Submission

I had the pen in my hand and a lifetime of debt on the table. All he wanted in return was for me to leave my pride at the door.

I had just turned twenty-two and had never been with anyone. Iván was three years younger, but one stupid bet was enough to show me who was in charge.

The metallic voice announced the next phase and, instead of panic, I felt something I shouldn’t have: a ridiculous urge for it all to start again.

The motel terrace connected to his, and from the dimness a deep voice called me “pretty.” I should have gone inside and locked the door. I didn’t.

The order was simple: kneel. My body obeyed before my mind could resist, and I knew that night would take me past a point of no return.

The rule was simple: when the elevator doors closed, I stopped being a person and became part of his furniture.

I came back from the kitchen naked, cloth in hand, and knew that night there would be nothing left of my pride on the black marble of his living room floor.

I checked the time at half past three when I walked into that empty bathroom. I didn’t lock the door. It was the mistake —or the stroke of luck— that changed forever what I thought I knew about myself.

The arm resting on his abdomen wasn’t his girlfriend’s. It was heavy, warm, male. And Bruno remembered absolutely nothing from the night before.

He sat right beside me even though the theater was almost empty. His knee brushed mine and didn’t move away. Then his mouth found my ear, and I knew that afternoon belonged to him.

Four months alone in the mountains had left him with a hunger no whisky could soothe. That night, behind the inn’s red curtain, three boys knew exactly how to take him in.

Iván and Nico walked through the door as if the penthouse already belonged to them, and before they even said hello they had us shoved against the living room wall.

When the door shut and swallowed the last of the light, there were only the hands, the mouths, and Mateo’s voice saying that night I was his.

I lay naked under the last September sun, offering my body to anyone who wanted to look. Then the only man I thought I’d never see again appeared.

It was two in the morning when he agreed to cross my threshold. He only asked for three things, and the third was the one that excited me most: that he could change his mind whenever he wanted.

We’d been at sea for weeks, and the old boatswain had been looking at me differently. That midnight, when I finished my watch, I knocked on his door without imagining what he’d ask of me.

He thought he was alone under the water, until an arm circled his neck from behind and a rough voice whispered in his ear what was already obvious.

I climbed the stairs behind him, breathing in his cologne, not knowing his roommates would come back two hours earlier than expected.

It was almost nine at night, the campus was empty, and a forgotten backpack sat in the bathrooms. I only opened it to find its owner. What was at the bottom changed everything.

She humiliated me over a video call and I went out drinking until I collapsed. At the bar, two tall men held my arm and offered me a quieter place.