I finished the last of my food and pushed the tray off of me and fully onto her lap.
"Sure." She eyed me suspiciously. "What was it you did again?"
"Marketing, some PR. The firm is retained by the BSH and the government, so it's mostly boring marketing."
I grabbed my pants from the night before and pushed a little thermal energy into them.
It had taken practice to just put enough into them to iron out the wrinkles, and not set them on fire. But I shook them out, and all the wrinkles were gone.
"Damn, not a single wrinkle." Melody watched my pants.
"New travel style. Wrinkle free. Can't live without it," I lied, doing the same trick to my button-down shirt and getting dressed.
Melody put the tray on the side table and watched me with a half-lidded look.
Something told me she was on the prowl, wanting to solidify something more with a little bit of fun woven in.
It was smart, but I actually needed to get to work.
Sure enough, Melody came over to the side of the bed, her finger tracing my package under the work slacks. "You know, maybe you should stay a little longer."
She didn't paw me for long. Stretching out on the bed, she let the sheets fall below her chest, revealing plump mounds topped with perfect little pink nipples.
"Tempting, but I really have to get to work. Maybe another time," I tried to let her down easy.
"Uh huh." She didn't sound convinced, but she wasn't about to throw herself at me anymore.
Melody wanted me, but not at the cost of her dignity. "Get going. Last night was fun, even if it'll linger like a finished cup of ice cream that you regret not buying the bigger size."
I smiled, ducking in to kiss her cheek before heading to the door.
Moving through the apartment, I headed out and towards the train station.
As I strode through the streets, downtown Point City was coming alive. Everyone hurried out of their apartments and headed to work.
Something broke the sound barrier far above my head, and I wondered what super was off to 'save the day,' as they called it.
I called it public property destruction in the name of a photo op.
They were always so messy with how they solved any problem.
Sometimes I wondered if their salaries were based on how much wreckage they could cause. At least that would explain it.
I only had to go a few blocks further from Melody's place before getting to the train, which was just pulling up to the station. I jumped on, heading to work in midtown.
The train was always an eclectic group of citizens. This time, it ranged from a woman in a business suit and a twenty thousand dollar watch to a hobo still sleeping across the benches, still in the same place they'd used the night before.
I tried to avoid scanning the ads that coated the inside of the train car.
There were images of superheroes endorsing about every product possible. Eat your Oaties cereal, with Captain Frost giving a big thumbs up. Or go to the local theme park where you may just meet Zappy.
But there was one common theme in the ads, the sheer number of women. The same was true on the train.
After all, women outnumbered men nearly seven to one now as a result of the advent of superpowers.
They ran on the X chromosome for humans. If I remembered anything from biology class, it was the slightly super sperm carrying the X chromosome that normally won out in pregnancies.
And being one of the few men, and what I liked to think was a rather good-looking one, I was always getting quite a few side glances. I stared at my shoes, not wanting to get into anything on my way to work.
I remained balanced as the train did a small jerk, coming to a slow stop away from any station.
"The PCPT would like to apologize to all passengers. Bactimen are on the tracks ahead of us. Burning Girl is on site clearing them, but there will be a small delay," a voice over the speaker announced.
Not just humans had gained superpowers—animals, monsters, and even bacteria, like what had become known as bactimen, could get powers.
It was a fuckfest beyond anything the world was ever prepared for, and no government organisation knew how to deal with it.
Passengers grumbled, and a few pressed themselves up against the window, their phones out, hoping to get a pic of Burning Girl.
I rolled my eyes. She wasn't even a top-tier hero.
But the bactimen bacteria were becoming a real problem lately.
The sewers of Point City were supposedly overflowing with the superpowered bacteria, and it was infecting the city like a giant sinus infection.
I knew the Bureau of Superheroes, or BSH as most people referred to it as, was doing everything it could to rid us of it, but it was taking a while.
And if the recent news was anything to believe, the bactimen were growing resistant to multiple forms of powers after a few cells survived each attack.
Those cells grew more of the green blob men that then rose back out of our sewers, resistant to yet another form of their destruction.
Burning Girl had an obvious reason to be the one responding now; fire killed most things.
I shuddered to think what would happen once the first bactimen became heat resistant.
As the train continued to stay stuck, I checked my phone. "Damn, I'm going to be late, aren't I?"
I really hoped that Burning Girl didn't melt the tracks or do something else that would make it take longer than it needed to be.
A ding got everyone's attention as the PA system announced, "We have been told that the tracks are clear, and we will be proceeding to the next stop."