Forbidden

I went downstairs to the bathroom with a simple urge 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 looked after her nieces, I was 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 exactly midnight when I crossed the patio barefoot. Her pink flip-flops were still there, warm, with the imprint of every one of her toes waiting for me in the dark.

The moment the gathering loosens up and no one is looking, I slip into the bathroom. I know exactly what I’m going to find in the hamper, and I know perfectly well 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’ve spent years working among the dead and thought I’d seen everything. Until that man on my steel table twitched when I sank the scalpel into his chest.

Balloons had terrified and aroused me in equal measure since childhood. On that birthday, locked in the bathroom, I discovered how far that contradiction could take me.

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

When she knelt in the shower and looked 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 help her like a good neighbor. I came down as something very different, kneeling in her bathroom and obeying every word that came out of her mouth.

The first time she put the collar on me, I knew there was no turning back: I would come down every time she called, ready to obey any order that 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.