Addicted

Aaron Cyrus January 5th,20XX

My hands were steady as I ended the voicemail for Joyce and put my phone on my bed. My bedside table had gone the same route as my footstool.

The two metal sheets that used to be my footstool and bedside table were propped up against the wall and dully reflected the light that streamed in from the windows.

After calming down from yesterday and processing it through the night I was left in a state of pseudo catharsis. I knew there was a lot more processing I had to do, but no matter how much I tossed and turned the situation around, there was nothing I would have done differently.

At the end of the day, I had saved a life and that was the most important thing.

I’d heard Joyce rave about superheroes before and knew that they used their powers for good but doing it myself filled me with a thrill and a dread that was hard to process. On one hand, these new abilities had come out of nowhere and had instantly dialled up my life’s difficulty level by ten points, but on the other...

The thrill of jumping out of the helicopter, the desperation to catch the falling teenager, the relief as I’d felt my frozen fingers hook into the back of his broken chute.

I hadn’t stuck around to properly receive any praise or thanks for what I’d done, but before we’d touched the ground, I’d caught a glimpse of Raf’s father’s face. The expression on his face, one of pure relief and gratefulness was more gratifying than any monetary or verbal reward I could ever get.

My heart began to pound again as I remembered it and I felt my breath become shallow from excitement. I brought my hands to my face and tried to stifle the weird expression that slowly bloomed on my face.

Ahh, this was bad.

If I wasn’t careful, I might let myself get addicted to the feeling.

I wondered where Joyce was but aside from a few vague answers and a promise that she was trying to help me, she refused to tell me details. Her sister had already called me a few times to ask if she was with me, so I knew that asking her was pointless. Since she had said she was doing something to help me I knew I didn’t have to be worried about my secret coming out, but the way she was acting was suspicious.

She wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but her definition of help was a bit unclear.

My feet hung awkwardly as I steadied myself in the air and I wobbled as I tried to pull them into a crisscrossed seating position.

It was strange.

I’d come across a post on Joyce’s social media website, Squire, that asked what people thought flying felt like. As I read through the replies to the post, it got me thinking about what it felt like for me.

The replies to the post had theorized it would feel like having an invisible platform under them. Others had thought it would feel like being held up by an invisible string in mid-air, or like they were being buffeted on a bed of wind.

The wind theory was the closest to how I defied gravity, but closer introspection made me realize that it wasn’t quite accurate. In the wind example, one would be able to feel their weight being supported by the wind, but when I went up into the air, I almost couldn’t feel my body and had to think an extra step to retain awareness of my limbs.

I felt completely weightless in the air, and every moment was slightly faster than it would be on the ground. There was less air resistance when I moved around, and it was easier to stand or lay down than it was to try to sit.

My eyes kept drifting to my phone despite knowing Joyce probably wouldn’t call back until the evening. I’d meant to call her last night but as soon as I’d entered my room, I’d gone unconscious and had woken up on the ceiling again. While it was nice, I hadn’t gotten any back issues from sleeping on the floor, I was worried the same thing would happen when my roommate came back from his family visit.

Speaking of my roommate, I should probably move out before I slipped up and ended up exposing myself to him. The only problem was where I would move too.

It wasn’t like I was poor, but a large sum of my funds went to taking care of my parents back home and my university fees.

I didn’t allow myself to feel regret for giving away the scholarship I’d been offered in the past and started to mentally arrange my finances. There was also my roommate to consider. It would be a jerk move to leave him to pay the full rent on his own so I needed to give him about three months' notice so he could find a new roommate.

I put moving out aside for now and stopped my mid-air pacing once I noticed the time. As much as I tried to lighten the landing my feet still made a loud thud as gravity took hold of me again.

The apartment under me responded by banging on the ceiling and I felt bad for being so noisy. The apartment was better than most of the others within the price range and was close to my university. The best part about it was the fact that almost everyone that lived here was a celebrity of some kind, we didn’t bother one another and could pretend that they lived alone or with a single roommate like I did.

I shook off my head full of thoughts and started to get dressed for class.

Honestly, the thought of going to my classes and acting like a normal student after the events of yesterday was off-putting. I fought off the temptation to take the day off and reminded myself of how much I was paying that school.

There wasn’t much of a reason that I was in university considering I was already a successful person. I was still an undecided major, despite being two years older than my peers as second-year university students but that was because of how much time off I‘d needed to take for my job.

Most of my classes were online classes that made me work at my own pace, but there were a few that I needed to meet once a month with the professors for.

I was currently torn between becoming a coach and teaching the new generation of my current team or leaving the professional scene altogether. Ever since my leg injury a few years back, I could only play in showmanship matches. At the time it’d been the most devastating thing to ever happen to me, but I could talk and think about it now without spiralling into a tunnel of depression.

It had healed up nicely enough, but I was too much of a liability to put on for professional ranking games. I was lucky enough to become a spokesperson for the team and got us a few more brand deals since I had more time than my other teammates. I was just grateful since my team hadn’t immediately fired me when I had gotten injured.

My coach had been more hopeful for my recovery than I was, despite me only being a mediocre player, and had fought with upper management to not only keep me on the team roll but also to keep paying me. It was an unspoken but well-known agreement that I would leave the team as soon as the coach retired so the old man had been cut a lot more slack when it came to showing results than others might have been.

I had also been pretty interested in acting lately. The pay wasn’t that much better than modelling, but it was something to keep busy while my other teammates practised the sport.

My phone rang out an alarm to tell me I would be late for class if I didn’t hurry and shook me out of my thoughts. For now, I needed to focus on passing my general education classes and understanding why I could suddenly fly and flatten metal solids with my body weight.