Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Six months into the marriage, my husband said in bed that he wanted to watch another man fuck me. I sat on it for three weeks before I answered: fine, but I pick the man, I set the date, I set the terms, and when I say stop it stops. Out of his pile of college classmates I picked Lu Ping, twenty-eight, single. Before he came through the door I said the rules out loud in front of both men.

A month before her birthday she was the one who said it out loud: this year I want a man I do not know. Her husband only sourced the channel. Of three photos she tapped the third, and she read the terms aloud in front of him before she signed. Hotel room 1706: she wants the twenty-seven-year-old model on his knees licking her first, her husband seated two meters away, watching. Just past midnight she says: extend it. Extend to eight in the morning.

Low season, five of the six rooms empty, and her man on the road two hundred days a year. A photographer from Shanghai moves into the courtyard to shoot the old house, and the one who walks over with a cup of tea and says “take one of me too” is her. She sets the rules: nothing posted, nothing sold, not one cent changing hands. Her husband comes home early and stands in the guest room doorway, and she looks back at him over the other man’s shoulder and does not stop.

Three years married, she finds four hundred and thirty-seven nude photos of herself in the locked album on her husband’s phone — and not one of them has ever left it. For two years he has been bragging in a group chat and saying he can’t bring himself to share. She sits on the toilet lid and looks at every one of them, picks out three, and from her own account adds the man who has been waiting two years.

A year and two months married, and my husband stands on the balcony with a cigarette and says, Da Wei wants to see you. So I set four rules: he only watches, nobody films, I take my own clothes off, and when I say stop it stops. The first time he sat at the foot of the bed in that ninety-nine yuan chair, and I came with my eyes on his. The second time I let him touch me. The third time I climbed on myself, and my husband sat in the chair. This week Da Wei says he wants to bring a buddy.

Nine years married, and her husband does not touch her once in a year. At the Tangshan hot springs two couples push their barbecue tables together, and her husband proposes swapping for a night. She says nothing at the time. At ten, in the private bath, she is the one who puts her hand on the other husband’s thigh: my husband proposed it, and I am agreeing now. Who changes rooms, and what time everyone goes back to their own — every one of those is her call.

Five years married, two years of watching that scene from the outside. The first time we actually went to meet someone, I set exactly one rule before we left the flat: you can film it, but whether it goes out is mine to decide. At thirty-one I kept the footage locked for three days, and on the fourth I cut thirty seconds myself and pressed send myself. Later that was not enough. I wanted the full one out, with my face in it.

Ten years married, and at the dinner table my husband said he wanted Fang Zhe, the man he shared a dorm room with at university, to be with us. I did not answer on the spot; I sat on it for two weeks. The day I answered I brought a sheet of paper and read four rules out to the two men, and only when I had finished did I say: then we start. Later he moved into our own compound, the schedule lives on my phone, three days a week.

Twenty-nine, head of the advertising department at a TV station, four years married and never once got there. Her husband begged her for two years; she said once. The night the other man walked in, she learned for the first time what she was made of. Two months later there is a fingerprint lock on the bedroom door with three prints registered in it, and none of them is her husband’s.

Eight years married, three of them with him impotent. That night he stood in front of the wardrobe and said he wanted to find a man to fuck me while he watched from the side. I said yes in ten minutes, with three conditions only: I pick the man myself, I set the rules, and in the room you watch and you do not speak. After that the hotel was booked by me, the condoms were bought by me, and the notebook was written by him because I told him to write it.

Ten days before the wedding, she returns to the southern water town that raised her, wanting only to live out her last quiet days as an unmarried girl. But Lu Zhixing is there too—her fiancé’s childhood friend, the two of them thick as thieves since diaper days, the man who has coveted her with his eyes since they were teenagers, and who now lives on the top floor of a building on the town’s edge, complete with a wine cellar and a private playroom. A jar of aged nü’er hong, and a string of old memories he lifts up one by one and lays before her again, pry back open the door in her heart that was about to close. From one grip through her shirt, to the stripping away of the ivory-white lace she had prepared for her wedding night, to that line when he was buried deepest without a condom—“Can I just go in like this?”—and finally to his two equally discreet friends joining in, the last no-tomorrow madness before the wedding. When dawn breaks they all scatter, she washes herself clean, dons the white veil, and carries this secret no one will ever know into the wedding hall. Three chapters alternating between viewpoints: Lu Zhixing’s obsession hidden for years, her layered tug-of-war between guilt and a body that betrays her on the eve of her marriage, and the fiancé off in another city, run ragged over the wedding, oblivious to all of it, who has even entrusted his childhood friend to “look after my bride-to-be for me.”

I have a very gentle boyfriend. We only ever used a handful of positions, never once tried dirty talk, and he couldn’t bring himself to say a harsh word to me. Mr. Liu was different — I met him at an industry mixer on Teachers’ Day, and over the next two-odd months I practically moved into his apartment. From the start he pinched my nipples, slapped my face, forced me to call him “husband” in the car. He pried open the back hole no one had ever touched, and with barely more than the wetness I couldn’t admit I had, he opened me there for the very first time. It hurt so much I thought I’d split apart; the tears wouldn’t stop. Yet the moment he drove in, I couldn’t help clenching, couldn’t help gushing. He came once in front and once in back. That mouth and that hole my boyfriend never used are now used by Mr. Liu almost every time. The low feeling isn’t fake — but I know we’re only fuck buddies.

Lin Zhixia is the kind of woman who makes people sit up straight the moment she walks into an office—a few years out of school, already a manager, with a cool, unshakable authority in her eyes. She has a boyfriend, Zhou Xu, so gentle he is almost translucent, who gathers her whole body into his arms and hums to her when she cannot sleep. And yet this woman everyone treats as a model met a man online who calls her only one thing: good girl. From the rope and blindfold pulled out of that black canvas bag in the hotel room, to the endless waves of climax forced out of her by a vibrator, to the scalding candle wax running down her back, her breasts, her thighs in that apartment—inch by inch she loses the disciplined, respectable self who never even learned how to be coy. Every night she returns to Zhou Xu’s arms, she knows with perfect clarity that she can never go back. So when the message “Let’s play again” lights up her screen, she answers with a single word: yes.

Art teacher Su Wan was worn soft over two years of her husband’s pillow-talk—he loves watching her be taken by another, forcing her at climax to admit she wants other men. She finally gives in, going to a hotel to meet a bull she met online. Her husband says look but don’t touch, playing the mere spectator, using a black blindfold to win her trust. But beneath the blindfold, the one swapped out is the husband himself. Blindfolded, she praises “darling, you’re bigger today,” cresting three or four times across fifty minutes and being filled to the brim; only when the blindfold comes off does she see the stranger kneeling between her thighs, her husband looking on beside them with reddening eyes. She weeps and curses, so ashamed she wants to sink into the floor—but her body had defected long before she understood. Three interwoven POVs: the bull’s hunt, the wife’s betrayed trust and the body that fell a step ahead of her, and the husband’s jealousy and twisted pride.

She is a retired auto-show model, a former warm-up dancer, and now the coaching assistant at a private billiards club — a long-distance sugar-daddy boyfriend wires money into her card every month and keeps her like a trophy behind glass. But glass cannot cage a hunger that walks. A regular at the poolroom pries the crack open first, then a KTV lounge, then the two friends her patron personally brought behind that hotel door. On the night three men take turns pinning her to the bed, she is driven to the deepest place while she bows her head to text her “husband” on the other side of a screen. Three alternating POVs: the fling who pried the crack, her churning inner voice, and the patron who treats her as a collectible yet hands her over with his own hands.

Ke Ning, a 25-year-old dance instructor, is the cold, locked-down introvert everyone sees on the outside — every reaction sealed inside her chest. But no one knows the film that loops in her head: being pinned down, being seen through, being slowly pried open in front of a crowd. Her boyfriend Zhou Zhao is a careless philanderer who never once read that dirty little fantasy of hers. Then, in the drunken backseat after a five-person KTV night, Zhou Zhao’s buddy Xu Yu opened her up through her skirt. Riding the liquor, she closed her eyes and, for the first time, let her body make the decision she could never say out loud. A week later, Xu Yu asked her out alone. This man — not as brawny as Zhou Zhao, but patient, lasting, someone who knew how to take a woman apart and reassemble her — used a private booth, an affair, and one filthy line after another to train her from clear-headed resistance all the way to begging on her knees. She grew more contradictory, wetter, more lost by the day — and all of it, kept from Zhou Zhao.

A city girl brings her current boyfriend back to the shopping district where she once dated her ex, B, using her old lover’s techniques and whispered secrets as fuel for flirtation the whole way. This Christmas Eve her period has come, so she can’t actually have sex — so she uses her hands, her breasts, her mouth, driving every line of “B loved it when I did this” straight into his heart. She leads, he seethes with jealousy, and jealousy only makes him harder — a night of soft NTR where she controls the tempo and he willingly sinks.

Dumped to her face by the first love she had dated for a year — who brought his new girlfriend along to gloat — twenty-five-year-old she cried until nightfall, went a whole day without eating, and wanted nothing but to drink herself blind. Dressed to bare her skin, she slipped into a corner of a bar and threw back beer after beer until she lost count, when a foreign stranger sharing her table asked why she was drinking alone. Drunkenness, heartbreak, and a self-destructive, vengeful recklessness pushed her step by step toward the hotel down the street — toward something her hand could not even close around. After a surrender that was half refusal and half consent, she realized there was no going back.

Lin Wan is twenty-nine, running a café across from the football pitch. In public she is the cool, beautiful, unapproachable proprietress, with suitors lined up to her door—but only she knows the truth: with the boyfriend she has dated for years, they do it just once a month, and her desire has long been ground raw through countless masturbating nights. At a friends’ dinner, the newly arrived foreign coach Mike sits across from her, and once the drinks are flowing the girls start goading him about his size and his history with Chinese girls. Mike grins and pulls out his phone to show them—and in that single glance, Lin Wan’s hands heat up faster than her head. Walking home the same way after the party, the tipsiness, the moonlight, and the hand he wraps around her waist drag her over the threshold she has never crossed in her life.

I went with my boyfriend back to his rural hometown in the north for the New Year, and at the class reunion I ran into his sworn enemy from middle school — that short, heavyset man who went to a diploma-mill college and never even landed a decent job. He stole glances at me across the table. At the second gathering my boyfriend drank himself unconscious, and I asked the man to help carry him to the bed in town. Late at night, with only the two of us left in the living room, he started with crude jokes; I stood up to send him off, but he grabbed me and pulled me back. Struggling, resisting, half-forced and half-yielding, I was dragged into the room right next to my boyfriend’s and thrown onto the bed — “what right does a loser have to land a girl like this” — and with humiliation and a size I refused to admit, he pried my body apart from my reason, inch by inch.

In her third year of grad school, she was crushed under her thesis and her advisor, prim and proper as a porcelain figure set on a windowsill. Until she met Xiaohang, a freshman from the sports college — nineteen, a javelin thrower, shoulders broad enough to block out an entire window. One party where everyone drank too much cracked that porcelain open, and a young, powerful body pushed in through the crack, slowly filling and prying open twenty-four years of hoarded restraint. Later came a tall exchange student from England. She went from a graduate student who nodded and smiled politely in the hallways to a woman who wanted nothing more than to be stuffed full by young men, growing more addicted the more cuckolded her men made her feel.

Her husband has been posted overseas for more than a year, and she keeps a hollow apartment in the Jiangnan region all to herself. After joining a local badminton club, she meets the “big brother” who organizes the group’s gatherings. Over the May Day holiday, an invitation to a villa retreat halfway up the mountain rips open the loneliness she has bottled up too long—a blindfold, stockings, one stranger after another. For the first time, she lets her body speak before her reason does.

The reception is over, and two married couples end up crammed into the same suite. He has long harbored a craving he could never say aloud — the desire to watch his small, delicate wife pulled into another man’s arms; and she, the shy one who earned her master’s degree and works in an office tower, discovers that night a beast hiding inside her body that even she doesn’t recognize. Three lines of sight cross in the dark: her mix of shame and wantonness, his pride and jealousy, and the breath of a stranger drawing near.

She and Xiao Wang had the kind of relationship neither of them ever put into words — once a week, then each of them went home alone. Until the night of her birthday, when Xiao Wang said, for the first time, that he wanted to write her name into the blank marked ‘girlfriend.’ Before either of them had figured out whether it counted as love, a couple named Brother Li and Xiao Man barged into their weekend, and one steam-filled hot-spring villa pushed everything ‘they could not put into words’ to the point where it had to be said out loud.