Submission

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.

I had spent weeks dreaming about that afternoon, but nothing prepared me for the first order you gave me the moment you closed the door behind me.

I hated him for the way he stalked me, but that morning under the fridge light I discovered his gaze made me tremble for reasons I refused to admit.

I thought I’d buried the woman who charged for her time. One offer from my own boyfriend was enough to wake her and take control of the night.

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.

He asked me to go upstairs and get myself ready just for him. That night, at last, I was going to earn the other girls’ respect.

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.

My friendship with that rough but good-natured old man took a turn one afternoon over wine in a lost village, when he whispered what he planned to do to me.

I sat in the dim light, determined not to touch anyone and only to watch. But my fingers had other plans as I watched her give herself to two men a meter from me.

I’d spent the whole night with three men and I still felt insatiable. So I picked up my phone and wrote: “Are you ready not to let me sleep all weekend?”

She lifted her dress, looked at me with a smile, and started touching herself for the trucker driving alongside us. It was only the beginning of a trip I would never forget.

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.

We worked in the same building, and one brush in the elevator was enough for me to understand I was about to lose something I thought untouchable: my will.

It was July, I was ruined and desperate. I crossed my sister’s garden looking for help; my nephew was waiting by the pool with a smile I didn’t know how to read in time.

I didn’t come seeking pleasure. I came to remember a buried desire: soft skin, curves, feeling desired. And she gave me permission.

I painted my lips against the trunk, convinced I was alone. Then I heard the crackle of leaves and knew someone had been watching me for a while.

“Come at five. We need to talk about Saturday. Alone.” I wrote that to her in the morning, and since then I thought of nothing but hearing her come down the stairs.