Submission

She has many names for me. None matter while I watch her obey from the other side of the screen, waiting for the day I have her on her knees in front of me.

When he pointed the camera for the first time, he told himself it was the last. Six weeks later, he was still filming. And Laura was still smiling on the other side of the lens.

The Mistress announced the inspection with that smile that always made my blood run cold. I knew at once that this day would be unlike any before it.

Marcos introduced her with a knowing smile. I looked her up and down and knew at once that behind that prim façade was something dying to be set free.

I locked the door and took off my robe. Marcos looked at me from the bed, eyes wide, with something more than gratitude.

That afternoon Lorena told me, with a calm that left me speechless, that her sister needed company and that she wouldn’t mind if it were me.

I’d been watching him cross the hallway for weeks. That afternoon he called me to his office, and something inside me knew everything was about to change.

When they told me I was their property, I thought it was an empty threat. But when Celestina appeared with the crop in her hand, I knew there was no turning back.

I got off the bike half a block away and slipped in through the back door. From the bedroom came voices I took a moment to recognize.

She was reading about succubi when a voice answered her question from the other side of the room. It wasn’t a dream: the creature was already there.

She came intending to tell Elena she wouldn’t come back. She rode up in the elevator repeating it to herself. But when Elena crossed the room toward her, everything she had rehearsed came apart.

The first time I saw him at that dinner, I knew that man was unlike the others. Months later, I was the one asking him for more.

When I finally said it out loud, his gaze changed. He wasn’t just my friend anymore. He was something else, and I had wanted that from the very beginning.

I put on the black dress and the high heels, and for the first time I wasn’t ashamed of the body I saw in the mirror. That afternoon, he was waiting for me.

When she came over to me at the bar, I knew that woman was going to do whatever she wanted with me. And I wanted exactly that.

Rodrigo walked over to the sofa where my husband was alone and said, “my girlfriend’s been watching you for half an hour.” What followed was not predictable for any of the four of us.

After months in captivity, the last thing Valeria expected was for Sofía herself to ask to be bound. But that’s how that first night began.

When they shut the door and the darkness became absolute, I knew it wasn’t a punishment. It was something worse: the transformation that would erase me forever.

When Rafael ordered me to take off my blouse, the other two men in the room didn’t move. No one protested. No one looked away. That was what he wanted me to understand.

She had spent weeks unable to get him out of her head. That skinny boy in the park, with charcoal-stained hands and that direct gaze that asked no one’s permission.