Domination

I never told my partner. But when I close my eyes, I’m not the one who decides: someone comes in, holds me down, and my body stops obeying me.

When he walked in and lingered half a second too long on her feet, I knew something inside me had cracked. And to my surprise, jealousy wasn’t the first thing I felt.

I wear the thong under my cycling shorts and no one knows. It’s my secret on the bike, the beginning of the fantasy I rehearse in my head again and again.

I crossed the threshold without underwear, just as she had ordered. What I didn’t know was that on the other side of the door, a face I knew far too well was waiting for me.

When I opened the door and saw her standing in the middle of the room, I knew that night’s lesson would never be forgotten: she had come back, and everything changed.

I had never paid for anyone’s attention, but that night, in front of the screen, her words reduced me to something I never imagined I would want to be.

He had the clamps biting into my nipples and the chain taut between Adrián’s fingers. One word was enough to make it all stop. I didn’t say it.

I don’t know your name, but I know what’s waiting for you. I also thought it was love before I learned to obey every one of his orders.

I had her against the wall when her phone rang. I ordered her to answer on video call: her friend was going to see just how far her obedience went.

She kept telling herself she was a decent woman, but that night, in the hotel room, she discovered how badly she wanted to obey every one of my orders.

The message arrived at dusk: show up at 1:45 p.m., black dress, no jewelry, no handbag. The rest, you will obey. It was the only currency I had left.

I stared at her from the bar until our eyes met. I didn’t know yet that that night she would call me “sir” and do everything I ordered.

When he crouched in front of me under the rain and asked me to show him my teeth, I knew that man in the black suit wasn't offering me a coin.

I hit play thinking it was a tender goodbye. Two minutes later I understood she knew everything I hid, and that night her voice was in charge of me.

Beside the open casket, while everyone pretended to grieve, Mariana could only think about the hands of those two men and what they would do to her that same night.

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.

He was in his twenties, had a thin wife swimming below, and hungry eyes that begged me without knowing it. That afternoon I taught him who was in charge.

I hit send and something broke forever. With his collar around my neck, I knew that crossing the bar’s door meant no longer being who I had been.

It started with a red thong and a “put it on, love.” It ended with her smiling from the counter, deciding for both of us how the rest of my life would go.