【Su Man·Bitch】
Six years at this company in Linjiang, and my coworkers know me by two words: hard to deal with. My face is bare, clean as my neck; my words are few, cut off the moment they land on the point; in meetings the men’s eyes circle around me and I can’t be bothered to lift an eyelid. Behind my back they call me a goddess, their tone half envy and half cowardice. I know, and I’m glad to let them believe it. Cold is a shell, and what the shell wraps around, I never show anyone — not even the daytime version of me.
Two years ago, on a sleepless night, I held my phone up to the mirror for the first time, stripped down to nothing but a pair of panties, and hit send. Face showing, no blur, sent to a foreign corner of the web where no one knew me. The instant the screen went dark my heart pounded like a thief’s, but ten minutes later the little red dot lit up, and a string of strangers were commenting on my body in the filthiest words — my collarbone, my waist, those two points on my chest, saying what they wanted to do to me. I read those words and found my panties already soaked through. So being made into a fantasy object by countless unseen eyes turned me on more than any touch ever had.
After that I couldn’t rein it in. The exposure crept higher bit by bit, each pose more shameless than the last. By day I was still the same Su Man who wouldn’t say an extra word even in the elevator; by night I was that nameless body in their comment sections, offered up for anyone to lust over. Those two versions of me didn’t know each other, yet I grew more and more unable to leave the nighttime one behind.
I have a husband. Married three years — an honest man, good to me. But every time I came home from that arousal of being stripped bare by thousands of eyes, my whole body ablaze, and pinned him to the couch demanding it, he always finished in two or three strokes and fell into a contented sleep, leaving me alone staring at the ceiling, my hand slipping quietly under the covers. I don’t blame him. It’s me that’s broken, me that’s been fed until my appetite grew too big — ordinary meals could never fill me anymore.
【Lu·Master】
At headquarters I oversee several major regions, and Linjiang is one of them. I first saw Su Man during a business handover. She sat across from me, shirt buttoned to the very top, her voice neither loud nor soft, laying out a heap of tangled accounts crystal clear. The other men in the room stole glances at her; she treated every one of them like empty air. But under that cold face I recognized something else — a flicker at the corner of her eye, something pressed down very deep. At my age, five or six years older than her, I’ve seen too many people. I know that the more tightly a woman locks herself away, the hotter the furnace usually hidden behind the lock.
As luck would have it, I knew her. Not from the company. From that foreign corner of the web where I sometimes amuse myself — that unblurred face, that body I’d remembered for a long time. The first moment I matched them up in the meeting room I nearly laughed out loud — so the other half of the goddess had already been laid out right in front of me. I didn’t let on. This kind of thing can’t be rushed.
We added each other on WeChat and started from work. I wasn’t frivolous; I only picked the threads she was willing to catch, keeping my measure steadier than anyone. Three dinner invitations, and she came to all three. Each time she wore that same cold air, but the extra two seconds she lingered before leaving, the extra character she typed into her messages — all of it told me the shell was loosening. I didn’t ram into it. I waited for it to crack on its own.
【Madam·Mistress】
I read my husband’s face when he comes home better than he reads it himself. In that stretch of time he often carried a suppressed excitement, flipping his phone face-down the instant the screen lit up — not out of guilt, but with the focus of a hunter who’s spotted something good. We’ve been married many years; we stopped playing the eat-alone game long ago. We like to play together, like to pick one who’s worthy, open her up slowly, watch her go from holding herself high to kneeling down. So I don’t rush to ask. I just pour him his wine and wait for him to lead the quarry to where I can reach it.
When he finally brought her up to me, his eyes were bright. “A woman who freezes herself into a goddess and secretly posts her nudes to a foreign site,” he said. I laughed over my wine glass. I know this kind of woman too well — it’s not that they have no desire, it’s that their desire is too big, too big for an ordinary relationship to hold, which drives them to stand at the dangerous edge, feeding that hungry beast on the eyes of strangers. A woman like this is the easiest to keep. You only have to give her a bowl deep enough, and she’ll crawl into it herself.
【Su Man·Bitch】
That day Director Lu invited me out for drinks, and once I was tipsy, he suddenly set down his glass, looked at me, and said he’d seen me on a foreign site. Which picture, what pose — he described it all clear as day. The blood rushed to my face all at once, the hand gripping my glass trembling — not from anger, but because that shell had been lightly rapped from the outside, baring the scalding core within. He didn’t mock me. He said he thought I was beautiful, so beautiful it was a waste, that hiding it was throwing it away. In that moment I should have gotten up and left, but my legs went soft, soft as if someone had pulled the bones right out of them.
He reached out and tucked the hair fallen along the side of my face behind my ear, the pad of his finger brushing the curve of it. Just that light touch, and I clamped my thighs together. I knew what would come next, and I knew I wouldn’t refuse. The daytime Su Man screamed inside for me to stop, but that nameless nighttime body had already gotten there a step ahead of me and said “yes” on my behalf.