Masturbation

I went into the bathroom wearing my thong and came out with it tangled in my hair. I never imagined the line into the theater would be the longest part of the night.

I put on my shortest miniskirt just to see if I could make him nervous. I never imagined that night he’d show up again, this time inside my head.

Since Tomás’s death, I embraced my lust without restraint, but the package wrapped in black velvet that arrived that night hid something my fantasies never imagined.

That witching night, he wasn’t expecting company. But something cold materialized at the foot of his bed and whispered his name as if it knew all death.

I went upstairs to lock myself away, thinking no one had seen me. I had my fingers between my legs and my eyes closed when I felt the door give way slowly behind me.

They humiliated him every day at school until an unmarked bottle promised him strength. What he took that night turned him into someone unrecognizable.

No one knew why I always parked on the same deserted stretch. That afternoon, a runner turned his head toward my window and realized everything.

I had never paid for anyone’s attention, but that night, in front of the screen, her words reduced me to something I never imagined I would want to be.

When he crouched in front of me under the rain and asked me to show him my teeth, I knew that man in the black suit wasn't offering me a coin.

I hit play thinking it was a tender goodbye. Two minutes later I understood she knew everything I hid, and that night her voice was in charge of me.

I left home with my thong folded in my pocket and three phrases I didn’t choose written on my skin. Each class hour drove me closer to the edge, with no permission to finish.

That night I watched her through the window, alone and desperate with her toy. And I knew exactly what to do with her... and with her son, watching beside me in the dark.

She accepted the roof, the food, and the freedom to go out with whomever she pleased. What she didn’t read properly was the nine o’clock clause, when she stopped being free.

No one has touched me for years. Only my hands repeat what he taught me: the pinch, the slap, the silent command not to come until I beg.

I came in smelling like someone else and didn’t even say hello. The next day he came into my room, locked the door, and took off his belt without saying a word.

He was limping, sweating, and too scared to look at me. When I ordered him to remove the towel in front of his brother, I knew he’d do everything I said.

I sat in the center of the classroom pretending to be an unconscious patient. No one knew that, with every hand pinning me down, I was falling apart inside thinking of him.

I drove to the abandoned factory with my pulse racing. I stripped among the broken glass and crossed the door, not knowing what waited for me on the floors above.

He ordered me to masturbate in front of him while he smoked in the armchair. What neither of us expected was how that playful afternoon would end.

I know I should feel ashamed, but at that hour, pressed against bodies I don’t know, I stop pretending the touch is an accident.