Submission

I shut the storeroom door, change my clothes, and turn into someone else. No one on my street suspects what I’m about to do tonight, and that’s exactly what I like most.

I signed my resignation without looking back. That night would be the last fuck of my life as a man, and I meant to enjoy it before becoming who Carla had always wanted.

She had been married for more than forty years and had never looked at another man. That morning she opened the door to an empty house, unaware that nothing would ever be the same again.

I was alone at the bar, bored and two drinks in, when he sat beside me and looked at me as if he already knew everything we'd do that night.

I arrived at his door carrying a bag with my other skin inside it: corset, stockings, and heels. That night I stopped being Adrian and gave myself wholly as Selene.

She knocked on their door soaked by the rain, without pride and with nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at each other, and she knew it was all beginning again.

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 my ex’s blackmail on my phone and the law firm’s bill on my mind. When he saw the videos and smiled, I knew that fee wouldn’t be paid in cash.

I went in thinking I’d stop at any moment. That I’d say enough, that this wasn’t for me. Fifteen minutes later, I was crying out the opposite.

I had denied it to him for months. That night, in a hotel room that smelled of cheap disinfectant, I decided to stop telling him no.

I recognized her at the bar by the way she moved. She was my ex-player’s girlfriend—the one who cheered behind the bench—and that night no one was holding her back.

I look at myself in the mirror in my garter belt and fishnets, and I smile: I lost the bet, and I know exactly what he’s going to ask of me this afternoon.

When the director’s assistant handed me the bag with the lingerie, I knew there was no turning back: that night belonged to every man in that room.

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.

He ordered me to go into the confessional in my finest lingerie and whisper my sins to the priest. What I didn't expect was for him to decide to punish me.

Mariela recognized that hoarse voice before she even turned around. The true owner of the office had returned, bringing all the old rules with him.

A whisper beside my ear was enough to make my respectable life begin collapsing beneath the click of heels that were not yet mine.

I went looking for a bar job at a roadside club. Three weeks later I was serving drinks in a thong, heels, and a new name: Adriana.

She walked down the carpeted corridor with her heart racing: behind that door waited the man she had spent half her life imagining.