Bolt

4| What The Hell Did I Get Myself Into.

After the attack, police and the medics helped the injured and carried the dead while I returned home. I paid the driver and got out of the taxi. She stared at me for a while before driving off. It wasn't the first time that happened. Most people who saw me did the same thing, trying to remember where they'd seen me before. The life of a former superhero.

I lived in East Side Park, Mamba. Apartment buildings circled the block, leaving space in the middle for sports fields and courts. Like most rural neighborhoods, criminals and drug dealers infested it. A lot of promising boys and girls sold drugs and engaged in prostitution to earn money because they had no other option. There were no morals in these parts—you either put food on your table by any means or die hungry.

Not everyone was blessed—the word they used to describe peculiars—with powers. And there were those who had them, but it wasn't powerful or attractive enough for the hero management agencies.

I walked past the basketball court outside my apartment building where teenage boys were playing on it. One of them—Curtis—stopped and turned to me. "Yo, Mr. Trey, you wanna play?"

Seven years ago, he moved in with his mother in the apartment opposite mine. Back then, he was still in middle school. Now he had earned himself a full-ride athletic scholarship to a top college with a high-ranking basketball team.

I shook my head while proceeding to the building's front door.

"Have a nice day, Mr. Trey."

"He never speaks to anyone. Why do you even try with him?" his friend asked.

"He speaks to me."

Curtis used to be a stubborn kid. After he moved in, he bugged me to buy him school supplies because I looked like I could afford them. His mother only had money to send him to school. Anything else, he had to get it himself.

He had made the wrong assumptions about me. I didn't have money to buy him or me anything. Instead, I gave him instructions on how to avoid superheroes while he stole. Now he was going to college, and I was the reason for it.

When I arrived outside my apartment, I reached inside my hoodie's pocket and took out my keys. As I searched for the right one, the door to the apartment on my right opened. Ms. Hyuna walked out.

Standing at five-foot-one, she was a white woman in her late fifties with a petite build she maintained by exercising every day. Her skin was smooth, and the veneers made her smile look as bright as the sun's ass.

"Did you hear me last night?" she asked, dressed in a light purple, see-through nightgown with nothing else underneath. "I was thinking about you the whole time."

Ms. Hyuna had been trying to "mate" with me for the past year—around the same time she found out I used to be a superhero: she wasn't sure which one.

She and the women in her book club had an agreement to sleep with former superheroes. The one who slept with the most by Christmas would get a two-week vacation, paid for by the others to a destination of their choosing.

"Thank you for reminding me, Ms. Hyuna." I tried not to puke as I remembered her moaning my name while she got banged to oblivion by whatever black man she found in the street. The tragedy of our bedrooms sharing a wall. Thankfully, the pills drowned out the noise.

She moved closer to me—her chest rubbing the side of my arm—and pulled down my hoodie. "Call me, Hyuna," she whispered into my ear, then bit it.

If there was ever a time I nearly hit a woman who wasn't a supervillain, it was now. I hated when people invaded my personal space. I told her repeatedly I wasn't interested, but she refused to listen. I could have fucked her a long time ago and ended this nonsense. But the thought of having sex with her—or anyone else—made me ill.