Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Four years married, and her husband hasn’t touched her in three months. Chi Yue, a buttoned-up back-office clerk at an insurance company, has always played it safe, until her coworker Jiang Man offers to take her out to play with men. On the first night Wang Ye only holds her while she sleeps; the second time, she’s the one who says no condom. Rope, a collar, anal: she learns them one by one, until the night she pushes open a hotel room door to find three men waiting, and, flushed red, she says: “Go ahead.”

Feng Yuwei, twenty-nine, product manager, with legs the whole office talks about. One year into her marriage, her programmer husband is gentle and sweet: six minutes, fourteen times, not a single orgasm. Then on an anonymous app, someone called K sends one line: Aren’t you the one who wants to be controlled. From then on, every morning at seven, she gets a task: no panties to work, a vibrator inside her through meetings, a soaked chair at the quarterly review right in front of the CEO. She has never seen K’s face, yet K starts telling her how to fuck her own husband. Then a package arrives at her home. Signed for by: Zhou Yi.

Qin Lan, thirty-three, head nurse at a top-tier hospital, 85G. Her husband is an attending surgeon: once a month, three minutes. In the night-shift break room she stumbles onto a forum: Old Zhou, a retired PE teacher, takes in married women as bitches, lives by rules, keeps a notebook. The interview is ten minutes on her knees before she’s sent away, and back in her car she tears right through her pantyhose. From then on it’s two hours every Wednesday: call him Master, report before every shower, cut open the pantyhose under her nurse’s uniform and kneel by the exam table swallowing in time with her heartbeat. The notebook grows thicker and thicker. One observer comes, then another.

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.

Her husband gambled and ran, and the hot pot restaurant had six days until the rent was due. Xiao Chen, the kitchen supervisor, put up a hundred thousand to save it, with one condition: from now on, in this restaurant, you do what I say. House rule one: after close, nothing under the apron. Rule two: no panties in the restaurant. Rule three would be written the day Lao Zhao came back. The thirty-eight-year-old boss lady lay face down on the stainless steel counter, the supplier’s delivery slip still crumpled in her hand.

Luo Xiao, thirty, runs an animal hospital; long legs from the gym, a husband who is a deputy section chief and hasn’t once gotten her there in two years. The dog trainer she hired to teach a course at her hospital calls her up on stage, buckles a collar on her, and uses her for the demo. After class she stays on the training floor to learn sit, down, roll over — do it right and the reward is one finger. The tag is engraved Xiaoxiao. Behind a park bench he tells her to bark, and she does.

Eight months divorced, her ex-husband stood outside the civil affairs bureau and said she was like a plank of wood in bed. Wu Nan, twenty-seven, caught the eye of gallery owner Ji Lan, who liked her legs. The first Friday was only shaving, a bath, and photos. The second Friday she put on a collar engraved with her name, ate from a bowl, slept in a dog bed, the master took her from behind while the mistress sat on her face, and the two of them kissed over her. On the day the gallery opened she stood in the middle of the hall in a transparent raincoat, the only living piece among thirty-seven works.

With her husband posted to Saudi Arabia for six months, she is the only one who can keep an eye on the renovation of 1602 next door. On day one the foreman, Old Li, says: you do what I say. Hauling bricks, serving water, squatting to hold a level, she does it all in her stockings. On day eight, in a bathroom with no door yet, he says two words: kneel down. On completion day she is cable-tied to the newly installed Jomoo shower bar while four workers line up for the inspection. Her husband comes home, gives the bar a tug, and says: solid.

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.

By day she is the most flawless project manager in the cubicle rows, measured in speech, immaculate in makeup; deep at night she carries out a stranger’s commands one by one, holding her own panties in her mouth for the camera, waiting for a single cold word of reward from him. Cyber-domination tames her bit by bit, until one day she books a cross-city ticket and walks into that rented flat — the door shuts, her clothes are torn off, a leather collar is buckled around the back of her neck, and a leash tows her crawling across the floor. Three points of view take turns telling this descent that spreads from the screen into the flesh: how he turns a single declaration into a panting bitch, how her body mutinies out of shame before reason can catch up, and how that respectable daytime self keeps remembering the ring of marks on the back of her neck in the meeting room.

By day she is a proposal designer at a design firm — soft-spoken, agonizing for half an afternoon over the color palette of a slide deck, the most well-behaved office girl anyone could imagine. Only a very few know that at her core she is an extreme submissive who treats obedience as salvation. She agrees to meet a “Master” she has only ever chatted with online and seen two or three times, at his home, assuming it will be nothing more than a private game behind a closed door between the two of them. She puts on newly bought stockings and washes herself spotless before ringing the bell. The instant the door opens she freezes on the spot — inside, besides her Master, sits a married couple, his close friends, three pairs of eyes landing on her all at once. She had imagined many ways of being trained, but never that the words “in front of everyone” would come down on her so suddenly. That night, under four watching gazes, she does an M-shaped squat, one leg sheathed in flesh-toned stockings and the other in black; she is struck with a slipper, made to squat again in heels, filmed at her most disgraceful — until a nosebleed seeps out. And at the end, before every watching eye, she is pressed down in the open by her Master, filled, poured into all the way to the deepest place. At the very peak where shame burns hottest, she finds a pleasure she has never tasted — one that almost burns her to ash.

By day she is the kind of woman in the office cubicle who follows every rule, who keeps her voice so low no one remembers it, and no one can tell she keeps a beast inside her that has been starving for a very long time. For most of a year she lurked in a small online circle you could only enter if a trusted friend vouched for you, watching others play, listening to others tell it, hungrier the more she watched, until at last she typed out the line herself: she wanted a stranger to recognize her outdoors, in front of whoever might pass by, and grind her down to the lowest place. He told her to come in a black dress, over-the-knee black stockings, and little leather shoes, and made that outfit itself the signal: to recognize it was to accept her nod, to accept the intensity she was handing over. That evening she walked into the old park in the south of the city, her heart pounding as if it would leap out of her throat. A stranger fiercer and heavier than she had imagined rose from the far end of a bench and locked his eyes on her shoes at once, and from that step the signal took effect, the game began, and she knew perfectly well that she was the one who had come knocking.

Three years married, I saved my most obedient face for my husband and hid my hungriest self inside my phone. That autumn, my best friend A said she wanted to take me to a neighboring-province city called Yunting, to meet four men she had known online for a long time, and play for three days. I said yes so fast it startled even me. Over those three days I stood at the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling window and stripped naked facing the whole commercial street; I wore a collar and a ball gag while A walked me around the room on a leash; a charging cable whipped my back red, and one hand clamped my throat while he came inside me at the deepest point; in a secluded restroom stall in a park I was made to swallow him, trembling as I sent photos to the man waiting far away for my reply, then frantically recalling them. On the last night, four men lined up and filled me one after another while A held up her phone and recorded everything. These were three days when, behind my husband’s back, I gave myself away completely — reason kept shouting stop, and my body kept surrendering. All adults, all agreed in advance, a willing fall.

In her parents’ eyes she is the pure, well-behaved girl raised in the palms of two families who have been close for generations — a grown woman now at university, flawless. But only the boy she has known since childhood knows the truth: three meetings, each one deeper than the last, until she willingly hands herself over and kneels as his rabbit, his alone. The red qipao on Lunar New Year’s Eve, one afternoon of humiliation that spun out of control, right up to the day she buys rabbit ears and a collar herself and stands before the floor-to-ceiling window. This is the ruin no one else ever sees, hidden beneath the pure little shell.

The private training history of two adult university students — starting with a collar, a maid outfit, and one escalation into blindfolds and bound wrists, she sinks deeper and deeper into shame and submission. Two years later, a third person joins them in the bedroom, and she becomes their shared prey. Her POV is a confession both bashful and wanton, his POV is a possessiveness that ratchets up inch by inch, and the third man’s POV is the greed of an intruder.

At forty, she had lived her marriage as a room where the light was never switched on. Then the tall stranger at the gym, with eyes that saw straight through her, hauled her up out of the chair she had sat withering in for ten years—her first affair, larger in size and in patience than anything she had imagined. Afterward she ran into a rugby player six years younger, one metre ninety tall, and every rule between an older woman and a younger man was rewritten from scratch: this time, he was the one who would teach her. A mature woman’s first-person confession—about the emptiness, the hunger, and the afternoons that finally left her full.