Domination

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.

I had nipple clamps biting into me and the chain taut in Adrián’s fingers. One word was enough to make everything 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 came at dusk: report at 1:45, 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 coffin, while everyone pretended to mourn, Mariana could think only of those two men’s hands and what they would do to her that 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.

I told him I wasn’t going out that night. Then he knocked on my door with a pink dress in his hand and a smile that already knew he would win me over.

I locked my office door, opened the day’s video, and saw my wife biting her lip while he hugged her from behind in the kitchen.

No one in the courthouse would ever imagine she was waiting there naked and on her knees, holding her breath for him to walk through the door and remind her who she belonged to.

I thought I was going to beg her to keep the secret. I never imagined that when she came back into the living room she’d be holding a crop and wearing stiletto boots.