Domination

Adrián fell asleep ten minutes after takeoff. The man by the window waited until he heard his steady breathing before leaning toward Marina and whispering in her ear.

I didn’t shower before going back home. I wanted my boyfriend to feel the gym sweat on my skin and the trace of another man, and not have the courage to ask whose it was.

When the engine died in the middle of nowhere, Daniela knew that night would depend entirely on the two men sleeping in those trucks.

I took off my ring before getting into the water. I didn’t want any souvenir photo to give me away, or for him to get ideas that weren’t his to have.

He thought that night was just a night out with his friends. He had no idea the masked woman on stage had been planning his downfall for weeks.

I warned her through clenched teeth, in the kitchen, that she would pay for deceiving me. I never imagined she’d end up on her knees in my room, begging me as she had never begged him.

The drive to the gym didn’t account for eighty extra kilometers every Thursday. That number was the first thread of a truth that would end up exciting me more than destroying me.

For two years, she gave her body every Friday to keep her husband alive. Now he is coming home, and she refuses to give up the cell that set her free.

When that stranger’s fist put my boyfriend on the canvas, I knew I was about to do something I could never fully regret.

Marina thought he was just a helpless young man. That afternoon, she discovered that behind the shyness was someone ready to take control of everything.

She went down for water and found them laughing in the garden. That night, on her knees in the hallway, I decided to remind my husband who he belonged to.

I opened the door expecting the smell of damp and abandonment. The house smelled of freshly brewed coffee and of a man. And there he was, pouring himself a cup as if he owned the place.

Everyone at the clinic thought he was crazy. In the dark hallway, he grabbed my arm and told me I was the queen his kingdom needed.

No one had touched her for months. That January afternoon, alone in the locker room with three sweaty boys, she stopped thinking and surrendered to what followed.

I wasn’t wearing anything under my skirt when I knocked on that rusted railcar door. I only wanted one man. I had no idea the foreman would show up to lay down his rules.

Daniel slept in the front seat while, three feet away, his uncle and girlfriend shared the truck’s narrow bunk. And Noelia no longer wanted to sleep.

They used me as a mule and I got busted over a suitcase I didn’t even know I was carrying. Inside, I learned the only currency that mattered was my own body.

I spent twelve months hauling spotlights and hating my life. That night, by the fountain, a stranger asked me to photograph her like no one ever had.

Around the bend didn’t come a modern tow truck, but a rusted old rig and a huge man who smelled of the fields. And I knew, before he even opened his mouth, how he was going to collect from us.

I offered her a job and a roof, nothing more. But that first night in the house by the river, neither of us pretended it was still just an arrangement.