Submission

Each strike against her skin aroused her more, and Renata didn’t know whether the worst part was surrendering or discovering someone was watching from the top of the stairs.

She ordered me to strip in the hotel hallway, where anyone might see me, and knock again only when I was completely naked.

I locked the stall, knelt on the cold tiles, and knew I was going to obey him to the end, even if anyone could walk into the next bathroom.

He was new, shy, and polite. He never imagined that that afternoon, after everyone left the office, a single command from me would be enough to put him on his knees.

That night I stopped being the proper lady I’d always been. I wrote what I truly wanted, hit send, and waited for three strangers to come for me.

We had rehearsed every gesture, every word, every limit. The game was ours and ours alone—until two strangers appeared among the trees and changed everything.

The last thing I remembered was toasting with a beautiful woman. The next, waking on a basement floor, weak, naked, and with no possible escape.

Renata wanted to take up more space; Damián wanted to stop deciding. The ritual granted them exactly that, and by morning their bodies began obeying another desire.

I came home still burning from the night before, never imagining a kitchen conversation would unravel me more than any caress.

That afternoon I didn’t want just any encounter: I wanted someone to take me beyond what I thought I could bear, while my husband watched without lifting a finger.

I decided the night before, while he slept: the next morning I would begin, alone, a routine I had imagined for years but never dared to maintain.

I woke up handcuffed to a chain, a collar around my neck and a gag tasting of filth. In front of me, the lady was smiling: she was only just beginning with me.

Ten minutes before six, I put away the papers, touched up my red lipstick, and drove to the motel where he was waiting with a very precise order from my husband.

I’d dressed up a thousand times in front of my bedroom mirror, but that night, for the first time, it wasn’t just for me. Someone was waiting for me on the other side of the door.

I woke with the heels still on and a voice whispering that there was no turning back: each day I would become a little more Lola and a little less myself.

Every time she left that apartment, she swore it was the last time. And the next day she came back in the shortest skirt, ready to please him again.

A week after that first night, my feet carried me back to the cabaret. Verónica was waiting with a velvet box and a sentence.

That night, after publishing, I opened my email and found a message from him. I didn’t know a stranger could move me so much with words alone.

I had promised him a different kind of gift: that weekend I wouldn’t decide anything. He would take the reins, and I would only have to obey and let myself go.

I couldn’t say whether I liked everything about that creature or nothing; I only know that, in the heat before the mirror, a new self began to emerge.