THE STORY OF RAFA AND DANI 6

You had nothing except a freshly used ass and a natural talent for obeying. So you said yes.

"Friday. I'll be here."

Dani released your neck and gave you a slap on the ass. Soft. Like a colleague. Like a boss. Like an owner. All three things at once and none of them at all.

"Good boy."

Again. Good boy. The verbal candy. The prize that didn't cost anything and was worth everything to someone who had never received one.

You left the apartment. The door closed behind you with a metallic click, and you were left on the first floor landing, alone, with five hundred euros in your pocket and the echo of the previous night pulsating in every cell of your body. The staircase smelled of old bleach and neighbor's food. Meatballs. Someone was making meatballs, and the smell of fried meat was coming down the stairwell, mixing with the smell of humidity on the walls and your own smell, that new smell you had on you, which was a mixture of cheap gel and something that had no name but any dog would have recognized instantly: the smell of recent submission. The smell of an animal that has been mounted.

You went down the stairs. One floor. From the first to the ground floor. Eighteen worn terrazzo steps that you knew by heart because you had gone up and down them ten thousand times in eighteen years of life, but now, this morning, under this Saturday light coming through the dirty skylight, they seemed like the stairs of another dimension. An interdimensional portal of shit with rusty mailboxes and an elevator that hadn't worked since 2014.

The door to the ground floor.

Your door. The usual one. The one that didn't have a doorbell because it had been broken for three years and no one had fixed it. The one with the peeling paint of a green that must have been hope in some moment of the eighties and now was just abandonment made into color. The one that didn't have a doormat because your mother said doormats were a bourgeois nonsense, although the real reason was that they cost six euros and six euros were six euros.

You inserted the key. You turned it. The lock protested as always, with that creaking of a mechanism that had been asking for a drop of oil for years but never got it. You pushed. The door opened, and the smell of your home hit you in the face like a welcoming punch.

There are smells that are geographical. That belong to a specific place in the world and cannot exist anywhere else. The smell of the ground floor apartment of the porter's lodge of block 7 on Carabanchel Bajo street number 34 was one of them. A complex, stratified olfactory composition that a perfumer would have cataloged like this: top note, stale blond tobacco and synthetic pine air freshener that your mother bought at the Chinese store for one euro. Heart note, structural humidity, the humidity of the semi-basement that never completely went away, even in summer, the humidity that got into your clo...