Humiliation

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.

Maximiliano strutted around as the alpha of the room until she walked in. One whisper and her perfume were enough to bring his smoke-and-mirrors empire crashing down in front of everyone.

I went to his house to make him leave my partner alone. I left knowing I’d be back the next Sunday, and the one after, and every one after that.

It began as a fantasy we read together at night. Today Daniel fastens my heels before Bruno arrives—and he prefers it that way.

I had never been with anyone like him. When he opened the door and I had to look up at his face, I knew that night would no longer belong to me.