Submission

It was July, I was broke 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 go looking for pleasure. I went to remember a buried desire: soft skin, curves, feeling desired. And she, with a whisper in French, 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.

I close the storage-room door, change clothes, and turn into someone else. No one on my street suspects what I’m going 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 nothing would ever be the same.

I was alone at the bar, bored and two drinks in, when he sat beside me and looked at me like he already knew everything we were going to do that night.

I arrived at his door with a bag hiding my other skin: corset, stockings, and heels. That night I stopped being Adrián and gave myself to him as Selene.

She came to their door soaked by the rain, with no pride and nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at one another, and she knew everything was 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 started as a fantasy we read together at night. Now 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 with money.

I went down thinking he’d stop any moment. That I’d say enough, that this wasn’t my thing. Fifteen minutes later I was screaming the opposite.

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

I recognized her at the bar by the way she moved. She was my ex-player’s girl, the one who used to cheer behind the bench, and that night no one was holding her back anymore.

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 of lingerie, I knew there was no turning back: that night belonged to all the men 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 into the confessional in my finest lingerie and told me to whisper my sins to the priest. What I didn’t expect was for him to decide I needed penance.