【Yao Wei · Model】
On the first day of the new term, Yao Wei crossed the plane-tree avenue with an armful of printed portfolios, jeans and a white shirt, hair tied into a low ponytail, only a thin layer of primer on her face. A teacher in the department stopped her to praise how good her form was this semester; classmates called her to the cafeteria, and she waved them off with a smile, saying she had a shoot in the afternoon. No one would connect this quiet senior-year girl with the car parked in the studio basement last night, its windows fogged over completely. She was twenty-two this year, her schedule packed solid, and the people she knew grew heavier in weight with each layer — a matter that not even the boyfriend still waiting for her reply knew a thing about.
【Yao Wei · Model】
She was the kind of girl whose contrast was grown into the bone. A frame of 165, sixty kilos pressed onto an 80H chest, any loose sweatshirt pushed out into a curve, yet she always chose plain cuts that hid her away. The more she hid, the hotter that peeled-open shame burned when someone, after the shoot, praised her figure in front of the lens as “too criminal.” The first time she tasted that heat was three months ago, at the end of an outdoor session; her boyfriend asked in the group chat what time she’d be back, and she stared at that message while she let another hand reach over from the passenger seat. Looking back on that night she remembered only one thing: it turned out that when a stranger’s hand touched her until she trembled, her body leaned toward that hand, not away.
【A · Big Shot】
I call him Ah Lan — I’m one of the top fashion photographers this city has. The first time I booked Yao Wei into the studio, she was a new face a friend recommended, said the girl’s chest was insane and she was well-behaved too. Half a day of shooting and I could tell — she loosened up in front of the lens, but curled in once the machine was off. The more a girl’s like that, the more there is to open up. After the shoot I took her to dinner, ordered wine, tested her. She flushed from the drink but her words never leaked a drop; she answered whatever I asked, she just wouldn’t take any of the veiled lines I fed her. I wasn’t in a hurry. A girl like this can’t be rushed; she has to take that step forward herself.
【A · Big Shot】
After that we booked a few more jobs, and I stopped calling her into the studio — I only asked her to dinner. That day, halfway through the meal, I pulled out a wad of cash and pressed it under the napkins on her side, and said flat out that I wanted to touch her. She didn’t answer right away; first she looked at the cash, lashes dipping down and lifting again, her eyes going back and forth between the money and my face. I said no one was nearby, the private-room door was locked. She let out an “mm,” a sound so soft it was like a sigh. I touched her face first, my thumb grazing her lower lip, and her eyes went wet; then lower, cupping that heavy pair through her shirt, and her breathing went instantly ragged; and by the time my hand slipped under her skirt, the moment my fingertip reached it, it was already a slick mess.
【Yao Wei · Model】
That day she showered in the dorm for a long time, cursing herself at the mirror, but her body remembered the taste of being priced in plain figures, of being opened little by little by a finger. She couldn’t say what it was; she only knew that when her boyfriend held her, her head was full of the hand in that private room, and the cash she later counted twice. She began to long for Ah Lan’s messages.
【A · Big Shot】
After a few sessions she became my mistress. She learned faster than anyone — I took her through all kinds of games, taught her how to put that contrast of hers to use, flew her out of town, shot her by the floor-to-ceiling windows of hotels, being pounded soft. She understood more and more what she wanted. Once she brought it up herself, said she wanted to bring her best friend along too, said the girl acted prim but had honestly been dying with curiosity about what we did. The night she led her friend into the room was the first time she learned to share, and the real step she crossed over.
【Yao Wei · Model】
She sat on the edge of the bed watching Ah Lan’s fingers slip into her friend’s body, listening to her friend go from biting her lip dead-shut to a moan she couldn’t hold down, and suddenly understood how far she had already come. This was no kidnapping, no coercion — every step she had taken herself. She stitched this secret into the skin of the good girl, crossing the plane-tree avenue by day with her portfolio, handing her body over by night. She even began to crave things more excessive — to crave more than one pair of hands, to crave being made, completely, into a thing to be used. She didn’t yet know that the yacht anchored just off the coast was waiting to stretch this craving to a place she couldn’t imagine.