The webcam from that night awakened my submissive side

There are desires you carry with you forever, without really knowing where they came from. No one ever taught me any of this. I grew up in a quiet house, without scenes, without clues, and yet, from a very young age, I knew sex was calling to me in a way I didn’t dare tell anyone about.

My name is Mariela, though almost everyone calls me Mari. I’m in my early thirties, very fair-skinned, with a pear-shaped body that I learned to love over time: wide hips, full thighs, a big ass, and medium breasts with peach-colored nipples. Out in the street I’m serious, almost abrupt. But when I close my bedroom door, another woman wakes up.

Today I have a daughter and an orderly life. And yet, before all that, I lived through one night — really, a succession of nights — in front of a camera that still turns over in my head when I’m alone. I’m writing this now, years later, and I feel the same tingling in my lower belly that I felt back then.

For a long time I was ashamed of it. I thought there was something broken in me, that no normal woman could want to be treated like that. It took me years to understand that I wasn’t broken; that my pleasure simply had a different shape, one that lived in submission, in total surrender, in letting someone else decide for me for a while. And that screen was where I discovered it.

***

It started out of boredom, or curiosity, whatever. I went onto one of those sites where you could chat with strangers about sex. I’d been going in and out for several days, frustrated, because none of them understood what I was looking for. Most wanted canned lines, two sentences and straight to the point. They sent photos I hadn’t asked for, wrote with typos and haste, and disappeared as soon as they noticed I wasn’t following the script. I wanted something else, even if I didn’t yet know how to name it.

That night a man appeared. He called himself Damián. He wasn’t blunt or pushy: he asked how I was, where I was from, what I studied. He made me feel comfortable talking, and that, in that place, was rare. We talked about banal things for a good while. I gave him my email. And when I’d already let my guard down, he dropped it:

—Do you want to have sex with me over the webcam?

I stared at the screen. My heart was pounding. I answered yes, but on one condition.

—You have to talk dirty to me —I wrote, my hands trembling over the keyboard—. Treat me like a slut. Insult me. That’s what turns me on.

I don’t know where I found the courage to confess it like that, so raw. I wanted to feel desired all the way to humiliation. I wanted his words to dirty me. There was a long silence on the other end, and for a second I thought I’d scared him off.

—I like it —he answered—. Tell me what you’re wearing under the pajama top.

—Nothing —I wrote.

—Let me see you.

And that’s how a complete stranger saw my breasts for the first time. He told me to suck one finger and touch them slowly. My breathing was already out of control. Then he ordered me to stand up and show him my whole body. I got up from the chair and undressed slowly in front of the camera, feeling the air raise goosebumps on my skin.

—Lie down —he typed—. Spread your legs. Run your fingers over your pussy. Slowly.

I obeyed. I masturbated while looking at the little light on the camera, imagining his eyes behind it. I was shaking. My body was lighting up in a way I’d never known. At one point the pleasure was so intense I was afraid I’d cry out and wake half the house, so I grabbed a cloth from the dresser and stuffed it between my teeth. I bit down on the fabric while everything exploded inside me. When I finished, my face was flushed and burning, and I had a heat in my chest I had never experienced before.

***

It didn’t end that night. We started meeting up. Every time my house fell silent, I turned on the laptop and he was there, waiting, as if he somehow knew the exact hour when my will would collapse. He asked me to buy clothes: thongs, a baby doll, fishnet stockings, a pair of heels I only wore for him. And night after night, the game became more intense, dirtier, more mine.

What’s curious is how my whole day changed because of those late nights. I spent the day with my head somewhere else, counting the hours, silently choosing what I was going to wear. At the office I answered in monosyllables and people thought I was in a bad mood. They didn’t know that inside I was a bundle of nerves and anticipation, that I could barely concentrate imagining what he would order me to do that night. That double life was intoxicating to me.

One of those nights he told me to put on the black baby doll and let my hair down. Then he sent me a video: women with lush bodies moving their hips, shaking their asses in an exaggerated, almost obscene way.

—I want you to dance for me like that —he wrote.

Without thinking, I obeyed. I put on music and started moving in front of the screen. I was turned on just knowing he was watching me; that filthy thrill filled me completely and made me wet. I felt possessed. I rubbed myself against the cold wall of the room, seeking the rough friction against my lips, playing with the contrast between the hardness of the wall and my burning skin.

—Stop —he typed suddenly—. Now strip while you dance.

He changed the song. I took off my clothes to the beat, and when I was completely naked, he told me to keep going. I was already dripping; I could feel the warm liquid sliding down the insides of my thighs.

—Put the laptop on the floor —he ordered—. Dance for me with your legs open. I want to see everything.

I did it. I wrote him that I was ready. His reply came dry and precise:

—Good girl, bitch. Stand up, throw yourself onto the bed. Touch your tits. Spit on yourself.

Every order hit me like a brutal caress. I spread my legs, turned around, and offered my ass straight to the camera. Then he told me to suck down a little glass of tequila imagining it was him. I took it into my mouth slowly, looking at the lens.

—Now shove it into your cunt —he said.

And I felt like it was really him penetrating me. The pleasure ripped moans from me that I could barely hold back. While I moved it inside me, I turned my head toward the chat.

—Turn on the microphone —he wrote.

I turned it on. And with my ass in the air, in front of the screen, he started filling my ears with insults. He told me things I’m not going to repeat, crude words, filthy words, perfect words. I stayed like that for a long while, listening to him, feeling like the most desired woman and the most lost woman in the world, alone in the darkness of my room, coming to every horrible and delicious thing spilling from his mouth.

—Before you come —he ordered—, take it out, turn around and sit down. And put it back in, slowly, burying it in yourself.

You can’t imagine the pleasure I felt. I finished trembling, drenched in sweat from head to toe, my legs no longer answering me. I couldn’t even get up from the bed. I stayed there, sprawled out, with my heart racing and a stupid smile on my face, listening to my own breathing gradually slow down.

On the other end, Damián would stay silent for a while and then write something soft, almost tender, that contrasted with everything before. “Good girl,” he’d put, and those two words comforted me more than I was willing to admit. I’d fall asleep with the laptop still open, with the camera image pointed at the ceiling, and the next day I’d wake up with the feeling that I’d lived through something secret and enormous.

***

Every night was similar to that one. Each with a new script, each pushing me a little farther away from the serious woman the rest of the world thought they knew. Damián never saw my face clearly; I protected that detail by instinct. He was a complete stranger, and precisely because of that I could be, in front of him, everything I didn’t dare be in front of anyone else.

I think about it now and I find it hard to recognize myself in that girl locked in her room, biting a cloth so she wouldn’t scream. And yet I know she’s still there, crouched down, waking up every time the house falls silent.

There were nights when the game went beyond words. Damián gave me challenges: go the whole day without underwear and tell him about it, leave him voice messages describing how I felt, text him in the middle of work about how wet I was thinking of him. I carried out every one of those things with a devotion that surprised even me. I had never given myself to anyone like that before, and I never did again afterward with that intensity. It was an obedience that set me free instead of binding me, a paradox I took years to understand.

Sometimes I wonder whether he understood what I meant to him, or whether I was just one more woman on the other side of his screen. I’d rather not know. In my memory, those late nights belong only to me: the heat of the room, the laptop’s hum, the cloth between my teeth, and that voice ordering me around in the dark.

The game ended when he started insisting that we meet in person. He wanted an address, a meeting, a real body. And something in me shut down abruptly. The filthy thrill lived precisely in the distance, in the screen, in not fully knowing who he was or having him fully know who I was. The idea of crossing that line scared me so much that I stopped writing to him. I closed the session one night and never logged back in.

Several years have passed. Today my life is different, calmer, fuller. But sometimes, when I’m alone and the night gets long, I look for a cloth, turn off the light, and let that woman come out again. What happened after that, on another screen and under another name, I promise I’ll tell you soon.