Strangers

I don’t know your name, but I know what’s waiting for you. I also thought it was love before I learned to obey every one of his orders.

I stared at her from the bar until our eyes met. I didn’t know yet that that night she would call me “sir” and do everything I ordered.

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.

She spent her whole life being the strong one, the one who cared for everyone. That afternoon, a stranger told me to get in his car and, for the first time, I stopped deciding.

It started with a red thong and a “put it on, love.” It ended with her smiling from the counter, deciding for both of us how the rest of my life would go.

I’d spent two years imagining this day. I had no idea a suited fifty-something, with his gaze locked on mine, would decide for me what my first time would be like.

She ordered me to get on all fours in the back room and, while her fingers explored me, I realized she had just uncovered something I’d hidden for years.

I had been watching her for weeks behind the clinic desk. The night her life fell apart, I invited her up to my apartment and offered her the one thing she couldn't refuse.

The bed across from hers creaked every dawn to the rhythm of a stranger, and she pretended to sleep while calculating how much she was willing to lose.

She was hungry, cold, and had no reason to trust him. But when he looked her in the eye and offered her a roof over her head, she knew saying yes would change everything.

I arrived trembling at the room, closed the curtains, and undressed following his instructions. I only wanted to be a usable mouth. I had no idea what would come out of there.

We’d been connecting for weeks through a screen, but what if there was nothing left of that spark in person? Then I saw him cross the bar and my body reacted before my mind did.

I was coming back from surfing, my hair damp and my bikini still wet, when they made me stop. I had no idea that night would show me how far my desire could go.

I sat in that chair pretending to be in an emergency, but beneath the bra-less top my body only obeyed a voice not in the room: my master’s.

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.

I went out determined to let him see me with other men, but I ended up between two cars on an empty street, letting a stranger use me.

I left the gym in the same clothes as always, with every eye on me. That night I understood I no longer wanted to hide how much it excited me to be desired.

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.

I was eight months pregnant, my hormones were raging, and there was a sweaty man working in the baby’s room. That afternoon I stopped being the proper wife everyone thought I was.

I went back to school that afternoon under the excuse of studying in the library, but neither of us was going to open a single book. We were there for them.