Write your fantasy,
make it real.

One October weekend, she did her wifely duty for the husband she was quietly at war with, only to be publicly slighted at his family’s tea table. Out of spite, she messaged the foreign man. Early the next morning she pulled on workout clothes, took the long way to buy a box of large-size things, and walked into his empty house—the whole family had left for Diwali, leaving him alone. He liked her with the smell of sweat on her; he pinned her to the couch, stroked, tested, entered. He poured the white liquid from the condom into his palm, mixed it with tanning oil, and spread it over her belly and her whole body, saying it would keep her skin supple. Coated in oil that smelled of him, she lay on the rooftop to sunbathe, and before the sun went down she took him to the very last drop and asked him a question.

Su Wei is the kind of wife everyone considers the most proper. One afternoon she goes alone to a photo studio converted from an old warehouse for a private shoot. The man behind the lens is called A-Wei — low voice, soft words. One line, “Your other half will never know,” pushes her past the first line of defense. From the first mouthful she swallows to the sudden phone call from her husband on an abandoned floor, she holds only one boundary the whole way — she will never let him come inside her. But it is that very line that finally breaks and slips loose. On the way home she detours to the docks, letting the river wind blow away the scent on her that does not belong to home.

Zhou Min is in her early thirties: two kids, a job that grinds a person dull, a husband who has gone a little soft around the middle. Her days feel like being pressed slowly into warm water and simmered. At the tenth-anniversary reunion for her graduating class, she runs into Aqiao, her closest male bestie from back then — the one who understood every one of her silences. After the party the two of them slip away from the crowd and drink until they are tipsy, and years of unsaid words and long-untouched bodies loosen all at once. That night he opens a place on her that no one had ever touched, and out of the pain surfaces a weightlessness and release she had never known. She flees home, swears never to see him again, and then replays it over and over on the high-speed train. This year the holiday came early; she went back to her parents’ place alone, and arranged to meet him a few more times. Until her husband spots a small scorch mark, burned by cigarette ash, on the underwear she had taken off.

On a rainy night, I was driving my buddy’s wife, Lin Lan, back to her place, but the road was cut off halfway. The umbrella couldn’t hold off the slanting rain, and the nearest door was my little rented room. The moment she leaned in on her own, a line that should never have been crossed had already loosened between our lips and teeth. Later she smiled and climbed on top, telling me to grab a condom — that was the one layer still between us. But panting, she said she wanted to try it bare, said she wanted that direct heat driving all the way deep, flesh pressed to flesh. The third time, pressed on top of my buddy’s wife, I stripped that thin barrier away completely and poured myself deep inside.

He figures he is holding a winning hand — the face, the mouth, the patience to coax anyone. From the summer he met his first girl at driving school, he glides effortlessly between relationships: the flirting, the promises, the cheating, and a tacit no-strings arrangement he keeps on the side. This is the confession of a womanizer, and also the private history of the women he stirred up — women who knew they were playing with fire and fell in anyway. It was not that they never saw through him. Their bodies simply chose one step ahead of their minds.

At twenty-four, fresh out of college, I joined the company on a project and was still practically a virgin at everything. The archivist who sat across from me, Chen-jie, was four years older than me, gentle, with a steady long-distance boyfriend. A bit of horsing around in the office drew us close, the tension fermenting little by little in the empty office during overtime, until one deserted lunch break she led me, taught me, and became my first. When the project ended we scattered to different cities, and neither of us could quit the other—one meeting a month, like an illness neither of us was willing to wake from.