Exhibitionism

I left that store trembling with desire, never imagining that by that same week I’d be on my knees, begging to be used with not a shred of tenderness.

My lover left me wanting more, but my husband knew exactly how to treat me: without romance, without mercy, like the submissive I am.

I sat in the center of the classroom pretending to be an unconscious patient. No one knew that, with every hand pinning me down, I was falling apart inside thinking of him.

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 drove to the abandoned factory with my pulse racing. I stripped among the broken glass and crossed the door, not knowing what waited for me on the floors above.

I went down to the kitchen in my pajamas, with nothing underneath, knowing he’d be awake. The tension had been building for days, and that night I decided I wasn’t holding back anymore.

I left the gym in the same clothes as always, with every eye on me. That night I understood I no longer wanted to hide how much it excited me to be desired.

I went back to school that afternoon under the excuse of studying in the library, but neither of us was going to open a single book. We were there for them.

We always thought no one could see us. That lie we told ourselves was the beginning of everything that came after, night after night.

I served that house since I was a boy and watched as that woman’s fire-red mane brought the valley’s most powerful men to their knees, one by one, by day of the week.

My friend promised me a wild costume night. I put on the sexiest outfit in the sex shop and headed out, not imagining what was waiting for me at that bar.

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.

I was sixty and my marriage was asleep when I noticed the boy next door spying on me through the hedges. I didn’t cover up. I played along.

That Thursday I didn’t have classes and the morning was mine. I turned on the water, closed my eyes, and let myself go... not imagining boots would appear in the window.

I’d gotten used to being looked at, but that afternoon, alone at the waterfall, I decided that this time I wouldn’t cover up when I found him hidden among the trees.

He shut the room door with all my clothes in his hands and left me on my knees, naked, with one order: “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

When he had us go up on the stage and people started betting on what we were wearing under our dresses, I knew the luxury party was no longer normal.

For fifteen years I’d greeted him on the beach without imagining what that man saw each night through the bathroom glass while I thought I was alone.

At four in the morning, locked under the sheets with my mother’s phone, I started opening folder after folder, unaware that nothing would ever be the same.

Our bedroom window faced his rooftop exactly. That night I realized the idea of being watched aroused me more than I’d ever admit.