Submission

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.

Forty-five years old, a growing belly, and a chastity device my own daughter controls from across the bar. This is my life now.

I was wearing my roommate’s tight dress when a taxi driver stopped to ask me for service. I never imagined I’d enjoy it so much.

I pressed the buzzer with trembling fingers. I knew that beyond that door awaited someone capable of turning me into what I had always dreamed of being.

She had made the promise weeks earlier, in a moment of weakness she never forgot. Now she was here, and Karim was not going to let her regret it.

Sofía weighed two hundred pounds of pure authority. Renata understood that the night an old folder changed the balance of power between them forever.

I had been in love with Andrés for months when he told me his ex was coming to dinner. I never imagined that night would end with the two of us proclaiming him our king.

Raquel thought she would always be the one setting the rules. That night on the pier, with the metal bit and the fresh mark on her thigh, everything changed.

The bamboo rod hissed through the air and Clara didn’t blink. We were friends. Now she held the stopwatch and I was on my knees on the cold grate.

We arrived not knowing what awaited us. We left changed. An estate, seven men, and a stranger who decided I would be his that night.

When the scissors finished their work, the mirror gave him back a gaze that was not quite his own. And the voice he heard in that salon would not leave him alone.

I went in to get my phone and found him there, silent, looking at me in that way that said he knew exactly what it meant.

When I arrived at his apartment that Saturday afternoon, I had shaved everything and I wasn’t wearing underwear. I knew exactly what I was going for. Or so I thought.

When I opened my eyes it was already too late. Two bodies were pinning me to the mattress, and the cold steel on my wrists told me that night had changed everything.

I was wearing my mother-in-law’s black lingerie when the door opened. Behind Lucía wasn’t just Patricia. My mother was there too.

She came home from the hospital with both arms in plaster up to the elbows. And I discovered, watching how she depended on me, how little I knew how to look at my own mother.

That afternoon I found one of his movies. That night he came back drunk, opened my bedroom door, and I knew something was going to break forever.

I dialed his number with trembling hands. Three rings. When he answered, I knew there was no turning back, even if I hung up before speaking.

We had been talking for three weeks without meeting. When I finally crossed the door to his apartment that night, I knew I wouldn’t come out the same.