Strangers

We counted to three and took off our swimsuits in front of everyone. What I didn’t know was that she’d kept a key on her necklace for the rest of the day.

The door opened and I understood that tonight I wasn’t deciding anything. She waited tied to the headboard; he, standing in the dim light, only looked at me and nodded.

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.

For years I’d chased this moment in airports and trains, but I never imagined a stranger would let me worship her bare feet on a flight.

I felt her bare feet on my shoulder in the darkness. Then a voice asked me if I liked how her socks smelled, and all I could say was yes.

For years I exposed myself in the window while no one mattered, until the night I crossed the street barefoot to kneel before the only man who dared to truly look at me.

He told me that wait wasn’t paid for with money. And instead of getting out of the taxi, I stayed to find out what he wanted me to pay with.

She smelled the flower that should not have existed, and her body stopped obeying her. Among the trees, someone watched and waited for the exact moment to approach.

I was half-naked in the car of a man I didn’t know, in a crowded parking garage, and he told me to relax because my checkup was only just beginning.

My adrenaline surged just thinking about it: going out at night to a remote area and letting men I didn’t know use me however they wanted. I knew the risks.

I had spent years working among the dead and thought I had seen it all. Until that man, laid out on my steel table, moved when I sank the scalpel into his chest.

The sea spat me onto a yacht deck with not a single man on board. When I woke up a second time, I was already wearing their dress and didn’t understand why I was letting them.

She’d been in all afternoon when she walked in. I knelt to fit her with a heel, and with her bare foot in my hands, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop.

She entered the half-ruined market looking for evidence for a complaint and found four men ready to use her like no one ever had.

I agreed to go with him on the trip, knowing I’d be his woman for a few days. What I didn’t know was that my body was already part of the deal.

The moment he got behind the wheel, Carmen knew who was in charge: no kiss or caress would come when she wanted, only when he decided.

She cranked the heat all the way up so none of them would stop sweating. She wanted them to arrive tired, dirty, and hungry to do to her all the things no one dared ask for.

We spent weeks looking for an audience on Telegram with no luck. That night, in a dark pine grove, someone parked beside us and kept watching what my girlfriend wanted me to do to her.

I went down to the reservoir to escape the heat and ended up lying on the shore, unable to move, while a stranger’s toes decided the pace of my surrender.

I offered to check her ankle as a doctor. She crossed her leg, brought her foot to my face, and I knew, in that instant, who was really in charge.