“Attention all passengers: the next stop is Yamaoka Station.” A cool female voice spoke over the intercom, barely audible over the rumbling of the subway train streaking through the darkness. “All passengers bound for Yamaoka Station, please gather your belongings and prepare to disembark…”

I wasn’t bound for Yamaoka Station, so I stayed put. Thumbing one earbud out of my ear, I stared out the window as the lights flashed against the bare, tiled walls of the Potomac Metro.

It was about ninety minutes after rush hour, so the subway car was barely half-full: mostly commuters coming home late from work or people heading out to enjoy a little nightlife. My backpack sat between my feet, with the corner of an economics textbook peeking out from underneath the flap.

What a day, I thought, leaning my head against the window. The glass was cold, and would be colder still in a few hours once night fully fell over the city. The chill leached down from the streets of Potomac City, especially these days.

It had been a long day, and it was far from over. I’d just gotten out of classes at Dartfeld College, but there was no time to party. An exam waited for me first thing in the morning, and a depressingly large chunk of that bulky econ textbook in my backpack would be involved in the composition of the questions. Miss Kennedy would kill me if I failed it, considering how much money she spent on my tuition.

The subway train rocked gently as we took a curve, knocking the backpack against my foot. I opened it up and leafed through my papers, searching for the book I’d checked out from the college library. I hadn’t had much time to read it in the last few days, but maybe I could pause my podcast and do some brain-stretching for a change. Anything had to be better than just sitting here.

But before I could find it, my cell phone buzzed. The sound of a notification cut through the chatter in my earbuds, and I took the phone out of my pocket and paused the music. Flipping past a news story about last night’s vigil for the victims of the clash between Clayman and Madrigal, I navigated to my text messages. I smiled as I saw that I had a new text from Bailey.

Hey there. Been thinking about you ever since last weekend ;)

No matter how many times I got a text like that from a girl, it never failed to make me grin like an idiot. A whole hell of a lot of things had changed in my life over the course of the last few months, but not that. Never that.

That drive to the beach was crazy, I texted back, glancing over at my own reflection in the subway window. A blond, 20-year old guy with a face full of stubble stared back, looking like he’d found out a short while ago he’d won the lottery. In a manner of speaking, I had.

I rubbed my cheek as I waited for Bailey to text something back, wondering if I ought to shave when I got back to my apartment or put it off until after the exam.

The phone buzzed again. Yeah it was. Soooo much fun! <3 <3

She’d added a couple of heart emojis to the end for emphasis. We’d ended up driving to the beach at two in the morning, grabbing a few drinks at a convenience store along the way. We hadn’t even made it out of the parking garage of the hotel. As I remembered it, we’d hooked up in the backseat, then a couple more times out in front of the waves. Dawn had found us snuggling under a blanket, ready to drive back to Potomac City and just barely make it to class.

So my Delta Chi sisters are having this totally boring sorority mixer tonight, Bailey texted. Even as the message appeared, three dots underneath it told me she was typing even more.

“Oh shit,” I whispered, weighing my options. “Any other night, Bailes, I’d be all over it…”

Before I could say anything, the next text had already appeared at the bottom of our messages.

I’m trying to figure out what I should wear, lol. Want to help me out?

As if by magic, another three dots filled the bottom of the screen. This time, they appeared for only a moment before an image loaded up. My eyes widened, and my heart skipped a beat.

Instinctively, I looked around to make sure no one sitting near me on the train could see my screen.

Bailey hid the top half of her face in the photo, but that’s about all she’d hidden. She wore no shirt, and only the work of the arm not holding the camera kept her from being totally topless. She held her tits with that wrist, pushing them up and squeezing them together. Her long, blonde locks hadn’t been combed yet, and hung around her like a messy halo.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Her cheerleading outfit sat on the bed behind her, draped over the blanket like a naughty promise. Bailey loved to flaunt her image as the heart-of-gold blonde cheerleader with just a little bit of edge. It was what drew me to her in the first place.

Most tempting of all were the pair of gray panties sheathing Bailey’s curvy hips. The contour of her mound was clearly visible through the thin fabric, and a faint wet spot had begun to form at the place where her lips gave way to the soft, pink folds within.

She’d probably just splashed some water between her legs to get the effect, but it didn’t matter. I was hard as a rock now, and had to cross one leg over the other in my seat to hide it.

Damn, what a girl, I thought, chuckling to myself.

You should come over, Bailey texted me. Help me pick out something cute to wear. Wanna come to the party with me too?

God, how I wanted to. And if thirty percent of my econ grade wasn’t set to be decided in the morning, I’d have jumped at the chance.

Can’t, I texted back. Big exam tomorrow. Make or break time. You know I would if I could.

A flood of sad emojis came back to me a few moments later.

That sucks, Bailey wrote back. You sure you can’t stop by really quick? My friends and I are gonna pregame, and I keep telling them you’re soooo cool and sweet…

As I tried to figure out how I was going to let her down gently, I flipped to the other conversations on my phone. Half a dozen other invitations waited for me. The cute Asian chick in my engineering class was trying to get me to go skating with her this weekend, and this goth girl I’d gone to high school with had been sending me pictures even more explicit than Bailey’s.

Life hadn’t always been like this.

A few months ago, I’d been happy enough to have one girlfriend. The thought of juggling a dozen dates (casual as they might be) was the furthest thing from my mind. That was before I’d started to show my powers, however. Nothing was the same after that.

Never before the big game, I sent Bailey with a wink emoji. Maybe tomorrow, to celebrate?

This time, the text took longer to arrive. As empathetic as I was, phones were still the bane of my existence. The digital medium robbed communication of so much depth and nuance, turning everything into short letters sent through the void. My cheat didn’t work over text messages or social media, which was both stressful and grounding in a way.

Aww, boo, Bailey finally wrote. You’d better make it up to me tomorrow ;)

I will, I promised her. Have fun at the party.

I tucked the phone away and rested the back of my head against the window. I can’t believe I just turned that down, I told myself, chuckling faintly. How is this real life?

Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I’d started to notice a change in my perceptions. It started faint and slow. For the longest time, I lived in denial, telling myself I’d just gotten really good at reading faces and figuring out how best to respond to people so they did what I wanted. It wasn’t until I’d felt my econ professor’s headache and offered him an Advil after class—without the man ever commenting on his migraine or giving any sign that he was in pain—that I faced up to the truth.

I had superpowers.

Supers weren’t uncommon in Potomac City. In fact, this part of the world had more superhumans per capita than any region of the country. No one really knew why, though the scientists and talking heads in the media had dozens of different theories. Some said it was because Autarch set up his capitol here a decade ago, some people said it was the water, and then there were the tinfoil-hat theories.

I didn’t care much. I just focused on keeping it quiet.

A generation or so ago, turning out to be a super would have been great news. It would’ve made me a celebrity overnight, given me the power to do whatever I wanted and go anywhere I chose to go.

But that was before the war. Before Autarch beat the snot out of the various groups of supers and formed SENTRY chapters in every major city—a group of supers dedicated to ‘maintaining the peace’ and ‘identifying new superhumans in the local community’.

On TV, SENTRY were presented as peacekeepers. In reality, we all knew what they were: a cross between the Mafia and the Cartels. Except neither criminal organization had superhumans backing them up.

Officially, Autarch had no political power or ability to make decisions for humanity.

Unofficially, he was the God Emperor of Earth.

And he didn’t like people with my abilities.

The press call what I can do ‘radical empathy’: the ability to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own. Some conspiracy theorists have called it ‘mind control’, but I’ve never been able to get anyone to do anything they don’t want to do.

I just happen to know what someone is feeling—if they’re hiding a secret, if they want someone to cheer them up, if they need someone to take them seriously, or if they want to toss their brain in a corner and go fuck hard at the beach. My powers could be useful in a thousand different ways, some of which I was still working on discovering.

The results spoke for themselves. To my teachers, I was the most responsive, attentive student they’d ever had. And to the hot girls of my college, I was the guy who was funny, sweet, or cocky on demand—and could get you off like no one else in the tri-state area. My empathy extended to other people’s pleasure as well as pain, which meant with all of my partners I could pinpoint exactly what turned them on and do it as often as possible.

It wasn’t hypnosis or pick-up artistry: my gift just gave me the ability to empathize. When you don’t merely know what people want, but feel what drives them, and what they secretly hope a guy would do or say when they come up to them at a party, it turns out you naturally become a guy that girls like to be around.

And it was that power that allowed me to feel the sudden wash of anxiety in the redhead a few seats away.