Doug packed his diaper bag Sunday night without objection. His bottom and ego still hurt from the day's events, and he was in no mood to put up a fuss. Still, he was more than a little uneasy about the following day, when he would head to work while wearing his diaper and carrying his pink diaper bag. He was worried about people at the lab finding out, since the job and the graduate program to which he expected it to lead seemed to be all he was living for now that the rest of his normal life had been taken away. So while he obediently placed three fresh diapers, powder, baby wipes, and lotion into his bag, his mind was racing for ways to make himself less conspicuous.

Some ideas were obvious. He'd decided that, starting tomorrow, he'd go in earlier and leave later. That way he could get to and from his lab unseen and wouldn't have to answer questions about his bulging, waddling, rustling, or his babyish bag. Appearing to work harder wouldn't hurt his admission prospects, either. In some ways he was very lucky to have the job he had: working alone, being able to wear what he wanted and essentially to decide what hours he'd work. These features were excellent, since he now wanted to avoid other people as much as possible and needed to wear something practical. He had bulky pants and a long sweatshirt that might work. Good thing winter's coming, he thought. It would be way harder to wear the kind of bulky clothing that was necessary if it were hot.

It was the prospect of diaper changes that really made him anxious. His floor in the lab building had one unisex bathroom in one of the more public areas. It wasn't uncommon to see lots of people on his way there or back, or for there to be a line. He couldn't carry the diaper bag, or, even worse, a diaper and some wipes, into the bathroom! It hadn't been until after Mrs. Warren left Sunday night that Doug struck on the idea of plastic grocery bags in which to carry clean diaper down and dirty diapers back. If it was around lunchtime when he went, he could even say he was just stopping off on the way to lunch. He felt much better after he pre-bagged his diaper changes for tomorrow. With any luck, he might be able to get away with this without anyone finding out.

Monday morning Doug woke up, dry as usual, and tried to get ready as normally would any other morning, except that this morning he had to wet himself intentionally before his shower, and rediaper himself afterward. He left his apartment early, and indeed got to his lab early as well, before anyone else had arrived. Relieved, he tucked his telltale bag safely into an unused lab cupboard and got to work. He was very conscious of how often he wet himself, as leaks might be horribly embarrassing, and so he checked his diaper several times before deciding at 10:30am that he'd better try to change himself.

So he put his clandestine operation into action and was thrilled when it seemed to go off without a hitch. No one really seemed to notice. From there the rest of the day was easier. He had to change himself once more, in mid-afternoon, and he waited until the halls were relatively deserted before waddling home. All in all, the day had been much simpler than he could have hoped for.

And the next several days went well also, in that he seemed to manage to keep his forced infantilization a secret from his coworkers. Mrs. Warren dropped by every day or so "to say hi." Wednesday night she commented that she'd been told that Doug was being a good boy at work, and that she was glad to hear it.

Doug's heart stopped. Mrs. Warren had an informant at work! Someone in his last bastion of normality *knew* about him. He didn't say anything to Mrs. Warren (sitting down was only now becoming painless), but his mind once again raced, as he tried to pinpoint who his informant could possibly be. He should have known he'd be spied upon. But now he worried that the informance might tell others. Everyone might already know by now! But he couldn't ask, because that would give it away. He was forced to watch everyone on Thursday, looking for clues that they might be on to him. But if anyone knew, they were quiet about it. No one appeared to watch him or react any differently than in the past.

Thursday night, as he was sneaking home after he'd thought everyone had left, he turned a corner and ran right into his lab director, Dr. Stillman, a tall, strikingly beautiful woman in her late thirties, with long brown hair and deep brown eyes. She was also, not coincidentally, the admissions director for the doctoral program Doug hoped to enter next fall.

"Ah...Doug, isn't it?" she asked crisply as she sized him up in front of her. Doug tried to hide his bag behind his legs. "Keeping late hours, are we? Well, that can't hurt. It's nice to see someone working so hard for a change." At this, she sort of chuckled to herself, and kept walking.

Doug stood in the hall after she'd left and tried to figure out what she'd meant by that. It had seemed like a compliment, and yet she'd laughed. She always intimidated Doug, to some degree because he found her extremely attractive. Now, though, in his paranoid mood, he found himself wondering if his boss might actually be the informant: "working hard for a *change*," she'd said. Maybe this had meant something else from what he'd thought. (This would worry Doug for a long time, and perhaps never be satisfactorily settled for him, since she never made any other similar comments and he knew he couldn't exactly ask her directly.)

Other than this incident, the rest of the week was uneventful, and Doug finished his second week of diaperhood smoothly. He was as obedient as he could be, and tried to wet and soil his diaper conscientiously. He settled into a predictable pattern of changing himself in the late morning and midafternoon, and he found that as long as he remembered to do that, he didn't need to think about *when* exactly he wet himself. That seemed convenient to Doug, though he would discover later that it was yet another piece in the puzzle of his undoing.