Su Wan had danced for eleven years. Among the people in the trade who knew her, the first thing they usually said was, “that unusually proper girl.” At rehearsal she pinned her long hair into a flawless bun; her street clothes were crisply ironed high collars and straight-cut trousers, and even in summer she rarely bared her collarbones. She smiled with grace, spoke in a soft low voice, never took up a dirty joke, and after every session she was always the first to leave quietly. No one knew that this composure everyone praised was the tightest, thickest shell she had ever fastened around herself.
Beneath the shell hid another Su Wan. That Su Wan had discovered, many years ago, that the point of her arousal — the shameful one — was not like other people’s. Others found satisfaction through intimacy, through touch, through being loved; what she wanted was to be seen. That spine-prickling shiver of thinking herself alone when in fact a gaze was resting on her body. She could not name what it was; she only knew that whenever the possibility arose, her sex would heat and grow slick beyond her control, and the more reason told her she must not, the more thoroughly her body defected.
A professional dancer’s body was her greatest asset, and the handiest prop for this appetite. Years of training had made her a long, taut frame: one metre sixty-eight, so slender the bone nearly showed, collarbones sunk into two little hollows, yet with flesh kept where flesh belonged. Her legs were a dancer’s legs — straight, even, the inner thighs firm and smooth from years of being clenched together, the ankles delicate. What made even her linger over her own reflection was that pair of high, upturned buttocks — years of horse stance, splits, and leg lifts had trained them round and lifted, the cleft deep, so that when she bent, that furrow would flicker in and out of view along the taut line of her trousers.
The rehearsal hall was the first place she secretly gave herself over. In the early mornings she was often the first to arrive. While no one was around, she would deliberately leave two buttons of her practice leotard undone. It was a pale-grey, close-fitting dance top; the two buttons that should have fastened below her collarbones she loosened, and the collar hung slack and open. Facing the mirror that covered the whole wall, she worked her shoulders, arched her back. Each time she bent, the loosened neckline fell fully open, drooping down, and the mirror caught, plain as day, a small stretch of her breast — not large, a handful, the areola a very pale pink, the nipple rising quietly into the air.
She stared at that half-bared self in the mirror, her heart pounding as if she had just finished a fast allegro. There was, in truth, no one else here. But what if? What if the door was not shut tight, what if someone passed in the corridor, what if behind that mirror, or beyond that high skylight, there was a pair of eyes she could not see? It was this “what if” that drew her belly tight in waves, that let a wetness seep quietly out between her legs. She could feel that dampness weeping from within, pressed against the thin dance tights, cool and clinging to her skin.
In private she had a whole ritual that belonged to her alone. Rehearsing bare beneath a short skirt was the boldest of them. On certain rehearsal days she would wear an extremely short practice skirt with nothing underneath. When she spun, the hem flew up, and her lower body was exposed utterly to the air, exposed to that all-seeing mirror. She turned, she kicked, and every movement might flip the skirt to her waist. When she had finished a piece she would slump to the floor gasping, legs falling open in exhaustion, and in the mirror that plain, bare place faced her without a stitch of cover — she would blush at herself, and even as she blushed she could not stop her hand from slipping down there.
She kept that place immaculate. A years-long habit: not a stray hair left, the two thin lips sealed flush together, like a shelled egg, smooth and plain. It was not for anyone to see — at least that was what she always told herself. Yet every time, in the moment after she had tidied herself and parted her legs before the mirror, the same absurd thought would surface: what would his face look like, if someone pushed the door open right now and saw me like this. The instant the thought surfaced, her sex would clench once and spill more wetness.
In the innermost layer of her wardrobe, pressed beneath a stack of plain underwear, lay her secret. A black lace slip nightgown, thin as cicada wing, the bodice openwork lace that hid almost nothing; and several sets of black lace suspenders and thongs, things she would never touch by day. She had hidden them very deep, yet could not bear to throw them away. Because whenever the night grew late she would lock the door, draw the curtain halfway — only halfway — change into that black lace slip, stand before the full-length mirror at the window, and sway, slowly.
The woman in the mirror was another person entirely. The black lace cinched her slender waist; the slip was short enough to just cover the curve of her buttocks, and rode up at the smallest movement. Beneath the openwork lace, the pale-pink areolae and the risen nipples flickered in and out of view, rising and falling with her breath. She lifted one long leg onto the windowsill in a split stretch, and the slip slid at once to her waist, baring that black thong, thin as a thread, cutting deep into the cleft. And so, before the mirror, she struck one pose after another she would never dare show by day — bending, thrusting out her buttocks, spreading her legs, glancing back.
And beyond the window lay the entire meaning of that half-drawn curtain. Her apartment was high up; across a street opposite stood another, taller building, a mix of offices and flats. At night most of those windows were lit. She never dared confirm whether anyone across the way was actually watching, but it was exactly this uncertainty that drove her to the deepest shiver. She told herself no one was over there, and at the same time deliberately turned her body toward the window, aiming her most unspeakable poses at that pitch-dark glass that might be hiding a pair of eyes.
Once, she even fantasized that a man stood behind one of the windows opposite, binoculars in his hands. This invented man had no clear face, only a pair of intent, greedy eyes that, across dozens of metres of night, took her in inch by inch — watched the breasts rising beneath her openwork lace, watched the plain sealed seam when she parted her legs, watched the wetness she was too ashamed even to admit, the wetness her own fingers were toying with. That fantasy made her come that very night against the mirror at the window, her legs so weak she nearly sank to her knees.
She knew she was sick. Or rather, she knew how irreconcilable this appetite was with the decorous figure she cut by day. It was precisely because she wrapped herself so tightly by day, smiled so flawlessly, that this small loosening at night felt so fatally sweet. The contrast itself was her fuse — the more she was praised for propriety, the more wanton the thing she bared to that darkness in private. She was like a string strung to its limit: propriety was the string, and exhibition was the pluck.
But fantasy was, in the end, only fantasy. In all these years she had never let that gaze truly land on her body. All her indulgence had happened within the safety of “thinking herself alone,” within the make-believe of the mirror and the dark window. She both longed to be truly seen and was frightened to death — afraid that gaze might acquire a face, a name, consequences she could not take back. That fear was the last and the most solid shell of all.
In the rehearsal hall she fastened the buttons one by one again, up below the collarbones, and pinned the loosened bun tight once more. The Su Wan in the mirror turned back into that proper girl. She picked up her bag, said a quiet goodbye to the few colleagues who had not yet left, her voice gentle and calm, and not one of them could tell that half an hour ago she had been spinning bare-hipped in this very room, the wetness not yet dried.
But that unsatisfied thing, like a seed, swelled deeper inside her body day by day. Fantasy could no longer feed it. Lately she drifted more and more at rehearsal, would stare blankly at that door in the hall that had never been fixed and never shut tight, would deliberately lag half a beat while changing clothes, would stand ever longer at the window late at night, her poses ever more outrageous. She could feel it herself: that shell was cracking, the crack widening.
She needed a real outlet. She needed a real pair of eyes with warmth in them to truly take in the thing she had, for all these years, only dared do before the mirror and the dark window. She did not dare to ask for it outright, but her body was already paving the way for her — every door deliberately left ajar, every garment deliberately worn thinner, was a trembling hand she reached out toward that unknown gaze. She did not know who that person would be, or when he would come. She only knew that day was no longer far off.