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At the Lakeside Hotel on Suzhou’s shore, thirty-two-year-old qipao tailor Shu Man sits by the floor-to-ceiling window in a black lace dress of her own making, saying nothing. The rule is hers: each time she undoes a frog button, the single man Cheng Jun may take one step closer; each time she fastens one back, everyone stops. Her husband Meng Yu stands outside the balcony door, his voice so soft it only ever offers suggestions—until he steps across the sliding track himself.

Lao Lang, thirty-eight, lives out of a suitcase and scores everyone he meets. Behind door C of Haijiao’s Yong’an Building, she opens the door and hands him a laminated course sheet: basic eight hundred, eating her out plus two hundred, tongue kissing plus two hundred, no condom crossed out twice. He orders the cheapest line, and neither of them is into it. On the second night she says please wait. On the third he never looks at the sheet and only asks which one she likes best herself. She turns the paper over. Her name is written on the back.

On the third day in Bali, Liang Zhiyuan and his wife Zhuo Ying walk into the tidal spa by the beach for a ninety-minute couples massage. The front desk makes it clear: no touching between therapists and clients. Zhuo Ying is thirty-three, thin-skinned, never able to say what she wants out loud—but her foot touches the male therapist Yono first, and the condom in her bag is one she brought herself. Her husband sees the condom on the nightstand, but not the moment she put it there.

Lao Lang, thirty-eight, works in foreign trade, second time at that apartment building in Hancheng. Old Park said this time it’s the fourteenth floor, and the doorknob still turns three times. The one who opens the door is called Jisoo, twenty-six, her palm slightly cool, all the mineral water labels facing the same direction. She asks “may I” before every step forward, and the scoring system he’s used for sixteen years can’t fill in a single column. Before leaving, he turns a bottle of water the other way; she turns it back, saying next time he can turn it again.

Lao Lang, thirty-eight, foreign trade, divorced, one red windbreaker. His client Old Park drops him off at an apartment building by the Han River: sixteenth floor, the door at the end of the hall, three twists of the handle. The door opens, and she stands in the light. Soyeon, twenty-seven, hotel front desk, red-orange hair, a little canine tooth. A single “oppa” pulls him back to Eunhee thirteen years ago, and he tries to fall in love in a paid-for apartment, until that single drop of white cream hangs on the tip of her nose.

Fu Yao, thirty, works the night shift on a customer service line. The washing machine at home is broken, so every morning at four she goes down to the self-service laundromat, where Niu Ben, the delivery station manager, is always there. She could still recite her mother’s rules at thirty; now she sets her own: while the drum is turning, anything goes, and when it beeps, she leaves. She never presses pause. Her husband You Kai, a day-shift programmer, fixes the washing machine. She still goes downstairs and presses sixty minutes. One morning at four, he wakes up.

Twenty days of picking season. Yu Lan, thirty-six, runs the kitchen at the family farmstay and feeds twenty workers, and she gives the new kid, Xiao Feng, one scoop more. She lays the rules out to his face: wages are paid by the day and have nothing to do with this; the fruit basket set under the trees means yes, the basket in her hand means no. The row at the foot of the hill ripens late, and nobody goes there. When the fruit is in, Xiao Feng leaves, the basket goes up on the kitchen wall, and her husband sets a half-used bottle of toilet water beneath it.

Yi Shan is thirty-three, a Chinese-lit graduate. When her magazine folded she took the front desk at Binhe Swim Center, teaches the evening adult class, and swims half an hour alone every dawn. Gu Zheng, the lane-four morning member, swam for the provincial team eleven years ago and only ever shows up from six to six-thirty. House rule three: cap on in the water. With the cap on she is the front desk. With it off, she is not. Her husband Lai Xu sells cars, has another woman at lunchtime, and has only one thing to say at night: “Dry your hair.”

Suo Min, thirty-one, plays bass for Low Pressure Trough. Her husband Ying Hao is the drummer, out with a wrist injury, not allowed to touch a single stick. At soundcheck for the Fengkou Music Festival, Da Li, the monitor engineer, pushes her low end up two notches. She sets the rule: with the pass hanging on her neck he can touch her; off and on the console, he stops. After the show, behind the black drape with close to ten thousand people still out front, her husband sits across from her with a bodypack on, listening, counting one two three four over the comms. A month later, at her husband’s comeback show, she hangs the pass on the drum kit.

A downpour strands wedding photographer Yin Duo and his makeup-artist wife Pi Xiaolu at a location base forty kilometers out. The female model never shows, so her husband puts her in a satin gown to be “the bride’s hand” for the sample groom, Hong Jin. When her makeup case is open she’s on the clock; when it’s shut she’s off. That day in the greenhouse she pushed the latch down herself, while her husband pressed the shutter from behind the viewfinder. The sample now hangs in the shop, and every day she touches up its dust.

Twenty-three below. Yu Fei, twenty-eight, a dental receptionist, is marched onto the slopes by her husband Lang Xiao, thirty-four, and falls twenty-seven times. It is Lao He, the forty-six-year-old guesthouse owner, who carries her off the intermediate run and back to the heated kang. On the kang, her husband makes a proposal: goggles on means yes, and whoever pushes them up calls a stop. She changes one line. If I push them up to my forehead, you both stop. If you push them, it doesn’t count. The walls are thin. Next door can hear everything.

Black Rock Flats campground, 3,200 meters up. Camping blogger Bi Yang lies on the car roof shooting three hours of star trails, and not a single frame can break. In the tent, thirty-year-old coffee-shop owner Jing Lan pulls the door zipper down to halfway. Yue Chuan, the geological surveyor camping alone at the next site, told her: zipped to the top means stay away, zipped halfway means come in, and nobody says a word. Her husband can only listen from ten meters away while she counts zipper teeth. On the second night she says: I’ll leave the zipper for you. You come in.

No tickets together for the holiday rush, so Tong Rui, thirty-four, an administrator at an adult night school, takes the soft-sleeper lower bunk while her husband Qi Yuan sits in a hard seat in another car. On the bunk across is Wen Tao, forty-one, a pharmaceutical rep who lives on long-haul trains. When the lights go out he says: the curtain shut means one thing, open means another. After Qinggang it’s all tunnels, one after another. Before the train pulls in, she hands her husband her ticket, with the number of the man across written on the back.

Luo Xue, twenty-nine, is a nude double at Yunqi Film Studios; her face never goes on camera. Her husband Tian Yifan is the best boy on the lighting crew, and in three years of lighting her every scene, her face has always been on the far side of his black flag. In the Scene 47 bed scene, leading man Ji Bei gets hard through two layers of modesty shorts and says sorry. After wrap she borrows a slate and knocks on his trailer door: it starts when you call action, and whoever calls cut, we stop. The next day there is a tenth take on the lighting playback drive. It was not shot.

Twenty-three days after night one, Lao K makes good on “a different person, a different position”: this time nobody is invited. Xiaoman goes out in a short skirt and black pantyhose with nothing underneath to flash at the riverside, gets dragged into the back seat, her hose torn open and fucked from behind, and sits down in a bar reeking of cum. The terrace of the top-floor pool suite is separated from the one next door by a half-open partition. Lao K has her kneel naked in the shallow pool and spread herself, and A-Yan, the lone business traveler next door, climbs onto his sofa and sees. Lao K nods at him, and then says: the door is not locked.

Night Four almost did not happen: in the days before her period Xiaoman’s mood is foul enough to cancel three times, and Lao K never pushes, waiting until the morning she says go on her own. All three of them work late and meet at eight at the hotel where she and Lao K first took a room, with a full Italian dinner downstairs first. A-Mu is a professional Lao K sought out, explaining each oil, testing one on her wrist, and after the test cards come back clean he says one word: lie down. His hands from the soles of her feet up leave her running down to her thighs while lying face down, she comes on his fingers first, then two cocks take turns front and back, and in the sandwich it is Lao K who finishes first. Hotel diary, Night Four.

After Night Four, Lao K said the next one should be someone doing it for the first time. Two rooms on the same floor, for safety. A-Ning has never done this; he knocks like opening a blind box, and behind the door is Xiaoman, naked in a collar, waiting for him. He flinches from the camera and never even takes the leash. Test cards, the wait, Lao K off to the shower, and she has his trousers down before anyone gives her leave. The leash, one mouthful left and one right between two cocks, her first deep kiss with anyone but her husband, a cushion of flesh beneath her and a big cock behind, and a novice ridden until he begs. This is Lao K’s hotel diary, Night Five.

On a weekday morning Lao K asks Xiaoman to talk about before, and by the time she is done a wide patch of the sheet is soaked. She names three things she wants: a big one, one with hair and a smell, and to be tied up and taken front and back at once. A few nights later she kneels on a hotel bed, tucks a deep red rose into the crack of her ass, and sends the photo to Lao K. The door sounds, and she smells Leon before she sees him. Red jute rope in diamonds across her chest, wrists bound behind her; Lao K beside them calling the angle, while she needs to pee and cannot, convulsing again and again. Then cowgirl, then front and back together, and when the rope comes off the white runs out of both holes at once. Hotel diary, night six.

Xiaoman is twenty-eight. In the car, down in the underground garage, she said yes to her husband K out loud: tonight she would be used by two men at once. A high-floor room with a single lamp on, the river outside the window. A knock, Ache walks in, K gives nothing but orders, and Xiaoman goes from muffled whimpers to filthy words she can’t hold back, her cunt, her ass, her mouth, opened one after another. This is K’s hotel diary. Night one.

Moving day, and her husband is off waiting on a ticket number. Hao Sisi, thirty, a game concept artist, is left in the empty apartment with Da Zhuang, the mover. She sets the rule: boxes sealed with tape are off-limits, open ones are fair game. At the new place the mattress is still wrapped in plastic and the apprentice is unpacking next door when she rips the tape off her finger: “I’m open today.” A week later her husband finds a box in the corner that never got unpacked. The tape on it is new.

Guan Xiaoman is twenty-seven, from the Northeast, three years streaming womenswear. Her husband Fang Yu sells cars and keeps a nail-salon girl named Tingting hidden in his phone. She doesn’t make a scene. She opens a late show, and her top gifter, “Beifeng,” drops ten sports cars in a row and DMs three words: Inspect in person. She writes back: I don’t want the cars. I want to see the man, and I set the price. The price isn’t money; it’s nine seconds of sign-off suona, and when the bell rings everyone goes home. In a showroom at the building-materials mall, she sits on a sintered-stone vanity and pitches the goods in her broadcast voice. The second time, the door isn’t locked, and her husband is standing in it.

Qi Ran is thirty-three and sells medical devices; her husband Liu Chong is a construction supervisor, and for two years he has made her send a photo of her hotel door plate before eleven every night. A storm hits Xi’an, the company botches the booking, and she ends up sharing a twin room with Xiang Dong, the new colleague on secondment. She sets one rule: I go back to that bed, you stop. The first night she photographs the door plate and doesn’t send it. The second night her husband video-calls; she answers, camera pointed at the ceiling. When the trip ends he goes through her phone at the airport: six shots of 1409 in the album.

Qin Yutong, thirty-five, runs a bookstore. Strictly raised, she never takes off the sandalwood prayer beads her grandmother left her. Divorced five years, she visits her ex-husband once a year, on his birthday, to bring a cake. This year she put the prayer beads in her bag. On her carpenter ex-husband’s elm workbench she argues every step with her grandmother while the beads rattle in the bag to his rhythm. Her current husband sees her location, does not call, and simply buys a new string of beads and lays it on her pillow. She goes wearing that string, does it wearing that string, the string breaks, and of eighteen beads she picks up seventeen.

Five days and four nights in Sanya. Xue Hong, thirty-six, spent four days in meetings on the balcony, and Qin Yue, twenty-eight, spent four days by the pool being watched by A-Hai, the twenty-four-year-old lifeguard. She is good to her husband, he is even better to her, he just never looks at her. She put on her sunglasses and asked A-Hai what time he got off, then picked the lounger right under her husband’s balcony. Sunglasses on, keep going; sunglasses off, stop. On the flight home, her husband put his hand on her knee, and she took the sunglasses off.

Wen Shuyao, thirty-two, restores ancient books. Six months after spinal surgery, her husband Sheng Lang still cannot make love to her. He suggests his oldest friend Gu Yihang: the best man who handed over the ring at their wedding, the surgeon who stitched him closed. She refuses three times. The fourth time, she takes off her wedding ring herself and sets it on the nightstand. Ring on the nightstand, he comes in; ring on her hand, nobody does. Through the wall, her husband listens to her recite the Book of Odes. The scar aches. Below it, he is hard.

Ji Tang, a florist, is twenty-nine. Her husband Wu Feng drives a truck and is away four days a week. The spare key lives across the hall with Lao Xue, a forty-five-year-old man who has fixed locks for twenty-two years and lives alone. The night she forgot her key she went over to get it, and Lao Xue came down to fix the lock at her shop and said a locksmith can hear loose from tight. From then on the brass hook on the door frame became a rule nobody said out loud: key on the hook, he comes in; key in the drawer, he opens his own door. Until her husband changed his route to come home on Wednesdays.

At the college reunion Li Xiangdong has only two drinks, and stone sober he bets a bottle of Macallan against his old roommate Nie Chuan: “Three dates with my wife and you won’t lay a finger on her.” Du Xiaoran is thirty, teaches English to adults, and tells bad jokes when she’s nervous. The next morning she messages Nie Chuan herself: bet, date one, Wednesday, you pick the place. The whisky sits unopened on top of the fridge, and the rule is hers: the game ends only when she says “I’m drinking this bottle.” She lets him all three times, so by her rules she won. The trouble is she finds she doesn’t want to stop.

A-Yuan is thirty-one, Tian-Tian is thirty, married eight years. In junior year, in his rented single room, she said “I want the elephant,” and neither of them knew how to 69; it took six tries before he got inside, and she told him, “I can’t let you have me too easily.” Eight years later, on the last day of a trip, the alarm goes off and she does not stop; she shakes her head three times before spreading her legs, and it is eighteen minutes after the alarm when they finish. Back home she is unusually eager: lifting her top to feed him in the morning, lying on the bed at night waiting for him to grind against her, her voice shaking when the delivery man knocks. On Friday, she has a new toy.

Nine years into their marriage, Zhou Yu hid an absurd “cuckold manifesto” under the takeout menus on the fridge door and never found the nerve to bring it up. Lin Wan found it first — and went through it line by line with the red pen she uses to edit manuscripts. Some points she cursed, some she struck out, some she marked “open to discussion.” That night they talked about sex for the first time in their lives, set three rules, and invited to dinner the older classmate she never quite said no to in college.

Her husband keeps scrolling through those forum posts about taking a wife while she sleeps. Lu Yao reads one and says only this: I won’t sleep. I’ll pretend. She sips a Long Island iced tea with no alcohol in it and plays drunk, lies on a hotel bed with a black silk scarf over her eyes, and sets a safe word: “thirsty.” A stranger in a white cap walks through the door. He knows she’s awake. But he has to treat her as if she’s asleep.

Bai Jing, thirty-eight, is a regional manager at a foreign company, single, and practically lives in hotels. In a hotel gym in Lisbon she meets an American named Marcus. One drink, one hand around her waist, and a current runs from her ear down to the soles of her feet; she gives herself to him that same night. From then on, the first thing she checks on every business trip is the gym, until she meets Qi Ze, a younger man, six foot six, who squats two hundred twenty kilos and opens his mouth to say “older pussy cools the fire.”

Four years married, and her husband hasn’t touched her in three months. Chi Yue, a buttoned-up back-office clerk at an insurance company, has always played it safe, until her coworker Jiang Man offers to take her out to play with men. On the first night Wang Ye only holds her while she sleeps; the second time, she’s the one who says no condom. Rope, a collar, anal: she learns them one by one, until the night she pushes open a hotel room door to find three men waiting, and, flushed red, she says: “Go ahead.”

Fan Jing is thirty, a graphic designer so quiet at work that her colleagues call her “Silent Mode.” Living alone on the fourth floor of an old apartment block, she goes from sitting by an open window with no bra, to taking out the trash at night with nothing under her skirt, to ordering a seventeen-centimeter anal bead stick online. One Friday near midnight, she stands at the curb with it buried inside her, and the man across the street watches her for ten minutes. Then he starts walking toward her.

Ruan Li is thirty-three, an English tutor for grad-school entrance exams, in a flat marriage to a husband who is always on the road. He Chuan was once her one-on-one student—twenty-one, a college junior—and nothing happened during those lessons; the chats just got dirtier afterward. The summer he graduates at twenty-three, he asks her to dinner, and she goes knowing exactly what it means. Four times in one night. Then her husband leaves on another trip, and at eight on Friday morning a message lights up her phone: Free tonight?

Zhong Ke is thirty-five, the section chief everyone at the Japan branch fears: baggy sweaters, long skirts, and a vocabulary that mostly consists of one word: redo. On the second glass at the Osaka celebration drinks, her twenty-five-year-old subordinate Yi Chen asks her cup size. She says D. He doesn’t believe her. She says: if you don’t believe me, come feel for yourself. At eleven that night, wearing nothing but a hotel yukata, she takes the stairs up to the twelfth floor.

Pilates instructor Qiao Tang has spent a year posting faceless photos on a burner account, and one follower named A-Shu has always called her “sis.” The night her husband Zhou Xiao finds the DMs, he isn’t angry. He’s hard. They set three rules: A-Shu stays inside the phone. No meeting. No faces. Friday night at eleven, she presses and holds the record button.

Ten years married, A-Lan is thirty-two and has started turning her back to Lao Song in bed. Alone in Dongguan, Lao Song spent a whole summer reading hotwife novels, then came home and said into the dark: go out and meet someone from the internet. She said yes, and not because he begged. She wanted to know what she looked like in another man’s eyes. An internet café, a KTV, room 1207 at the Vienna Hotel, and she texts her husband one line at a time. Before going up she sets one rule: both phones off. At dawn she comes home and says nothing happened. He says he doesn’t care about the answer.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, ten years married. Last month she met A-Kai, a gym trainer she had been chatting with on a forum for three months, and came home to tell her husband about it in bed, over and over, until she got to “He’s thicker than you” and he was hard. This time he wants to join by video call. She agrees, on two conditions: no face, no recording. But when she holds the phone up to the place where they are joined herself, and then turns the camera to her own face, whose rules they were no longer matters.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, ten years married. This time what he wants is: she pretends to sleep, and the other man, A-Kai, slips into the room in the middle of the night. She sets the rules, and one “lights on” stops everyone. Ji Hotel, room 1207, room 1210 diagonally across the hall; the lights go out, and a black shape comes in through the crack of the door. She was never asleep, and the moment he pressed down on her she panicked for real: one punch, and Lao Song’s nose was pouring blood. Lights on, three people frozen for half an hour. Then it was she who said it: go on, him first, leave the lights on.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, married ten years. Last summer, during the plant’s heat leave, Lao Song arranged A-Feng for her on a forum, a man from across town: video the whole time, condom on, no WeChat, dates set by him. One year and one month later, the tenth time. Express hotel, room 3012. She walks the eight hundred meters over in nothing but a thong, and A-Feng licks her three times over with spit, jelly, and lube, and doesn’t stop when the delivery guy knocks. Afterward, Lao Song types a question mark after the tenth line in his notes.

Six months into the marriage, my husband said in bed that he wanted to watch another man fuck me. I sat on it for three weeks before I answered: fine, but I pick the man, I set the date, I set the terms, and when I say stop it stops. Out of his pile of college classmates I picked Lu Ping, twenty-eight, single. Before he came through the door I said the rules out loud in front of both men.

A month before her birthday she was the one who said it out loud: this year I want a man I do not know. Her husband only sourced the channel. Of three photos she tapped the third, and she read the terms aloud in front of him before she signed. Hotel room 1706: she wants the twenty-seven-year-old model on his knees licking her first, her husband seated two meters away, watching. Just past midnight she says: extend it. Extend to eight in the morning.

Low season, five of the six rooms empty, and her man on the road two hundred days a year. A photographer from Shanghai moves into the courtyard to shoot the old house, and the one who walks over with a cup of tea and says “take one of me too” is her. She sets the rules: nothing posted, nothing sold, not one cent changing hands. Her husband comes home early and stands in the guest room doorway, and she looks back at him over the other man’s shoulder and does not stop.

Three years married, she finds four hundred and thirty-seven nude photos of herself in the locked album on her husband’s phone — and not one of them has ever left it. For two years he has been bragging in a group chat and saying he can’t bring himself to share. She sits on the toilet lid and looks at every one of them, picks out three, and from her own account adds the man who has been waiting two years.

A year and two months married, and my husband stands on the balcony with a cigarette and says, Da Wei wants to see you. So I set four rules: he only watches, nobody films, I take my own clothes off, and when I say stop it stops. The first time he sat at the foot of the bed in that ninety-nine yuan chair, and I came with my eyes on his. The second time I let him touch me. The third time I climbed on myself, and my husband sat in the chair. This week Da Wei says he wants to bring a buddy.

Five years married, two years of watching that scene from the outside. The first time we actually went to meet someone, I set exactly one rule before we left the flat: you can film it, but whether it goes out is mine to decide. At thirty-one I kept the footage locked for three days, and on the fourth I cut thirty seconds myself and pressed send myself. Later that was not enough. I wanted the full one out, with my face in it.

Ten years married, and at the dinner table my husband said he wanted Fang Zhe, the man he shared a dorm room with at university, to be with us. I did not answer on the spot; I sat on it for two weeks. The day I answered I brought a sheet of paper and read four rules out to the two men, and only when I had finished did I say: then we start. Later he moved into our own compound, the schedule lives on my phone, three days a week.

Twenty-nine, head of the advertising department at a TV station, four years married and never once got there. Her husband begged her for two years; she said once. The night the other man walked in, she learned for the first time what she was made of. Two months later there is a fingerprint lock on the bedroom door with three prints registered in it, and none of them is her husband’s.

Six years married, she is a bridesmaid at an old classmate’s wedding, and the best man is Zhou Kai, the one who chased her all through university and never got a single sentence out. Her husband drinks himself under the table and gets hauled up to the room. She has had two glasses and is completely sober. The second the elevator doors close, she is the one who presses the red stop, and she pulls his hand up under the bridesmaid dress: back then you did not dare — do you dare now.

Eight years married, three of them with him impotent. That night he stood in front of the wardrobe and said he wanted to find a man to fuck me while he watched from the side. I said yes in ten minutes, with three conditions only: I pick the man myself, I set the rules, and in the room you watch and you do not speak. After that the hotel was booked by me, the condoms were bought by me, and the notebook was written by him because I told him to write it.