Humiliation

For weeks he watched her from his window; the night he climbed the fence, he understood that she would decide everything that happened between them.

I knocked on the door knowing I’d gone too far this time, and the woman who opened it accepted no excuses—only obedience.

I dressed up for the first time, got in the car with the other two girls, and crossed half the province without knowing that night would teach me to endure contempt with my head held high.

I’d been noticing the way my husband’s friend looked at me for weeks. That night, alone in the patio, I understood none of it was accidental.

When the mirror showed me a face that wasn’t mine, I understood that I no longer ruled this house. I only obeyed and wanted to please her.

That night I wasn’t the host, I was the ornament. My wife picked my dress, put me in heels, and ordered me to smile while her bosses appraised me.

She ordered me to strip in the hotel hallway, where anyone might see me, and knock again only when I was completely naked.

The last thing I remembered was toasting with a beautiful woman. The next, waking on a basement floor, weak, naked, and with no possible escape.

That afternoon I didn’t want just any encounter: I wanted someone to take me beyond what I thought I could bear, while my husband watched without lifting a finger.

Rubén was laughing at the blonde’s body on the screen, certain she wouldn’t last a minute. He had no idea he’d be the one ending up on the floor.

I woke up handcuffed to a chain, a collar around my neck and a gag tasting of filth. In front of me, the lady was smiling: she was only just beginning with me.

Every time she left that apartment, she swore it was the last time. And the next day she came back in the shortest skirt, ready to please him again.

I thought arriving at the dead hour would protect me from their eyes. I didn’t count on them coming in to clean just as I got out of the shower.

Adrián just wanted to get home after class. Two strangers in an alley decided that night would turn him into the neighborhood’s humiliated plaything.

Nobody taught me how to name what I felt every time I closed the bathroom door with her clothes in my hands and let out the woman inside me.

The woman who chained me in that basement wasn’t after pleasure: she meant to teach me, blow by blow, that my body no longer belonged to me and that her word was the only law.

By day she humiliated me in front of her friends; by night she begged me to put her in her place. No one imagined what was happening inside that car.

I found him hiding in the garage, frozen with cold. I never imagined that a year later I’d be the one inviting him into my bed and my marriage.

We went to confront him believing we were in control. It took only for him to close the office door for my wife and me to lower our eyes and obey every word.

I walked into that gray office ready to beg for a document. I left knowing that that night the one who’d be begging would be him, on his knees in his own house.