With a sigh, Corinne settled into the hard plastic seat on the Brooklyn-bound C local. She had given it a quick wipe with her towel, just in case, but it seemed clean.
Next to her, a woman was breastfeeding a serene infant while grading papers.
As the train pulled out of the station, the voice of Stevie Nicks in her headphones duetted with the creak and whine of the rails. She tried to let the song wash away the stress of the workday.
Glancing around, Corinne spotted a slightly pudgy, nondescript man in a grey windbreaker kneeling on the floor of the car, giving a blow job to the dapper, silver-haired gent in one of the seats across from her.
Next to them, a slender, very dark-skinned woman dressed all in red played a portable video game.
She leaned back in her seat, letting her head rest against the plexiglass cover of the ad behind her, and her eyes half closed as the chorus surged in her ears. Off to her right, a cluster of teen girls who looked to be coming home from baseball practice hooted and hollered over a video on someone's phone.
The nondescript man bobbed his head on the silver fox's cock. The seated man, eyes lidded with pleasure, was really quite attractive, Corinne thought. She checked out his earrings. Interested in men only, she saw. Oh well.
Not that she was looking right now, of course. She didn't really do that sort of thing. Not usually, anyway. Her own earrings were set, as on most days, with the little red "not interested" signal.
But there was no harm in peeking, she thought.
He looks like a gallery owner, Corinne decided. And the nondescript guy works at a bookstore. She'd always enjoyed making up little stories about random strangers on the subway.
The woman in red? Maybe a photographer? Wait, could you even wear such bright colors while taking photos? She'd throw red reflections all over her subject.
A few seats down, a stout woman in a fine business suit with an elaborate updo of colorful braids slid her sunglasses up her face to rest in her hair, and caught the eye of the man sitting across from her, who had gotten on at Corinne's stop.
The woman flicked out her middle finger in his direction — the universal invitation to fuck. Corinne saw a series of quick hand signals flash between them, and then the man rose from his seat and sat next to her.
He was tall, with broad shoulders and dark eyes, built like a blacksmith, wearing the uniform of an office-building security guard. The businesswoman kissed him, reaching a hand into his lap to run her fingers along the bulge in his jeans.
She hooked one leg over his, granting him access to slip a hand up her skirt.
Next to them, a bored-looking woman with a stack of shopping bags on her knees flipped through something on her phone.
The train began to slow as it pulled into the next station, and Corinne saw the nondescript man stand up. The silver fox offered him a handkerchief, which he took with a grin. They shook hands and went in for a quick kiss.
The nondescript man quickly washed up at the little cleaning station by the nearest door, and then, adjusting the messenger bag on his shoulder, slipped out onto the platform as the doors opened.
Those little sinks on every train car had been a great upgrade, Corinne thought. Good on the city council for actually getting something useful done.
It had been five years since the Metamorphosis. Almost half of her adult life, she realized. There had been some real Wild West stuff early on, but people had adjusted, and the kinks, so to speak, were being worked out.
People still debated what the cause of the Metamorphosis had been. Aliens? God? Humanity's collective psychic energy?
Whatever it was, one day everything had simply been different. The world they had always known, of wars and cruelty and hatred, had melted away. People had found that they just didn't want to murder each other any more.
It wasn't only humans that had been affected. Infectious disease had vanished. Viruses and bacteria now lived in comfortable equilibrium with their hosts, no longer growing out of control.
In a broader sense, those were the big, important parts of the Metamorphosis. But the thing that had affected Corinne's daily commute the most was the fact that people had suddenly lost almost all of their sexual inhibitions.
She could still remember the old days, riding the subway to and from work in grumbling, tense silence, surrounded by tired, unhappy people avoiding each other's gaze.
Then the Metamorphosis had come, and suddenly, no one could quite remember why they would previously have been mortified to be seen sucking cock at rush hour.
Or, perhaps that wasn't quite it, Corinne thought. Since the Metamorphosis, she had sucked a cock or two on this train, under the watching eyes of a hundred passengers, and it had definitely made her blush bright pink with embarrassment.
The heart-pounding, stomach-lurching sense of terror, of making oneself so vulnerable, so publicly — it wasn't gone, it was just strangely harmless nowadays.
Sort of like the difference between eating spicy food and actually being burned.
Security Man had lifted the businesswoman into his lap, and she was now riding him, one arm thrown back around his head, moaning joyously, leaning back into his strong arms and letting the cares of the day fall away. One breast had been popped free of her polka-dot blouse and Corinne found her eyes following the dark nipple as it bounced in time.
Corinne imagined wrapping her lips around that nipple, feeling the businesswoman's hot breath in her hair.
She pushed the thought away. Normally Corinne would have a book to read, but she had finished hers on her lunch break, so her only distraction was her headphones. She turned up the song and leaned back in her seat again.
An elegant, sharp-boned young pregnant woman a few seats down was deep in a book of her own. A romance novel, one of those ones where almost the whole cover is just a closeup of rippling abs. Her face was flushed.
