Forbidden

When the officiant asked whether anyone had something to say, the groom raised his hand. Not to say yes, but to confess what he had been holding in for months.

I’m thirty-four and I never doubted what I was. Until that seed started growing inside me, silent and persistent, and I could no longer ignore it.

I knew his schedule, the sound of his boots, the exact moment he took off his shirt because of the heat. What I didn’t know was how far that obsession would take me.

She left them by the mat, still warm from her bare feet. It only took my daughter being distracted for a moment for me to commit the madness.

I’m a patrician used to buying everything I desire. That afternoon I discovered there are men you don’t command: you obey them.

I went to the bathroom with a simple urgency and found her there, soaped up and smiling, already knowing the order I was about to give her.

Every time her sister turned away, she slipped off her sandals and left her feet on display, knowing exactly what she was doing to me and savoring every second of my torment.

I told her I liked her feet and she laughed. She had no idea that that afternoon, while she was looking after her nieces, I’d be on my knees in front of her bed with her sneakers in my hands.

I learned to count the hours until she fell asleep. Only then, in the darkness of the bunk bed, were her sandals mine and no one could see what I did with them.

I went to her house for a school assignment and found her in flip-flops. From that moment on, I could never look at her without thinking of her feet.

It was midnight when I crossed the patio barefoot. Her pink flip-flops were still there, warm, with the mark of every one of her toes waiting for me in the dark.

The moment the gathering loosens up and no one’s watching, I slip into the bathroom. I know exactly what I’ll find in the basket, and I know perfectly what I’m going to do with it.

I didn’t need to read his name to know the green pants he described in such detail were mine. And I knew, in that instant, that I was going to make him beg.

She went down those clinic stairs knowing she would not leave as the same woman: three pairs of hands were waiting to remind her what she really was.

I’d never paid for anything like that before. We met on a Tuesday morning, she handed me the bag in a hurry, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what was waiting for me at home.

She lifted her skirt, looked at me hard, and said not to be embarrassed, that we all did it. That’s when I knew that night wouldn’t be like any other.

He knew he was going to lose before they even started. But giving in right away gave him nothing: the pleasure was in resisting, in forcing the other to wrench victory from him with bites under the full moon.

I had spent years working among the dead and thought I had seen it all. Until that man, laid out on my steel table, moved when I sank the scalpel into his chest.

Ever since I was a child, balloons both terrified and aroused me. At that birthday party, locked in the bathroom, I discovered how far that contradiction could take me.

I read the name on the corpse tag and my heart skipped a beat: it was her, the same girl who had humiliated me for six years. And now she was still, at my mercy.