Submission

When Sofía walked into the living room and found the loan shark tied up and her husband holding a shotgun, she knew her lie had reached its end.

She had been slipping an intimate ingredient into my dishes for five years, and I’d tasted it every day without knowing. Until that afternoon she dared confess.

When he yanked the towel off me on the porch and the neighbors stopped dinner to stare, I knew that summer was going to be very different from the one I’d imagined.

My friends were strolling past the display windows laughing. I stopped in front of hers and, by the way she looked back at me, I knew that night wasn’t for them.

I turned off the music and pressed my ear to the wall. My mother’s moans came from the other side, and I understood why she moved in silence during the day.

I climbed onto the chair in front of the mirror, legs in the air for the photos my girlfriend asked for. I didn’t expect him to walk in, or what came after.

His hands were no longer seeking the pain in my back. I knew it, he knew it, and still I said nothing when they traveled down the cleft to places they had never reached before.

I bit the pillow when he said her name. And then everything I had hidden for years began to unravel between the sheets, blow by blow.

The two goons dragged me off to tour the machines while she stayed alone with the owner. When I came back, the desk was empty.

When I learned I had only a few years left, I decided to live them without rules, starting with the person who slept three meters from my door every night.

I tied him up so he wouldn’t bite me. I washed him among the ruins. What I discovered that night between the empty shelves changed who I was forever.

When I looked through the keyhole and saw her on her knees in front of him, I knew lust had defeated pride long before that night.

I closed my eyes in the empty locker room and let the fantasy carry me farther than I’d imagined. When I opened them, there was no going back.

The doorbell rang at seven-thirty, and I knew my marriage had changed forever. She came downstairs braless, looked at them, and smiled.

When I opened the door, he wasn’t alone: behind him, wearing that practiced rent-boy smile, he had brought a man I had never seen in the neighborhood in my life.

The bed creaked to the rhythm of restrained moans. I walked barefoot to the crack in Camila’s door, and what I saw left me frozen in place for an hour.

I went to the bathroom on a night with no electricity, convinced I was alone in the house. A phone light lit up the kitchen and I understood why the two of them had been acting so strange.

He came to the apartment of a stranger promising not to hold back. He still had no idea how big the cock was that would take his virginity, or how far that paddle could go.

I got off the plane knowing I’d have to look him in the eye. What I didn’t know was that that same night, through tears, I’d ask him for something I had never dared say aloud.

When I looked up from the grass, two headlights went out thirty meters away. Inside the car, a motionless shadow kept watching us.