Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Thirty-one-year-old Su Wan, a Chinese language instructor at the county workers’ spare-time college, had been passed over for a mid-level title for three years. She deliberately left that button undone, locked the principal’s office door, and made a deal with him: only saying “red pen” meant a real stop—every other “no” was part of the act. Being forced, having no choice—that was the script she wrote for herself. From the principal’s sofa to the section chief’s back seat, then to Room 1806 at the Jinjiang Hotel, she kept crying “no” all the way while delivering herself to their doors.

Zhou Meng, a twenty-seven-year-old teller at a rural commercial bank, asked one question through the glass: Boss Cao, how much does that money lose you each year sitting in a demand account? Thirty million came in, and her quota was done twenty days early. That day she drove herself up the mountain and locked the door of the tin shack from the inside: Today I’m the one who slides the bolt in, not you.

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.

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.

Thirty-eight, partner at an accounting firm, husband a surgeon who is home two nights a week. Every Wednesday at seven the math tutor comes; at nine the lesson ends, the boy is collected, and two people are left in the apartment. She laid it out flat: the lessons go on, the money stays at the original rate, and you can stop any time you want. Nine months, twenty-one thousand six hundred, not a cent more. The day the account was settled in full was the day she threw the deadbolt.

Five years married, and my husband cannot even change a bulb; the wiring in this apartment breaks down twice a month. The man who comes to fix it is his card partner, the electrician from the next entryway, forty-five, hands full of calluses. The third time the breaker went, I was the one who pulled it, and I went downstairs in nothing but a nightdress and knocked on his door. After that the times, the rooms, even the day my husband was home, were all picked by me.

Jiang Yue is thirty-three, six years a full-time wife, and does not say three hundred words in a day. At the Mid-Autumn dinner, in the half hour her husband is downstairs buying drink, she walks over and straddles her husband’s old boss, points at the wedding photo on the wall and says: look at that and fuck me. After that, she picks which day of the week she goes to his building. She sets the time.

Married a year. Her husband runs a courier station and hauls parcels till past midnight every night. Lin Shan is twenty-seven, a course consultant at a vocational training school; the group leader post was decided by the school affairs committee on September receipts, passed on Thursday, the announcement already queued. For eight hundred eighty she rented ten hours at a recording studio off campus. The owner is fifty-seven, minds the machines and doesn’t teach, and doesn’t know a single person where she works. The first time, she undid her own buttons.

Zhou Yu, twenty-nine, contract clerk at the district court, her bar certificate locked in a drawer for two years. Getting on staff comes down to one written exam in April, and nobody can lend her a hand. And it is the Political Department that sends her to compile the oral history of Yan Song, a judge two years retired: an apartment full of old case files, and his robe hanging in the wardrobe. The first time, she was the one who put the robe on and climbed on top of him.

Song Jia, twenty-eight, a sales consultant six months married, is three units short of her annual target. When Old Jin from Wenzhou comes to see the model unit the director has assigned someone else, so she walks into his office and says: I want this client. In the master bedroom of the model unit the curtain stays open, and she says, whether you buy is your business, and this is this. By year-end she is a manager, and on launch day she walks to the Maybach at the door herself.

Zheng Wan, thirty-four, a bank branch manager. Her husband drinks with clients till the small hours and comes home only to sleep. She goes alone to the foot spa across from the Wanda mall, and Xiao Liu, the twenty-six-year-old technician crouching at her feet, asks: “Sis, want to extend?” She extends. From her feet to her calves, from her calves to the tops of her thighs inside her stockings, from the private room downstairs to the soundproofed suite on the second floor. She starts going every week, then three times a week, and then she brings her husband along.

Han Jing, thirty-five, dean of studies at a primary school, ten years married to Wang Lei, who sells building materials. Their life is so good it has gone dead. Then he finds the novel she hid inside her lesson plans and asks whether this is how she wants to be treated. Belt, kneeling pad, collar, the rules go up one at a time, and then he says he wants other people to see how well he has trained her. At a business dinner she is under the table sucking off two of his partners while, above her, he signs a one point four million contract.

My husband’s startup owed the chairman three million, and the guarantor line on the loan agreement carried my name. Chairman Shao spoke slowly and never raised his voice. He said: Kneel, and hand me the schedule. From that day on, every morning at seven fifty I reported to the inner room first: strip, kneel, get inspected by his fingers. He sent a photo of me face down on the carpet to my husband, and my husband replied: That’s good. The day the debt was cleared, he gave me the pen.

Luo Ya, a thirty-two-year-old history teacher, is married to a tax clerk so by-the-book he’s by-the-book in bed too. A bad back walks her into a blind-massage shop, where the male masseur Old Sun is blind, his hands unerring. One line—“I can’t see, you can take it off”—presses her, step by step, onto that pink massage table. Extra time, requesting him by name, the lights blazing over the mirror—she sinks deeper and deeper, until the glint in the gap of the door curtain.

Feng Chuchu, thirty-three, regional manager at a multinational, skirt suit and black stockings, sees her university-lecturer husband fewer than sixty days a year. Her flight is delayed three hours, and the masseur in the VIP lounge says: Your flight has been delayed. I can help you relax. Fifteen minutes on the neck and shoulders is free; a private room is two ninety-eight. She says: Full body. When the boarding call sounds, she is on her knees on the massage table, stockings torn open, and she does not stop.

At the office she is the flawless assistant to the project lead, always wearing a perfectly composed face; only he knows that this slight little body secretly craves his astonishing size. The line between superior and subordinate that must never be crossed is trampled underfoot by the two of them again and again, trampled into a friends-with-benefits arrangement neither of them can quit. Kneeling at his feet in her stockings, the obedience she could never learn in the office she gives to him alone.