✅ A Dose of Humiliation

89. Lapse in Judgement

Earlier that week...

I could hear the raised voices from the front of the shop. Becker certainly wasn't happy, and I couldn't blame him. But there was nothing I could do to keep Elspeth out of legal trouble; Serena would probably be more help there, and Alyn would no doubt be along soon enough. The easiest thing for me to do now, so that I wouldn't get myself into any more trouble, was to just sit here calmly.

Of course, I had the urge to rebel. It was something I'd never done before I got the shot, and sometimes it was hard to fight. But I knew that anything I did to upset Becker now would only rebound on me, and there was no way that could be a good thing in the long run. But I wanted to hurt him; I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to feel more pain than he got from a simple broken tooth, and I wanted it to be me causing him problems. I knew it was irrational, and that I would be so much safer just keeping to myself, but that didn't seem to matter to my lizard brain. I had to hurt him.

I stamped down on those impulses as hard as I could, and tried to force myself to just sit there. Of course, there was nothing wrong with working the handcuffs loose, now that Serena had unclipped one of the cable ties for me. Even if I pulled my hands out of them completely, I would be able to put them back on before anybody else came in here. With the volume of the raised voices in the front of the shop, I was sure that I would hear a real difference just as soon as the first door was opened.

And then I looked down at the stuff on the desk. There was a desk tidy thing, a little mountain of plastic tubes with all kinds of junk in it. From erasers to staples, and even cable ties if I wanted to reseal myself in order to avoid suspicion. And a veritable forest of pens of course, but more than anything else I didn't want to touch those. Some were disposable ball-point pens that he would hand out to customers – or the parents of customers – when something needed to be signed. But most of them had been used by Becker at least once, and so had their barrels deformed by innumerable tooth marks, and visible trails of old saliva dripping down the outside of the pen.

I shuddered, and then somewhere in my mind I compared that image to what I had already seen. Somehow it all made sense. It was the reappearance of a memory from long ago, something I'd thought about but never thought it would happen. I stared at the pens, and the gobs of spit dangled disgustingly from the caps. And when I stared hard enough, it reminded me of when I'd spat at Becker earlier, and my own mouth juices dribbling down his tie. It was the same stuff, I knew, so why did his make me feel particularly gross?

It didn't matter. I reached out for a cable tie, being extra careful not to tough those disgusting pens. I couldn't pick up just one, so I got a small bunch, spread them out on the desk, and then returned the ones I didn't need. And then I couldn't restrain my curiosity anymore. I needed to hurt him, and sheer chance had given me exactly what I needed.

I took one of the empty vials that he had carelessly laid out on the desk. I unscrewed the cap. I'd seen him do it twice now, but that wasn't particularly important because there were instructions printed on the side. They would later be covered up by a label with the patient's name and ID codes, but that didn't matter now. I took out a swab, rubbed it all over the gross pens as well as I could at arm's length. I nearly cried when I slipped for a fraction of a second, and came within a hair breadth of letting his saliva touch my skin. But I was confident that there was enough on the swab, so I put it back in the vial. Not like that would do anything; even if I could find a lab to do something with it, the sample container needed a few blood samples as well. And how was I going to get my hands on Becker's blood, unless he happened to get repeatedly punched in the face and left a pool of the stuff on the desk beside me.

I quickly searched the desk until I found an automatic sample syringe. They were supposed to be easy to use, so that it would be easier if he had a patient who was resisting. I could just pull the safety out – a thin strip of plastic that made the needle live – jab it into someone, and it would collect blood automatically when the tip reached a vein. I wasn't quite sure how it worked; did it detect when the tip was in liquid? I tried dipping the tip in the blood puddle on the desk, and it filled up right away. So apparently ease of use was a big deal for whoever designed these things.