【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
My name is Lin Wan, born in ’98, one meter sixty-five, forty-six kilos, breasts neither big nor small, though when I wear a blouse the gap between the buttons always strains open a little. All my life I was the child other parents held up as an example — no dyeing my hair, no coming home late, no bare shoulders; even majoring in finance was my dad’s call, he said it was stable. I lived into my twenties like a clock that had been wound up: keeping time, behaving, and no one ever asked where the spring inside the casing actually wanted to fly. Not until my first relationship, the first time I let a man into my body, did I belatedly realize that spring had been coiled tight all these years, and no one had ever truly plucked it once.
【Zhou Yu · Current Boyfriend】
Lin Wan was the first proper girlfriend I ever had, same year, the college next door. It took me the better part of a year to win her; she was so proper she’d only hold hands where no one could see. That day was the first time she agreed to come to my rented room, and my palms were slick with nerves. The moment the light went off, I could barely hold it the second I touched her; I was inside for only a few strokes before I finished. I remember lying face-down after, burning with shame for the longest time, mumbling something like “it’ll be better next time,” then pulling out my phone because I couldn’t face her. I always assumed she didn’t understand any of this — she was so obedient, surely she wouldn’t mind. I didn’t dare turn to meet her eyes.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
In that under-a-minute, before I’d even figured out what being filled felt like, he had already gone soft and rolled over with his back to me. I lay beneath a strange ceiling, my body half open, like a door someone had just pried a crack into and then abandoned. I wasn’t angry. I was only empty. The kind of empty where a match is struck, the flame just licks up, and then — poof — it’s snuffed out. I reached down and touched my own belly; something in there was still pulsing, beat after beat, aching and urgent, as if asking on my behalf: that’s it? I waited over twenty years for that? In that moment I didn’t cry. I only knew, with perfect clarity, that the thing I wanted, he could not give.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
Back at the dorm that night I couldn’t sleep. The light of my phone screen lit my face; I don’t know what I was searching for, but my finger tapped its way, step by step, into a very quiet niche-circle forum. The people there spoke in words like passwords — of submission, of rules, of one person willingly handing herself over into another’s hands. I’d never told anyone: I was raised to be controlled, controlled down to the bone, and it turned out I… liked being controlled. Not the way my parents did it — another way, the kind where someone tells me in a low voice what to do, and if I do it he’s pleased. I scrolled down page after page, my face burning fiercely, my legs pressing together on their own, and that fire — those words lit it up again, one by one.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
I hid myself behind an avatar with no photo, daring only to lurk, daring only to look. The things those posts described were shameful and alluring at once: kneeling, waiting, being ordered, being inspected, trembling helplessly at a single word of praise — “good girl.” As I read I thought I’d gone mad — I was Lin Wan, after all, the Lin Wan who picked even the palest lipstick shade, the one stamped “sensible” by every elder. Yet the more that was true, the more that world inside the screen looked like a pit — black, deep, warm — and though I knew jumping in would shatter something, every night I still couldn’t help edging toward the mouth of it, edging closer and closer.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
By day I still kept myself immaculate. Blouse pressed, hair tied back, spreadsheets accurate to two decimal places, colleagues praising how steady I was, my boss calling me reliable. No one could tell that this girl sitting bolt upright had, the night before, gotten wet all night under the covers over a stranger’s few lines of text. I even stood before the bathroom mirror and studied myself a long while, trying to find one flaw in that clean face, and there was none. So it turned out a person could be split in two — a daytime half, a nighttime half — with only a membrane between them, thin enough to tear at any moment, waiting for one hand to poke gently through from the other side.
【Gu Xing · Male Online Friend】
The first time I noticed her, it was because of her silence. The forum is full of people who talk too much; she was different — she only watched, occasionally leaving a line or two beneath someone’s post, every word weighed, giving off something well-pressed-down and about to spill over. In this line of ours, you can tell at a glance which kind truly wants it in their bones and which is just here for a thrill. She was the former, and the kind that had never been opened up, locked tight. I’m a year older, and I’ve done this a while; I know a person like that, once opened by the right one, burns hotter than anyone. I sent her my first private message, just four words: Who are you waiting for?
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
“Who are you waiting for?” — I stared at those words a long time, my heart pounding like it would leap out of my throat. I should not have replied. My mother taught me from childhood: if a strange man speaks to you, ignore him, always. Yet as if possessed I typed and deleted, deleted and typed, and in the end sent back only one word: “You.” The second it sent I regretted it, buried my face in the covers, half wanting to hurl the phone out the window. But he replied quickly, unhurried and unruffled, as if he’d long expected me to answer that way. He didn’t open with anything explicit — first he asked when I slept, whether I was tired today, whether I’d eaten properly. It was that contrast that was so deadly — the man who was clearly coming to take control of me had first learned to be tender with me.
【Gu Xing · Male Online Friend】
I was in no hurry to touch the tautest string in her. Rush it and it snaps. The first few days I only chatted — about her major, about her childhood held under such tight control, about that “useless” boyfriend of hers — and when she brought that man up her tone was flat, flat as if describing a piece of furniture that had nothing to do with her. That told me what I needed to know. I set the pace very slow, slow enough that she started waiting for my messages, slow enough that one day she sent, on her own, “Why are you so late tonight?” — carrying a hurt she herself hadn’t noticed. That one line, and I knew: the first tumbler in that lock had loosened. That very night, I called her for the first time.
【Gu Xing · Male Online Friend】
The call connected; on the other end was very faint breathing, she didn’t dare speak first. I didn’t press either, just let the silence bear down. After a good while, I said, in a voice pitched an octave lower than usual, “Lin Wan, what time is it now?” She said eleven. I said, “Aren’t you supposed to be lying down by eleven? Why are you still sitting up?” She froze, her voice changed: “How do you know I’m sitting up?” I said I don’t know — I’m telling you to lie down now. From the other end came the soft rustle of bedding being shifted, and then her small little “I’m lying down now.” Just that one “I’m lying down now,” and I went hard. This woman was born for it — give her one clear command and her body obeys before her mind does.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
“I’m lying down now.” Having said those words, I startled myself. Yet at the same moment a current, aching and soft, shot up along my spine — so this was what it felt like, to be ordered “lie down” by a low, deep voice. He had done nothing to me, he couldn’t even see me, and yet I had already obeyed him like a good girl, and from it tasted a comfort I’d never known, one that loosened me all the way into the seams of my bones. So this was the thing I’d always been missing: not someone to love me, but someone to catch me steadily, to tell me what to do, and if I did it, he was pleased, and I was at peace. I pressed my face to the pillow, listened to his breathing, and for the first time felt the night wasn’t so long.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
After that night, I began to long for the dark. As proper as I was by day, that was how much I anticipated by night. I would shower early, charge my phone full, turn off the overhead light and leave only the dimmest lamp, then lie down under the covers as if awaiting a secret that belonged to me alone. The moment his call rang, my heart would already clench into a knot. Sometimes he deliberately didn’t call, and I’d toss and turn alone in the dark until the very second the phone lit up and I could finally breathe. I never imagined a person I’d never even met could train me like this — train me so that at the sound of his voice, my body would go half-soft before my mind even had to take part.
【Gu Xing · Male Online Friend】
Every night after, the call became our rule. I never wasted words; I only gave commands and watched her carry them out. “Turn off the lamp.” “Put your hand on your belly.” “Lower.” — At each step I left ample gaps, letting her struggle for herself between shame and want, letting her spread her own legs open inch by inch. The more she resisted, faltering and stammering, the steadier and slower I pressed my voice. Later, all I had to say was one word — “good girl” — and from the other end would come a stifled, tearful pant of hers. I’d never seen her face, yet I knew better than anyone what she looked like just then: flushed, weak in the legs, shamed to the edge of tears by her own honest body, and yet unwilling to stop for even a single step.
【Lin Wan · Inner Voice】
I don’t know which night it was that I fell completely. Maybe the night he first made me call out to him over the phone, and after the words left my mouth I burned all over; or maybe the night he said “you did very well today,” and I, over that one bit of praise, trembled in the legs and came. He was hundreds of kilometers away, behind a thin layer of screen, yet he held me more firmly than anyone who’d ever stood before me. I began living in two worlds: by day the Lin Wan in suit and blouse, spreadsheets flawless, praised by colleagues as “reliable”; by night the Lin Wan who turned off the light, listened to a strange man’s voice, obeyed like a good girl, ashamed and greedy. And I grew ever more certain that the latter was the real me.
【Zhou Yu · Current Boyfriend】
Around then Lin Wan changed. I couldn’t say where, she was just different. She still replied to my messages, but slowly, and short. Once I asked her to see a movie, and she said she was tired and wanted to get back to the dorm early. I walked her to her building; she looked down at her phone, a smile at the corner of her mouth I’d never seen — a smile she couldn’t hide, and it wasn’t for me. Something dropped in my chest, and I asked who she was chatting with. She stuffed the phone into her bag and said a classmate. I believed her — I always believed her, she was so obedient. I even foolishly thought I’d have to really perform next time and make up for that embarrassing thing before. I didn’t know that by then I had already lost, lost cleanly and completely, and I was still kept utterly in the dark.
【Gu Xing · Male Online Friend】
Taming someone to the point she’ll open herself to you over the phone is only the first step. The real thing can’t be given through a screen. That night she lay down as usual and did as I said, but afterward she didn’t say goodnight like she always had — instead she asked, very softly, “Will we… ever meet?” I laughed. The fish had taken the hook, and had swum onto it herself. I didn’t agree at once; I made her wait a bit more — the more I made her wait, the more parched she got. Three days later I sent her the name of a strange city, a specific bullet-train number, and one line: “Arrive Friday afternoon. I’ll come get you. Three days, you obey only me. If you can do that, come.” I knew she’d come. A woman like this, once she’s tasted being caught steadily by someone, can never go back into that hollow shell she used to be.