The Kidnapping I Had Asked Him for Myself

I was heading home after an impossible day. I had spent the afternoon signing papers I hated signing, deciding over other people's lives from behind a desk that had already grown too big for me. Running a hotel does that to you: it forces you to be the person no one wants to see walk into their office. I left work with a stiff neck and a head full of noise, and the only thing I wanted was to get home, kick off my shoes, and stop being myself for a while.

What I didn’t remember — because I had made myself forget on purpose — was that that week I had given Damián permission to come.

We had talked about it for months. First as a joke in bed, then seriously, with a sheet of paper between us and a list of things that were allowed and things that never would be. One word to stop everything, another to slow down for a moment. He kept it, chose one of the days I had marked in red, and promised me only one thing: that I wouldn’t know when.

I wouldn’t know when. That was what made it work.

I got out of the taxi a few streets before home, at a candy shop open at all hours, and bought myself a box of ice-cold chocolates that I started devouring with a hunger I knew well. Eating when I’m nervous is an old habit that took me years to tame. I was biting into the last one when I entered the underpass that runs beneath the old highway, that poorly lit tunnel I always avoided and that night, out of laziness, didn’t.

A huge shape emerged from the shadows.

A blunt удар between my shoulder blades cut off my breath and sent my bag flying in front of me. A big hand covered my mouth before I could even think of screaming, and my whole body, all of it, went still. Three seconds. I counted them without meaning to. It took three seconds for him to shove me against the concrete wall, my chest crushed against the cold, his weight pinning me entirely.

The hand over my mouth loosened just a little. A voice spoke in my ear, low, unhurried.

—Don’t scream. Do what I tell you.

I obeyed. Not because I was truly afraid — part of me had already recognized the heat of those hands — but because obeying was exactly what I had come looking for. The safeword burned in my throat like a key I chose not to use. As long as I didn’t say it, this was real.

I felt plastic slide around my wrists and tighten with a snap. Zip ties, taut, snug. Then the brush of my own silk scarf, the white one, sliding over my eyes until I was left in darkness. The makeup and the tunnel heat kept nothing from sticking to my skin, so he tied the silk behind my nape in a firm knot.

—Now, quiet and good, we’re getting out of here.

He led me to the other end, holding me by the arm with a hand that left no room for doubt. I heard the sliding door of a van open. As I climbed in, I lost a shoe, one of the slim heels that stayed behind on the asphalt. He didn’t let me pick it up.

—Don’t even think about touching your blindfold — he said, and for the first time his voice trembled a little, as if he, too, were struggling to keep the character together —. Do you understand me?

I nodded. The door shut and the engine started.

***

The ride was long, or it seemed that way to me. In the dark, time stretches and warps; without sight, every bump is a surprise and every turn a small abyss. I counted the minutes until they stopped meaning anything. Thirty, maybe forty. I felt my heart in my throat and, lower down, a heat that had nothing to do with the tunnel. I had promised myself I would submit, and I was keeping that promise better than I expected.

The van stopped. The silence outside was enormous, the silence of open country, of night with no city nearby. I knew where we were going: the old country house we had chosen together, with no neighbors, no one around. But knowing didn’t lessen the vertigo. That was the magic of the arrangement.

The gate was opened. The night air hit my bare legs.

—Now, Marina — he said, using my name for the first time —, we’re going to have a long talk.

I didn’t answer. He pulled me out of the van and led me a few steps over dry ground until he set me against the rough trunk of a tree. An oak, I would learn later; then it was only coarse bark biting into my back through my blouse.

His hands slid down my hips and unfastened my skirt. The fabric fell to my ankles and left me in black seamed stockings and the lace underwear I had put on that morning without knowing who it was for. I felt something cold and blunt travel up my leg, from my knee to my waist, slow, deliberate. I didn’t know what it was. A handle, the back of a dull knife, it didn’t matter: the trick was not knowing.

—I want you to feel exactly what you make me feel — he murmured near my neck.

I stayed still. So did he. For two endless minutes nothing happened: I knew he was there, I heard him breathing, but he didn’t touch me. The waiting was part of the punishment. When you’re blindfolded, anticipation weighs more than any blow.

—Damián? —I whispered, because sometimes the character cracks on its own and you need to hear the person is still underneath.

A finger came to rest on my lips, asking for silence. He didn’t scold me. He only hushed me.

Then he freed my wrists. The plastic gave way and for an instant, on pure instinct, my hands wanted to rip off the blindfold and run. He anticipated it. A firm pressure pushed me back against the tree, with no real violence, with the exact control of someone who knows how to measure his strength.

—Take off your jacket and blouse.

I did. With clumsy fingers I unbuttoned my silk blouse and let it fall beside the skirt and jacket, forming a puddle of fabric at my feet. I felt naked long before I truly was.

—That’s all you pretend to be during the day — he said, and I heard him nudge one of my shoes away with his foot —. Here, it’s useless.

He was right. There against that bark, I wasn’t a boss or an agenda or a signature at the bottom of a hard letter. I was only a body that had asked to be taken.

***

A hemp rope, rough and dry, began to wind around my wrists and climb until it brushed my throat, not to choke me but to remind me I was restrained. The tension was perfect: enough to make me feel at his mercy, not so much that I would truly be afraid. Damián knew every inch of that line. We had drawn it together on paper, and now he traced it with a precision that made my skin prickle.

I felt the blunt end of that cold object travel over me again, this time across my breasts. He unclasped my bra with one hand and let it fall. Being like this, tied and blind in the open air, under the sky, made me feel more exposed than I had ever felt. His free hand circled one breast, not squeezing, just holding it, as someone might assess what belongs to him.

Then came the first blow.

I didn’t see it coming — you never do when you’re blindfolded — and that was what made me moan before I even felt the pain. The bundle of ropes cracked against my thighs with a sharp, forceful snap. One. A hot sting spread over the skin. I clenched my teeth.

—Do you remember? —he asked, and I knew he expected me to count.

—Two —I said, and the second landed on my hips.

—Three.

The third was the hardest, a clean burst that buckled my knees and tore out a sound from me that was neither pain nor pleasure, but both mixed together. I ended up hanging a little from the rope, panting, my skin burning and the rest of my body asking for more than my pride wanted to admit.

Damián dropped the ropes to the ground. I heard them fall, soft, onto the earth.

And then everything changed.

His hand, the same one that a moment before wielded the lash, ran with incredible gentleness over the hot mark crossing my chest, up to my collarbone. I felt his fingers at the knot of the blindfold. The silk began to loosen. And as he took it away, a tear slipped free without my permission, not from sadness, but from that huge thing that overflows when you let yourself fall completely and someone is there to hold you.

The blindfold fell. The faint light from the van blinded me for a second. I saw him: my Damián, looking at me with the same intensity with which he had struck me, but now tinted with something else. He held my chin with two fingers and, with the corner of the white scarf, wiped away the tear with a care no stranger would ever have shown.

—Are you here? —he asked softly. The same question as always, the one that closes the circle.

—I’m here —I answered, and it was true. More whole than I had been all day.

He untied me. When the rope slackened, my body slid down the trunk and he caught me before I hit the ground, the bark barely scraping my back, the last physical remnant of what I had just lived through. He held me against his chest until my breathing settled.

***

—Get dressed —he said after that, again with feigned roughness, though the smile was obvious in his voice.

I dressed slowly, savoring the return. First the bra, then the underwear. The stockings slid up my still-shaking legs. I put on my blouse and fastened each button with fingers that were slow to remember how. When I tugged my skirt into place at my waist, the fabric made that particular sound skin makes when it’s being cinched again, and I realized how much I had enjoyed ceasing, for an hour, to be the woman I had to be.

Damián watched me put on my jacket with something like tenderness, as if recovering a valuable object he had borrowed for a moment. He brought me my shoes — the one left in the tunnel, he had picked it up without my noticing, of course he had — and handed me my bag.

—There’s water and a blanket on the other side of the house — he said —. And tomorrow, if you want, we can talk about what you liked and what you didn’t.

Then I kissed him, slowly, my mouth still dry from the imaginary gag, from the tension, from the chosen fear. It wasn’t the kiss of lovers saying goodbye. It was the kiss of two people who know each other so well they can make themselves strangers for each other and then, afterward, find one another again.

—Tomorrow —I promised.

And as we walked hand in hand toward the house, beneath a sky without cities, I understood that the real luxury wasn’t the control I exercised in my office, but the one I surrendered, willingly and completely, when I let him tear me out of my own life for a night.