Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Twenty-year-old Pei Rui lost a year retaking her college entrance exam, still can’t breathe in the pool as a freshman, and her boyfriend in the next city hasn’t touched her in two months. Kofi, a Ghanaian classmate in her major, teaches her at the lane rope to tuck her chin and breathe, and once they add each other on WeChat, the chats get filthier and filthier. One Saturday morning in the empty new pool, he asks her under the water, “Can I?” and she presses his hand down herself.

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.

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.

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.

165cm, 60kg, 80H — Yao Yan is one of the busiest veteran shoot models in the scene, her skin luminously pale, her heavy breasts capable of straining any tube top past its limit; they are the asset she carries into every studio, the one thing that never loses her a booking. Demure on the surface, wildly the opposite in private, she is opened up inch by inch, starting the evening a shoot wraps, by a patron who spends without flinching: from cash slipped into her bag at the dinner table, to the first time her chest is kneaded open through a sports bra in the car, to becoming his acknowledged mistress, flown across the world on his arm — until she leads her own best friend into the bed of a threesome with her own hands. Three chapters trace how a woman who treats her body as capital sinks, step by step, through money, through the pleasure of being drawn out, through the shame of being shared — until the man who first opened her returns to her city, treats her as a gift ripened to perfection, and passes her to two of his friends. Three alternating points of view: the patron’s calculation and control, her own steady defeat between reason and flesh, and the greed of the man she is shared with, watching from the far bank.

To everyone she meets, she’s the good girl — plain, quiet, soft-spoken to a fault. But only one man knows the kind of beast that’s been starving beneath that blank-page surface. Three years ago, an ex-boyfriend so dominant he bordered on tyrannical took the naïve version of her apart inch by inch and trained her into a slut who couldn’t live without being handled roughly: mouth, ropes, outdoors, exhibition — she gave him all of her firsts. After they broke up, she found a gentle, considerate new boyfriend, but the gentler he was the emptier she felt, the more considerate the thirstier she grew. So again and again she went behind her new boyfriend’s back and crawled back into her ex’s bed — slapped, spanked, filled inside — until one act of cheating that nearly got exposed in the stairwell finally let the beast all the way out.

For the three days her husband is away on business, a stranger behind a sunglasses avatar invites her to the ninth floor of an old factory district to shoot artistic swimsuit photos. She says it is only photos, but beyond the lens her body betrays that ring a step ahead of her.

A young language teacher born in ’99, raised under an iron-strict upbringing, a blank page before marriage — the most daring thing in her college years was holding hands. Two years into the marriage, her husband is so busy he treats her like air, and she can only feed her own hunger with toys that keep getting bigger. An inter-school teaching seminar leads her to add a fellow male teacher on WeChat, and over two weeks of chatting they only grow closer. On the day he is on duty with his family away, he invites her over — and when her husband, at a dinner banquet, tells her to stay safe, she is in fact already driving to his place.