Forbidden

When she knelt in the shower and looked up at me with that smile, I knew there was no turning back: her fantasy and mine were about to cross a line.

I went up to offer help like a good neighbor. I came down something very different, kneeling in her bathroom and obeying every word that came from her mouth.

The first time she put the collar on me, I knew there was no turning back: I would go down every time she called, ready to obey whatever order came out of her mouth.

“We’re not doing anything, it’s a piece of silicone,” she told me. But the way she looked at me while opening the box said exactly the opposite.

She fell asleep in front of the TV, and I knew I shouldn’t get close. But her bare feet on the sofa were an invitation I’d been waiting for months to accept.

For years I accepted to please them, then ran to the bathroom to spit it out. With him I discovered that the barrier I struggled most to break was also the one hiding the most pleasure.

I went into his room just to talk and ended up discovering something that woke every hormone in my body. Once he caught me, there was no pretending I didn’t want him.

She had never touched a belly like that without gloves and a gown in between. This time it was Marisol’s, her sister-in-law’s, and she couldn’t pretend she was only there to feel for the twins’ kicks.

I was days past my due date and could think of only one thing. When a contraction bent me over in pain, I asked Rocío to slip her hand under the sheet.

When the bathroom light suddenly came on, I froze, bikini bottoms in my hand and her eyes locked on mine. I knew I wasn’t in charge anymore.

I went down to the garden in the dark, not knowing that this time she wouldn’t leave me alone with her underwear: she had something of her mother’s saved for me.

She was hiding something in her hand, and that smile promised nothing innocent. “Stick out your tongue,” she ordered, and I already knew I’d obey.

Every night she asked me for something new through the bars of her window, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no, even if it meant rummaging through my own mother’s laundry basket.

Carla appeared barefoot among the shadows of the garden, with that good-girl face that hid the most perverse girl I had ever known.

“I’m your lady and I order you to stay still,” she whispered. I had survived three combat missions, but nothing had prepared me to obey her.

They trained me to please and obey, but that ajar door awakened something else: a spark of defiance that even the cold cuffs against my skin couldn’t extinguish.

I was still naked on the bed when the door opened, and for a second neither of us knew what to do with what the other had just seen.

She crossed half the kingdom for a legendary relic; what she didn’t expect was to kneel before those guarding it, or to desire it with every fiber of her body.

I watched him from before his failure. He said I was too perfect to walk in the mud, not knowing that sentence condemned him never to leave it.

That night I went down for a glass of water and he was awake on the sofa. What happened next in my bed, with my stepfather breathing on the other side of the door, still burns me.