Submission

I thought it would just be the three of us having dinner. But my cousin invited her friends, and that night I discovered how far I was willing to go to please her boyfriend.

He was the king of the pool and he knew it. When he called me to the locker room to laugh at me, I never imagined I’d be the one unable to stop looking at him.

I’d gone almost two months without hearing from him. Then the message came: “Tomorrow come to work wearing women’s underwear.” And I knew I wouldn’t be able to say no.

I knew my parents were dominant. What I didn’t know was how far they’d go to give me the gift I asked for that morning.

The moment he heard the key turn in the lock, Nico knew his cousin’s arrival was going to change everything, even if neither of them said it out loud.

I was twenty, a virgin, and shut away among comic books. My father thought a trip to the countryside would make a man of me. He had no idea who would be waiting for me there.

I saw him on the corner with the whistle between his teeth, warning the dealers. I couldn’t stop looking at him, and I knew I wouldn’t go home that dawn without him.

I went trembling into that dark apartment to wait for a man I had never seen. What happened that afternoon marked me for the rest of my life.

I waited naked beside the olive tree, my backpack at my feet and my phone in my hand, never imagining that cold night would leave me with two different tastes in my mouth.

The hot water ran down my back and, for the first time in that captivity, I felt his calloused hands like a caress. I didn’t open my eyes. I had promised him.

I put on the lingerie she would never wear and wait for him to knock on the motel door. I know he’ll come back: at home there’s a man starving.

That stone basement under their house was my secret school: there I learned what I didn’t even dare to name, first with Tomás and then with his brother.

I like being looked at, being desired, seeing eyes drift down when I turn around. And over the years I learned to turn that into an art.

The bedroom door was ajar. I looked through the crack without thinking and what I saw pinned me to the floor: my father was not who I thought he was.

Karim ripped my swim trunks off and told me it was time to stop acting so prim. I had no idea that by the water I’d learn to use my body as a weapon.

I was drunk on the subway when I opened the app out of boredom. I had no idea that message from a stranger would end with me on my knees in a dark storage room.

I agreed to the game: the door left unlatched, the lights off, and a man I’d never see face-to-face. What I never imagined was running into him at the office on Monday.

I had a week to decide whether to leave everything behind. That night, four men set out to make me forget the decision, even if only for a few hours.

Unai’s suitcase was packed, but before crossing the ocean there was one last night left: four bodies, two harnesses, and a goodbye none of them would ever forget.

I was hunting deer in the mountains when claws lifted me into the clouds. When I awoke, a hirsute-bearded man with an erect sex was waiting for me on a marble bed.