupid to get the police involved over this. I don't think she's that mad."

"Right. I think you'd better pack any stuff you want to take with you, though. She's bound to be angry when she gets up, and I'd rather we're already gone."

"My dad's not got any work today," Jodie chipped in. "Got a moving van and a couple of big apprentices probably hanging round the office just in case. I heard him moaning. I could ask him to come round and load all your stuff in the van, so you don't have to leave anything."

Marcie glanced at her friend, and her mum lying on the couch, and then back again.

"Sounds like a plan," Serena said. "I bet professional movers will have your stuff loaded in no time."

"Lorna?" Nikki said quietly, and put a hand on my shoulder. "You okay?" I nodded slowly. My friends were all working together, trying to work out what they needed to do to move Marcie and all her possessions out of the house as quickly as possible, and nobody had been paying attention to me. I guess that was better than the embarrassment I should have been feeling, but I felt kind of lost. I didn't know what had happened to me, and it still felt a little hard to believe. I had been pretty desperate, but not that bad. It had just come on out of nowhere.

"Sorry," I finally managed to get a word out. "Sorry, I don't know what... I just couldn't... I don't know what happened. Maybe I was distracted by the feeling from the booster. You know what it's like, don't you, like it's crawling under your skin?"

"Blame her," Marcie glanced over at her mother, who was lying back on the couch. "She had one of those injectors with the orange ring, the intensity booster. It changes the effect of your shot in some way. Only to be used in extreme circumstances."

"You need to look at the card," Elspeth pointed out. "It's on those cards, isn't it? You can scan the code at the bottom with your phone and it tells you how the boosters are likely to work."