Forbidden

I didn’t want him simply to take me. I wanted him to claim me, slowly, until I no longer recognized myself. That night I learned surrender can also be power.

She screamed at me in the elevator, and ten minutes later she was dragging me into her apartment. I was a virgin, clumsy, and terrified; she knew exactly what she wanted from me.

I raised the blind just a little, as always. But that night Marina was standing in front of the mirror, and for the first time she didn’t look away from my window.

I turned off the light, convinced he wasn’t coming. Then the doorbell rang twice, and I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

Everyone in the waiting room stared when we came in hand in hand. None of them imagined the secret I was hiding beneath my calm.

Three offenses, three punishments. For the first time, someone forced her to choose which one she would endure: the hardest part was not the pain, but choosing it herself.

I hadn't gone back for two weeks, but his midnight message found me in bed, nearly naked and without a single argument for saying no.

She had the seriousness of someone who knew the effect she caused and chose to administer it drop by drop. That night, on the massage table, I stopped pretending I’d only come for my back.

I heard him every night on the other side of the wall and imagined taking my mother’s place with the man who devoured me with his eyes whenever he thought no one was watching.

I wrapped my legs around his waist just as he came. It wasn’t an accident: I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wanted it.

My aunt had dried up over the years. When my body began changing on that remote farm, my uncle looked at me as if he had finally found a replacement.

We both had partners, and we both knew it. Even so, I took off my sweater in the passenger seat and let him look at me the way he’d wanted to for weeks.

I had been unemployed for months when I started working at his warehouse. I never imagined that my best friend’s serious, broad-handed father would undo me with a single look.

My phone fell into the water, so I had to use my mother’s. I never imagined a saved chat would show me who came into our house when I wasn’t there.

For almost a year I lived two lives: the perfect wife at the family dinner table and the woman who waited for Monday to meet him at that hotel on the outskirts.

I arrived at the temple half dead, convinced my body was a curse. That same night the priest whispered that I was actually the chosen one.

I met him while collecting the mail. A week later I was on my knees in the meter room, wondering how I’d lost control so fast.

He had saved my course without asking for anything in return. That afternoon, I decided to thank him in a way neither of us would ever forget.

The door was barely shut and inside someone kept saying yes, yes. I shouldn’t have looked, but I stayed frozen in the hallway, holding my breath.

I was twenty-two and had a final project worth the entire course. What wasn’t in any plan was the offer that man made me on the way home.