Submission

She called her “babe” in the same voice from twenty years ago, and Helena knew the severance check would never leave that drawer. The debt was going to be collected with her body.

I was always the girl who followed the rules, until he ordered me to kneel and I realized my body had spent years waiting for someone to give it permission.

She ordered me to wait for her in the compartment, naked and with the ruler on my lap. I knew she would come; what I didn’t know was how long she would take to make me suffer.

She wore the mask and had been ordered not to move. She knew this time there would be no tenderness, only the lesson she’d been begging for for days.

The first time I walked into his office I thought I was there to negotiate a loan. I left with his instructions etched into my skin and the certainty that my own desire was no longer mine to command.

I only wanted to smell it for a second. When I heard her voice behind me, I knew that night I was done deciding when, how, or how much.

The taxi rolled through the dark when Lena pulled out a blindfold and covered her eyes. Bruna trusted her best friend, never imagining where that night would lead.

“If you stay, you stop being the perfect student,” he said without touching me yet. I looked at the locked door. My legs did not move.

The towel slipped during the massage and, without meaning to, I kept looking. He noticed. And from that second on I stopped being myself and became something that belonged to him.

“Take your clothes off,” she said, without raising her voice. And he, after fifteen years together, knew the whole weekend belonged to her.

I had been watching her for weeks behind the clinic desk. The night her life fell apart, I invited her up to my apartment and offered her the one thing she couldn't refuse.

I never had the courage to expose myself. Until today. Tomorrow I’m going to class naked under my clothes, and writing it here already feels like your first order.

She accepted the roof, the food, and the freedom to go out with whomever she pleased. What she didn’t read properly was the nine o’clock clause, when she stopped being free.

That morning I decided to take his coffee to his office myself, in front of everyone, so they’d understand what kind of woman I meant to be by his side.

I thought I was only going to have some fun and make a little money. I never imagined that night, between blows and caresses, I’d find exactly what my body had been crying out for.

They could have hailed a taxi and gone home. Instead, Raquel tugged down the workshop T-shirt and waited, barefoot, for the owner to claim them again.

I was on my third whiskey when the phone vibrated: “I’m looking for a man who will treat me like his slave.” I opened the photo at a family dinner and knew I was done for.

She arrived thirteen minutes early, without a bra and with that smile that wasn’t innocent. And I had left a cord ready in the hall.

Every night I go down into the dungeons with bread and water. Last night, the woman chained to the pillar was waiting for me naked and with an order on her lips I couldn’t disobey.

I had worn the belt for months and she promised to take it off that night. She didn’t tell me what I’d have to do first to deserve it.