【Fan Jing · Her】
My name is Fan Jing. I’m thirty, a graphic designer, single. My office is on the nineteenth floor of a tower in the high-tech zone, and I sit at the desk by the window. In a whole day I say fewer than twenty sentences, most of them “Got it,” “Okay,” and “I’ll send the revision tonight.”
My coworkers gave me a nickname: “Silent Mode.” At team dinners I sit at the far end, drink one glass of orange juice, and at nine sharp announce I have to go home and feed my cat. I don’t have a cat.
I live in an old nineties compound on the west side of the city: six-story brick buildings, no elevator. I’m on the fourth floor. Two bedrooms, one living room, 1,900 a month, the balcony facing the street. Across the street is a row of hardware shops with roll-down shutters, and a Shaxian snack bar that stays open until one in the morning.
The habit started last summer. That July my air conditioner died, and my landlord texted me: “The repairman can’t come until next Wednesday. Open the windows and make do for a few days.”
The fourth floor gets the western sun. At nine at night it was still thirty-one degrees inside. After my shower I couldn’t be bothered to put on a bra. I pulled on a white T-shirt washed thin and sat cross-legged in the living room revising a client’s poster. Seventh draft.
The window was wide open, and seven or eight meters beyond the screen were the balconies of the building opposite. A middle-aged man lived on the third floor. Every night at ten he came out to smoke; his lighter clicked, the flame flared, then went out.
That night, halfway through his cigarette, the red tip stopped at his lips and stayed there for a long time.
I glanced down. Sweat had glued the T-shirt to my body. Both nipples were pressing against the cotton, their color and shape showing clear through, even the little bumps around them.
I should have gotten up and closed the curtain. I didn’t. I nudged the mouse one notch to the right and pretended to be aligning a layer. My back broke out in a cold sweat, and the tops of my thighs burned so hot I could barely sit still.
I worked on that draft until midnight and didn’t change a single pixel. When I turned off the light and lay on my side and finally slid my hand into my panties, one touch told me the crotch was already soaked through in a small patch, stuck to the lips of my pussy.
The next morning in the office elevator I ran into the manager from the team next door. “Morning, Xiao Fan,” he said.
“Morning,” I said, quieter than usual. There were seven or eight people in that elevator, and not one of them knew that last night “Silent Mode” had let a strange middle-aged man stare at her tits for twenty minutes, then touched herself until her leg cramped.
After the AC was fixed, I still didn’t wear a bra at home. I drew the curtain only halfway and left the light on, and the open half faced the exact spot where I sat to work.
The man on the third floor opposite moved out later, and a young couple moved in. I felt a little let down, and a little relieved, and then I realized I had started thinking about places farther away.
On a Wednesday in October, at eleven-thirty at night, I stood at my front door holding two bags of trash and took off my panties.
I was wearing a knee-length gray cotton skirt, very ordinary; I’d worn it to work before. There was only one difference: under the skirt there was nothing at all.
The motion-sensor lights in the stairwell were dead on two floors. I didn’t stamp to wake them. I felt my way down along the handrail. Wind poured in through the ground-floor door, crept up my calves, and kept crawling until it reached the crack of my ass, so cold I shivered.
The trash bins were at the compound gate, four green ones, past the guard booth and under a streetlight. Old Wang the gatekeeper was slumped in his chair, his phone blaring Douyin, a man’s voice shouting, “Hey, fam!”
“Taking out trash this late, girl?” He didn’t even look up.
“Yeah, they collect in the morning.” I hurried off as soon as I said it. Under the streetlight I could hear my own heartbeat knocking in my ears.
A Meituan delivery guy rode past on his e-bike, slowed down for a second, and looked back at me. Just once. The wind chose that moment to lift my hem, and when I reached down to hold it, the back of my hand brushed the inside of my thigh. It was slick.
By the time I climbed to the landing between the third and fourth floors, my legs were too weak to go on. I sat down on the pitch-black steps and put my hand under my skirt. My juices had already run down my thighs to the backs of my knees. I bit my wrist and touched myself for less than two minutes before my whole body arched; one slipper fell off and tumbled down the stairs.
From then on, taking out the trash was the thing I looked forward to most all week.
I started counting the days. Monday through Thursday I was “Silent Mode” at the office, revising logos for clients who, after draft twelve, said “the first one was better after all,” and all I said back was “Okay.” On Wednesday and Saturday nights I carried my trash bags four flights down and four flights back up, bare under my skirt.
Once in the stairwell I bumped into the young guy from the fifth floor coming down for a takeout order. He turned sideways to let me pass. I kept my head down as I went by, my hem brushing his trouser leg. Back home I shut the door and stood with my back against it for a long time, the insides of my thighs so sticky they would not come apart.
Eventually, just going without panties wasn’t enough. At one in the morning I lay on my stomach in bed scrolling Taobao, typing into the search bar, deleting, typing again, until I stopped on one page: a silicone anal bead stick, seventeen centimeters long, nine beads going from thin to thick, the thickest as wide as two fingers, a finger ring at the end.
I opened the customer service chat and typed: “Is this okay for a first-timer?”
The reply came instantly: “Dear, for first use we suggest pairing it with lube~ Start slow from the thinnest end, no rush, just relax your body!” followed by a blushing emoji.
I placed the order. In the notes field I wrote: Discreet packaging.
Three days later, at the Cainiao pickup station, the auntie pulled a small box off the shelf. “Pickup code 621038, Fan Jing, right? Household goods.”
“Yes.” I took it. The box was light, about the weight of a book. I shoved it into my tote bag, and for the whole five hundred meters home I felt as though everyone on the street knew what was inside.
That night after my shower I stood with one foot on the edge of the tub and the other on the floor, facing the mirror over the sink, and squeezed a big glob of lube onto my fingers. It was cold. When I smeared it on, my asshole clenched on its own, so tight not even a fingertip could get in.
I did what customer service said: breathe out, breathe out again. I pressed the thinnest end against it, round and smooth. First a little pressure, then, with a soft pop, three centimeters slid in. I pushed farther: the second bead, the third.
It was a strange feeling. Suddenly there was something inside my belly, a fullness that made me feel like I needed the toilet, though I didn’t really. By the time I stopped at the fifth bead, that fullness had slowly turned into something else, a tingling that kept surging forward. My slutty pussy hadn’t been touched once, yet it kept clenching and spilling out wetness, dripping onto my wrist.
I tried pulling it out one bead. The thickest ring backed up to my hole and stretched the flesh there white, then popped free. I pitched forward and my forehead smacked the mirror with a dull thud. I didn’t even notice the pain. I pushed it back in.
The woman in the mirror was red from her face to her neck, mouth half open, eyes wet. I stared at her for a long time. At three that afternoon, that same face had stood in a conference room explaining to a client “the sophistication of negative space.”
I didn’t dare put all of it in. I stopped at twelve centimeters. I walked one lap around the apartment, and with every step the silicone beads shifted inside me, nudged me. When I reached the balcony door I had to grab the frame and stand still, my legs shaking the whole time.
The street outside was empty. Only the Shaxian place across the road still had its lights on, and under the streetlight by the curb a circle of yellow light lay on the ground, clean and bare. No one there at all.
I thought: What if I had all of it inside me and went to stand under there?
I didn’t pull it out. I went back to the bedroom, crouched, and dug out from the bottom of the closet a sheer white micro-miniskirt I had bought last year and never once worn.