【Qiao Tang · Wife】
I have a burner account on Qingke. The handle is “Mat No. 7.” In a year I posted over two hundred photos, and not one shows my face.
The locker-room mirror at the Pilates studio. Yoga pants, sports bras, side angles, back angles, one leg up on the barre. I’ve been teaching at that studio for four years, and I built this body one class at a time: narrow waist, round lifted ass, straight legs, not an ounce of flab on my inner thighs. A body you work that hard for deserves to be looked at. Nobody at home looks.
The most popular one I took last winter: me on my knees on the reformer, doing cat pose, back sunk low, ass pushed up, gray leggings pulled so tight they cut a seam right down the middle. Over four hundred comments under that one. Half said “that waist.” The other half said things I’d be too embarrassed to read aloud. I read every single one, and I read them with my thighs squeezed together.
Zhou Xiao doesn’t look. It isn’t that he doesn’t love me. He’s tired. He runs dispatch at a logistics park, out the door at seven, home at nine; after dinner he flops on the couch, scrolls short videos for ten minutes, and his eyes close. I walk past him twice after my shower in a brand-new slip nightie, and he glances up, says “looks nice,” and looks back down.
Sometimes I climb on top of him, and he pats my head. “Really can’t tonight, babe. Tomorrow.”
So I take care of it myself. While he snores, I roll onto my side with my back to him and slide a hand into my pajama shorts, thinking about those four hundred comments, thinking until I’m wet, biting the corner of my pillow as I come. He never wakes up.
Tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow.
【A-Shu · Online Friend】
I’d been following “Mat No. 7” for eight months.
Her photos weren’t like everyone else’s. No influencer poses, just quick shots in the practice room, fingerprints still smeared on the mirror. But those quick shots, that curve from her waist down over her ass, kept me up at night.
The first time I DMed her it was one in the morning. I sent: “Sis, your body is unreal. Obsessed.” The second I hit send I regretted it. I felt like a creep.
She replied the next day at noon, one word: “Ha.”
After that we talked more and more. She laughed a lot. Every sentence ended with three “hahaha”s. She told me she’d been married five years, her husband was a good guy, just lazy in bed. I said that was a waste. She said, tell me about it.
Once she sent me one she never posted: the bathroom mirror fogged over, a patch wiped clear with her hand, and in it just her chest and stomach, drops of water hanging off her nipples. She said, “This one’s just for you.” I didn’t sleep that night. I jerked off to that photo three times.
I called her sis, and called her husband bro. She said, you sure took to that fast.
【Zhou Xiao · Husband】
That night, a little after ten, I came out of the bathroom and saw Qiao Tang sitting cross-legged on the bed, hugging her phone and laughing, shoulders shaking.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” She shoved the phone under her pillow.
Five years married, and she had never once hidden her phone. My stomach dropped. I reached under the pillow for it. She didn’t stop me. She just watched me, the corners of her mouth still curled up.
The screen was a DM thread. The other guy was “A-Shu,” and the top message was his: “A wife with a body like that, he must be fucking you every day, trying every position.”
Under it, her reply: “Sometimes I let him fuck me and he still won’t.”
And below that: “You must be draining him dry.” “If he won’t, let me.” “Hahaha.”
My face went hot, so hot my ears were ringing. I should have been angry. I stared at the line “If he won’t, let me,” and down below I got hard, inch by inch, until my pajama pants were tented.
I scrolled up. There was a lot more. He praised her legs, praised her waist, said he wanted to hold her from behind, said he wanted to kiss her feet while he was inside her. All she ever sent back was hahaha, strings and strings of hahaha. But she hadn’t blocked him. She hadn’t deleted a single message.
Qiao Tang saw. She didn’t say a word. She stretched out a foot and tapped the tent in my pants with her toe.
“You’re hard,” she said, eyes creased with laughter. “When’s the last time you got hard that fast?”
【Qiao Tang · Wife】
That night he moved on top of me harder than he had since the year we got married. When it was over he lay sprawled across my back, panting, and after a long time he came out with: “That guy. It’s just talk?”
“Just talk. He lives in another city. I don’t even know what he looks like.”
“Does he want to… you know?”
“In his dreams.” I rolled over to look at him. “Do you want him to dream about it?”
He didn’t answer. He buried his face in my neck, and I felt him getting hard against my leg again.
We talked for a long time that night. We settled on three rules. One: A-Shu stays inside the phone. No meeting, no video calls, no faces. Two: anything that gets sent to him, we both have to say yes. Three: if either of us gets uncomfortable, we say so and it stops. Delete the account, block him, act like none of it ever happened.
Zhou Xiao said, “So does he know that I know?”
“I’ll tell him tomorrow.”
The next day I messaged A-Shu: “My husband saw our chats.”
It was five minutes before he answered. He must have been terrified. “Bro… is he mad?”
“Nope.” I typed, laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. “He got hard.”
【A-Shu · Online Friend】
I stared at “He got hard” for a long time. My palms were soaked.
Then she sent another one: “He says if you want to listen, next time you can.”
I asked, listen to what?
She sent back a smirking emoji: “Listen to your sis getting fucked by your bro.”
That was Tuesday. Friday night, 11:07, a message came in: “My husband’s in the shower.”
For those three days I couldn’t get anything done. At work I zoned out staring at my screen; after work I went home and showered three times. I dug out my earbuds and charged them full, afraid she was joking, and afraid she wasn’t.