【Her · Su Wan】Whenever my roommates called me “little good girl,” I’d just smile, tug my bangs down a little, and hide half my face. I’m twenty-one this year, a junior, my major courses steadily in the top five, never skipping class, always in the front row, my notes neater than anyone else’s. This is the Su Wan they see — quiet, clean, voice so soft it’s as if she’s afraid of waking someone. Not a single person knows that beneath this shell hides something I can barely bring myself to look at directly.
【Her · Su Wan】There’s something wrong with my body, and there has been for a very long time. Other people don’t feel much when someone touches them. I can’t do that. When the subway is packed solid, a stranger’s arm just pressing against my back through the fabric sends a wave of tingling up my whole spine, raises invisible goosebumps, makes my thighs clamp together on their own. In an elevator crowded with people, my back to a wall of unfamiliar stares, my face burns red — but what’s more shameful is that deep in my body, in that place I don’t want to admit to, it quietly clenches once, gets a little wet.
【Her · Su Wan】Highly sensitive — I looked that word up online later, and it felt like it was explaining me and condemning me at the same time. Other people’s sensitivity is being ticklish, hating noise, hating the cold. Mine is this: the more inappropriate the setting for any reaction, the more my body betrays me. The quieter the library, the more proper the occasion, the more unfamiliar eyes there are, the more disobedient I get down there. I buried this thing deep, buried it for so many years, buried it into a secret I only dared open at night.
【Her · Su Wan】After I moved out of the dorm and rented a single room off campus, the secret finally got a room of its own. It was a small west-facing studio, and the afternoon sun slanted in and lit the whole wall up bright. I bought a mirror almost as tall as me and leaned it against the wall. The first time I stripped down to just my underwear in front of it, I stared at myself in that mirror for a long time — the well-behaved little Wan was gone, and standing in the mirror was a woman I didn’t recognize yet somehow found strangely familiar.
【Her · Su Wan】I started, on afternoons when no one was around, wearing the things I’d never normally dare put on. A pleated skirt so short it barely covered the line of my bottom — bend over even slightly, and in the mirror you could see that dangerous curve at the hem. Down there I always kept myself very clean, not a single hair, smooth as a piece of warm, soft jade, so that in pale-colored panties you could faintly make out that closed, delicate seam. I turned slowly in front of the mirror, imagining I wasn’t in an empty room but walking down a busy street — the wind flipping up a corner of my skirt, a strange man’s gaze behind me clinging to my bare inner thigh and crawling all the way up.
【Her · Su Wan】Just imagining that gaze scrambled my breathing. I could feel it clearly, that switch inside my body being flipped: my nipples hardening under the thin tube top, poking out two tiny points; down there starting to heat up, to get slick, the two smooth folds slowly engorging, faintly swelling, parting into a thin slit. Shame and pleasure rose at the same time — half of me wanted to throw on thick clothes and hide back inside my shell, the other half greedily wondered: if someone really saw, what then?
【Her · Su Wan】I admitted it. Right there that afternoon, facing the woman in the mirror whose sex had already begun to seep, I admitted that word to myself for the first time: contrast slut. The more well-behaved by day, the more wanton by night; the more I clutched my bangs and dodged people in public, the more I craved, in private, to be seen through, to have someone stare at that smooth seam, to be leered over and picked apart in someone’s dirty thoughts. That realization was like a needle stabbed into the deepest part of my shame, and what it drew out was a numb, sweet wave of pleasure — so what excited me most was this very contrast of mine that couldn’t bear the light.
【Her · Su Wan】I sat down on the carpet directly facing the mirror, hiked my short skirt up to my waist, and slowly parted my knees. In the mirror I saw that my once-closed, delicate slit was already gleaming wet, the two tender folds slightly turned open, a hint of deeper red showing between them. My fingers were shaking when I reached down — not from fear, but from that about-to-catch-fire shame of doing this while watching myself do it. The first time my fingertip touched that engorged, swollen little bud, my whole body jolted as if electrocuted, and a soft, sticky moan I didn’t even recognize leaked out of my throat.
【Her · Su Wan】I rubbed that little bud, harder and harder, not daring to shut my eyes, forcing myself to watch the mirror. To watch how the good girl turned into a puddle in her own hands. My fingers circled, faster and faster, the wetness down there so plentiful it was slippery now, making a faint squelching sound, trickling little by little into my palm, onto the carpet. My head was full of those fantasies: the short skirt flashing, countless strange stares, being pinned from behind, someone leering at me while saying, “So this kind of good girl is this filthy down here.” I was so ashamed my eyes went hot, yet my body honestly surged upward, spasm after spasm.
【Her · Su Wan】I tried working one finger inside. It was hot and tight in there, the inner walls hugging my knuckle layer by layer, sucking on the moment I entered, making a slick, wet sound with every movement. I never knew I could be this wet inside, this soft, this hungry for something to be pushed in. As I pumped my finger, I pinched my achingly hard nipple with my other hand, and the woman in the mirror had her brow knotted, mouth open and unable to close, face red as if about to drip blood — that was me, that was the real me.
【Her · Su Wan】When the climax came, I nearly arched my back and cried out. Down there suddenly convulsed, clamping tight around my finger, and a rush of heat surged out, leaving my palm and the carpet a slick mess. I slumped in front of the mirror, panting, still trembling all over, looking at the woman in the mirror — clothes in disarray, sex a wreck, that smooth seam still opening and closing — and what welled up inside me wasn’t regret but a kind of clarity close to release.
【Her · Su Wan】After that day, afternoons like that became my fixed ritual. I got bolder each time — wearing a nightgown thin to the point of transparency without drawing the curtains, standing at the window fantasizing that someone in the building across the way had their gaze leveled at me; propping up my phone facing the mirror to watch my flushed face and that opening, closing seam. But a mirror is, in the end, a mirror; a fantasy is, in the end, a fantasy. The more I played, the louder the filled-up void inside me cried out: I wanted real eyes, real hands, something real, scalding, that could split me wide open and drive all the way to the deepest end. I knew where I was headed, and I knew it was only a matter of time.