I Still Miss the Collar My Master Put on Me

This morning, while the coffeemaker dripped into the carafe, I found myself thinking again about the soles of his shoes. Not about him exactly, but about the sole: the leather worn smooth on the inside, the smell of pavement and old leather, the way my tongue had grown used to tracing it. I saw myself again on my knees before Damián, on the floor I myself had left spotless after hours of housework, with my legs gone numb after he inspected me like someone checking merchandise.

Back then I was still his. His like the car, like the wrappers he tossed into the trash every night without looking. I was one of his belongings, and he decided when and how to use me.

It’s been a year now since it all ended, and I still feel the echo in my knees. No one has taken me as far as he did. No one has dominated me in the same way, with that methodical coldness that wasn’t looking for my pleasure but for my obedience.

***

In a way, I’ve gone back to being an ordinary woman. I don’t kneel as often anymore. Work took the place discipline used to have, and my days begin with the same coffee and end on the same sofa, in front of the same dark screen. A tidy life, without shocks, the kind of life anyone would envy.

And yet, even if I deny it and will probably regret writing it, each day I want more and more to go back to the routine he had imposed on me. I wish I could wake with his cock pulsing against my palate, giving him pleasure while he ignores me, checks his phone, opens an app, reads messages from other women. I miss that indifference. The way my mouth worked for someone who barely registered my existence.

I long, if only one more time, to bring him breakfast naked in bed and receive in the same gesture both his caresses and his contempt. His hand could stroke the nape of my neck with a tenderness that made me close my eyes, and a second later spit in my face without changing expression. Both things were him. I wanted both.

I think about his fingers opening me, parting me with an almost clinical precision, without compassion, as if he were studying a piece before deciding whether it was any good. And I shiver. It’s the same body; it still works, still sweats and trembles when I remember. But it no longer trembles for you.

There was a ritual, and rituals are what I miss most. Every morning I knelt by the door before he got dressed and waited with my head bowed until he decided to look at me. Sometimes he took a minute. Sometimes he left me there half an hour, feeling the cold of the floor crawl up my shins while he drank his coffee and read the paper in a low voice, without speaking a single word to me. I learned to love that waiting. Silence was a way of his hand on the back of my neck.

When he finally said my name, or the name he had given me, my whole body would suddenly go loose, as if only then I were being allowed to exist. That’s the feeling I chase and never find. The feeling of appearing in the world only because someone else commands it.

***

I never told you about these stories. What I write is only mine, even if hundreds of strangers read it on a screen. There’s something in exposing myself to strangers that brings back, from far away, the feeling of not belonging to myself.

I wonder if one day you’ll find this account and understand that I’m talking about you. Maybe you’ll look at your shoes and notice they no longer shine the way they did when my tongue polished them every morning, before you allowed me to speak. Maybe you’ll touch yourself while reading me. Please, do. And if you feel generous, write me a line. You have no idea how much I want to read you again.

All it would take was one “on the floor” from you for me to grab my things and cross the city to your apartment. No underwear, with the leather collar once again snug around my neck, the one that left a pink mark that took hours to fade. I’d go proudly, glad to belong to you again, to be at your mercy once more. I want you to play with me again. I want to feel as small as I did under your shadow again, that tightening in my chest I mistook for fear and that was really relief.

It was easier when someone made decisions for me.

***

I imagine you’d wonder about the infidelity if you read this. That’s fine. I’d say I forgive you, but it makes no sense for a submissive to forgive her master. Now I understand it differently: I should never have refused to let you have other women. That night when I complained about it, when I raised my voice as if I had any right, was the beginning of the end.

I hope you know how to forgive me for having been jealous, possessive of the only wealth that mattered, which was your control. You deserve more than one. You deserve rows of women begging to be under your command, you deserve the whole top of the pyramid. I’d be satisfied with one glance. Two, if you were in a good mood.

I know how it sounds. I write it and hear myself sounding pathetic, and still I don’t erase a single word. There’s a truth in humiliation that I can’t find anywhere else in my life, and I prefer that truth to the comfortable dignity of my afternoons.

***

This afternoon I’m meeting an old client again. It’s what I do now: I dominate. I get paid to do to others what I would give anything to receive. He’s an older married man who arrives in an impeccable suit and drops to his knees as soon as I close the door, trembling before I even touch him.

I’ll do my best, as always. I’ll crush his ego with my voice, flatten his masculinity under my heel the way he begs me to, leave him crying and grateful. I’ll know exactly where to press, how much to humiliate, when to withdraw the contempt so he’ll miss it. I’m good at this. Too good, maybe, because I know hunger from the other side.

I’ll see in his eyes the same blind devotion I felt for you, and for an instant I’ll envy him. He has what I lost: someone steady standing in front of him, someone who decides. I’ll watch him kiss the floor and think that floor is me, a year ago, in another city, before another man.

I’ll order him to count each blow out loud, to thank me for every single one, to ask permission even to breathe hard. And while I do it, my voice will come out firm, without a tremor, that commanding voice I learned by imitating you. No one would suspect that the woman holding the whip spends her nights wishing to be exactly where he is now: on the floor, nameless, without will, waiting for someone to decide whether he deserves to stand up.

And at night, when he’s gone and I hang up the whip and put away the straps, I’ll get into bed and touch myself thinking of being the insect beneath a pair of feet. I’ll think of your feet. When I come, I’ll scream your name into the pillow like an idiot, like a bitch who never learns.

***

Will I be ashamed? A little. I’m not writing all this without shame; on the contrary, I can feel it rising up my neck as I type. But my sex speaks louder than my head and forces me, every so often, to humiliate myself in public. For some readers’ pleasure, I suppose. And for mine, that’s for sure, right now, with one hand on the keyboard and the other where it shouldn’t be.

I finish the coffee, now cold, and go back to work. To the ordinary life of an average adult woman in the capital. Meetings, emails, a bill to pay. There’s so little magic in all this. So little weight, so little consequence.

Submission is the only thing that truly makes me happy, and it feels so far from the life I lead now that sometimes I doubt I ever lived it. The people I see on public transit, in the office, in the news, would never understand the pleasure of being an object. The exact peace of not having to decide anything.

I can never tell my coworkers how radiant I felt when I was stripped of will and judgment. When I drank from a man’s hand whatever he chose to give me, when my face was covered in saliva and I saw myself reflected, tiny, in the filthiest objects in the room. Those women talk about promotions and vacations, and I nod and smile and keep my truth under my pressed blouse.

But I keep moving. I go on. I pour the second coffee, open the laptop, answer the first email of the day. Another normal day, I tell myself. And while I’m writing it, I’m already counting the hours until night.