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Image and characters copyright Tessa Stone
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"'Ere you go, cupcake."
The thick plastic of the blood bag is cool and smooth, a weighty heft snagged mid-air with a muffled plaff against Conrad's palm. It much reminded Conrad of the water-balloons filled with pudding on faire days, tossed from one line of screamers to the next until they broke and disqualified someone in a muddy splatter. His hardly ever broke, back in the day, though there was no use bragging the point. 'Pudding-tosser' would have fit snugly between the confectionery nicknames and the sexual innuendo, a bridge fording colorful insults.
Conrad holds the bag up by its sterile plastic corner. "I can pay for this, you know. I have a job."
Doc Worth snorts, disrupting the cloud of acrid smoke that haloed his head of receding blonde hair. "Keep your milk-money, Mary Jane."
Conrad sniffs, eyes narrowing. "I don't want to owe you anything."
"I can respect that. Now get." Worth had hunched himself further over a coverless book, bony shoulders standing in sharp relief beneath the off-white ruff of his coat. A long hand slides from the margin of yellowed pages, flapping toward the door without so much as a glance.
"I have money so it's not a big - "
The book hits the cheap metal desk with a hollow ring. "Can't. Take it up with Cross."
"With - "
"I'm gonna stop y'right there, toots. Take. It up. With Cross."
"This has nothing to do with - "
"Fuck's sake, you four-eyed tit. I said no and I even took it upon my generous heart t'give you a fucking clue. Now scram, you fuckin' turtle-necked headache." Worth flips a page of the textbook, scowling as a framed newspaper article clatters off its perch from the force of the slamming door.