College

She boarded the bus barefoot, sneakers in hand, and at the back a stranger couldn’t tear his eyes from her bare feet on the seat.

That night, as I drove home, I knew that behind her wicked smile there was a new idea. And that I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of my head.

My whole life I believed I belonged only to him. The afternoon he walked into the dean’s office and found me on the desk, I discovered how much he liked seeing me with another man.

I knew that blouse would make him nervous. What I didn’t imagine was how far I’d be willing to take it that afternoon, with the apartment empty and the door closed.

I left the house wearing a sweater that made everything see-through and nothing underneath. My boyfriend walked behind me, watching me, while strangers’ eyes ran over my body.

She grabbed my arm in the middle of the street and whispered that if I let her go, she might disappear. I had no idea how far that night would go or what price I’d pay for following her.

That witching night, he wasn’t expecting company. But something cold materialized at the foot of his bed and whispered his name as if it knew all death.

He came in uninvited, wearing a smile that promised pleasure and hid hunger. That night, every body he touched stopped being theirs forever.

She spent her whole life being the strong one, the one who cared for everyone. That afternoon, a stranger told me to get in his car and, for the first time, I stopped deciding.

I told him I wasn’t going out that night. Then he knocked on my door holding a pink dress and that smile that already knew he was going to win me over.

I left home with my thong folded in my pocket and three phrases I didn’t choose written on my skin. Each class hour drove me closer to the edge, with no permission to finish.

I thought I was only going to have some fun and make a little money. I never imagined that night, between blows and caresses, I’d find exactly what my body had been crying out for.

Before, she argued politics and read the classics. Now she sits on his lap and waits, smiling, for the next whim of the man who transformed her.

I sat in that chair pretending to be in an emergency, but beneath the bra-less top my body only obeyed a voice not in the room: my master’s.

I came back from the bar with a beer in hand and saw her dancing with him. Nothing happened… or did it? The question lodged itself in me and, to my shame, it turned me on too.

I promised I’d only tell true things, so here’s how my mother found out about my older boyfriend… and how I accidentally discovered what she really did.

Fresh out of the shower, I looked in the mirror and realized I couldn’t keep waiting. I took a sheet of paper and started writing down everything I’d wanted for years and never dared to do.

Dommes squeeze, ring, burn them. We barely lick. The first time I looked at a pair up close was in a student flat, long before I knelt before anyone.

At eighty-seven he thought he’d heard it all. Then she knelt on the other side of the grille and began telling him what she did when her husband traveled.

I’ve always hated public bathrooms, but that day I had no choice. What I never imagined was what I’d find when I ran back for the phone I’d left on top of the water tank.