Submission

Her hand slid up my forearm as I tried to pour her more wine, and I knew the drink wasn’t the only reason she had invited me home.

I told my parents I’d spend the day with a friend. In reality, I was going to Renata’s, where a wig, a pink cage, and a man who knew what he wanted from me were waiting.

Under my track pants I wore only fishnets and a lace thong. I wasn’t looking for just any doorway: I was looking for the place where they’d treat me like an object.

He made me wake at an exact time without an alarm, with only his words inside my head. And I obeyed while my boyfriend snored beside me.

I looked at myself in the mirror wearing my wig and translucent dress, and knew that night I would let a stranger do everything I’d imagined for weeks.

I saved his number as “S.1.” Two days to regret it, and not once did I want to: I wanted them to use me again, worse than the first time.

I was ready from four in the afternoon, soaked and aching, when that short man knocked on my door, never imagining I’d force out his nickname.

I entered the office with a dry throat. I didn’t expect her to ask me to close my eyes and describe, word for word, what I had been hiding for months.

I walked past the booth five times before daring to look inside. The gray-haired man looked up and motioned to me without saying a word.

Her post on the book app said “looking for a baby.” I answered without thinking, and for almost a year I learned to obey every word she said over video call.

“Good night, princess,” my wife whispered in my ear. And something inside me, something she had planted weeks earlier, answered as if it had been waiting for that name all my life.

The young master’s wardrobe held a black uniform with a white cap, and Don Aurelio told her that once she put it on, she would cease to be Marcial forever.

I’d spent a year staring at that toy in the drawer without daring to use it. That night, in my lace nightgown with the padlock locked, I knew I was finally going to let it open me all the way.

Camille came into the office with two coffees and the hallway door was already locked. That night Elena discovered how much freedom she had given her husband.

That September morning I saw the shyest girl in class walk in. It took me two weeks to realize the shy one wasn’t her, it was me.

I’d spent months begging her for a session. When I finally stepped into her studio, I understood she hadn’t summoned me to photograph her, but to teach me obedience.

I had barely gone a few steps when my phone started vibrating nonstop. It was her, and she wasn’t going to let me get away that easily that night.

When I pushed open the metal door, I expected to find him alone, like always. But under that hanging bulb were four more men, and none of them looked in any hurry.

When she gestured to me from the central hallway, I knew the list of books borrowed in my name was only the first trap she would spring that night.

I found her biting her lip in front of the mirror, wearing her bikini, her crotch already wet. I wasn’t going to wait for her to be ready.