Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Guan Xiaoman is twenty-seven, from the Northeast, three years streaming womenswear. Her husband Fang Yu sells cars and keeps a nail-salon girl named Tingting hidden in his phone. She doesn’t make a scene. She opens a late show, and her top gifter, “Beifeng,” drops ten sports cars in a row and DMs three words: Inspect in person. She writes back: I don’t want the cars. I want to see the man, and I set the price. The price isn’t money; it’s nine seconds of sign-off suona, and when the bell rings everyone goes home. In a showroom at the building-materials mall, she sits on a sintered-stone vanity and pitches the goods in her broadcast voice. The second time, the door isn’t locked, and her husband is standing in it.

Qi Ran is thirty-three and sells medical devices; her husband Liu Chong is a construction supervisor, and for two years he has made her send a photo of her hotel door plate before eleven every night. A storm hits Xi’an, the company botches the booking, and she ends up sharing a twin room with Xiang Dong, the new colleague on secondment. She sets one rule: I go back to that bed, you stop. The first night she photographs the door plate and doesn’t send it. The second night her husband video-calls; she answers, camera pointed at the ceiling. When the trip ends he goes through her phone at the airport: six shots of 1409 in the album.

Qin Yutong, thirty-five, runs a bookstore. Strictly raised, she never takes off the sandalwood prayer beads her grandmother left her. Divorced five years, she visits her ex-husband once a year, on his birthday, to bring a cake. This year she put the prayer beads in her bag. On her carpenter ex-husband’s elm workbench she argues every step with her grandmother while the beads rattle in the bag to his rhythm. Her current husband sees her location, does not call, and simply buys a new string of beads and lays it on her pillow. She goes wearing that string, does it wearing that string, the string breaks, and of eighteen beads she picks up seventeen.

Five days and four nights in Sanya. Xue Hong, thirty-six, spent four days in meetings on the balcony, and Qin Yue, twenty-eight, spent four days by the pool being watched by A-Hai, the twenty-four-year-old lifeguard. She is good to her husband, he is even better to her, he just never looks at her. She put on her sunglasses and asked A-Hai what time he got off, then picked the lounger right under her husband’s balcony. Sunglasses on, keep going; sunglasses off, stop. On the flight home, her husband put his hand on her knee, and she took the sunglasses off.

Wen Shuyao, thirty-two, restores ancient books. Six months after spinal surgery, her husband Sheng Lang still cannot make love to her. He suggests his oldest friend Gu Yihang: the best man who handed over the ring at their wedding, the surgeon who stitched him closed. She refuses three times. The fourth time, she takes off her wedding ring herself and sets it on the nightstand. Ring on the nightstand, he comes in; ring on her hand, nobody does. Through the wall, her husband listens to her recite the Book of Odes. The scar aches. Below it, he is hard.

Lan Zhi, thirty-one, a contracts assistant at a law firm, hears her husband Qi Ming say in bed that he wants to watch her with another man. The next day she produces a five-page, seven-clause Performance Agreement: Party B qualifications, Party C’s seat, ownership of the recordings, the Clause Seven termination clause, nothing left out. Qin Ye, a personal trainer at her gym, is interviewed like a supplier and signs under Clause Seven. Thirty days, thirty rows of signatures, and the husband retreats from the chair to the lobby, until he ends up as “Party C (Informed Party).” The day it expires, she brings out the renewal.

Ji Tang, a florist, is twenty-nine. Her husband Wu Feng drives a truck and is away four days a week. The spare key lives across the hall with Lao Xue, a forty-five-year-old man who has fixed locks for twenty-two years and lives alone. The night she forgot her key she went over to get it, and Lao Xue came down to fix the lock at her shop and said a locksmith can hear loose from tight. From then on the brass hook on the door frame became a rule nobody said out loud: key on the hook, he comes in; key in the drawer, he opens his own door. Until her husband changed his route to come home on Wednesdays.

At the college reunion Li Xiangdong has only two drinks, and stone sober he bets a bottle of Macallan against his old roommate Nie Chuan: “Three dates with my wife and you won’t lay a finger on her.” Du Xiaoran is thirty, teaches English to adults, and tells bad jokes when she’s nervous. The next morning she messages Nie Chuan herself: bet, date one, Wednesday, you pick the place. The whisky sits unopened on top of the fridge, and the rule is hers: the game ends only when she says “I’m drinking this bottle.” She lets him all three times, so by her rules she won. The trouble is she finds she doesn’t want to stop.

A-Yuan is thirty-one, Tian-Tian is thirty, married eight years. In junior year, in his rented single room, she said “I want the elephant,” and neither of them knew how to 69; it took six tries before he got inside, and she told him, “I can’t let you have me too easily.” Eight years later, on the last day of a trip, the alarm goes off and she does not stop; she shakes her head three times before spreading her legs, and it is eighteen minutes after the alarm when they finish. Back home she is unusually eager: lifting her top to feed him in the morning, lying on the bed at night waiting for him to grind against her, her voice shaking when the delivery man knocks. On Friday, she has a new toy.

Nine years into their marriage, Zhou Yu hid an absurd “cuckold manifesto” under the takeout menus on the fridge door and never found the nerve to bring it up. Lin Wan found it first — and went through it line by line with the red pen she uses to edit manuscripts. Some points she cursed, some she struck out, some she marked “open to discussion.” That night they talked about sex for the first time in their lives, set three rules, and invited to dinner the older classmate she never quite said no to in college.

Her husband keeps scrolling through those forum posts about taking a wife while she sleeps. Lu Yao reads one and says only this: I won’t sleep. I’ll pretend. She sips a Long Island iced tea with no alcohol in it and plays drunk, lies on a hotel bed with a black silk scarf over her eyes, and sets a safe word: “thirsty.” A stranger in a white cap walks through the door. He knows she’s awake. But he has to treat her as if she’s asleep.

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.

Bai Jing, thirty-eight, is a regional manager at a foreign company, single, and practically lives in hotels. In a hotel gym in Lisbon she meets an American named Marcus. One drink, one hand around her waist, and a current runs from her ear down to the soles of her feet; she gives herself to him that same night. From then on, the first thing she checks on every business trip is the gym, until she meets Qi Ze, a younger man, six foot six, who squats two hundred twenty kilos and opens his mouth to say “older pussy cools the fire.”

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.”

Fan Jing is thirty, a graphic designer so quiet at work that her colleagues call her “Silent Mode.” Living alone on the fourth floor of an old apartment block, she goes from sitting by an open window with no bra, to taking out the trash at night with nothing under her skirt, to ordering a seventeen-centimeter anal bead stick online. One Friday near midnight, she stands at the curb with it buried inside her, and the man across the street watches her for ten minutes. Then he starts walking toward her.

Ruan Li is thirty-three, an English tutor for grad-school entrance exams, in a flat marriage to a husband who is always on the road. He Chuan was once her one-on-one student—twenty-one, a college junior—and nothing happened during those lessons; the chats just got dirtier afterward. The summer he graduates at twenty-three, he asks her to dinner, and she goes knowing exactly what it means. Four times in one night. Then her husband leaves on another trip, and at eight on Friday morning a message lights up her phone: Free tonight?

Zhong Ke is thirty-five, the section chief everyone at the Japan branch fears: baggy sweaters, long skirts, and a vocabulary that mostly consists of one word: redo. On the second glass at the Osaka celebration drinks, her twenty-five-year-old subordinate Yi Chen asks her cup size. She says D. He doesn’t believe her. She says: if you don’t believe me, come feel for yourself. At eleven that night, wearing nothing but a hotel yukata, she takes the stairs up to the twelfth floor.

Six years into their marriage, every time they were in bed, He Yu asked about her ex. Then one night Wen Ning switched off the light and said: You’ve always wanted to know, so I’ll let you see it with your own eyes. She booked two adjoining rooms, set up the camera herself, sat her husband next door with headphones on, and went to open the door for her ex.

Pilates instructor Qiao Tang has spent a year posting faceless photos on a burner account, and one follower named A-Shu has always called her “sis.” The night her husband Zhou Xiao finds the DMs, he isn’t angry. He’s hard. They set three rules: A-Shu stays inside the phone. No meeting. No faces. Friday night at eleven, she presses and holds the record button.

Ten years married, A-Lan is thirty-two and has started turning her back to Lao Song in bed. Alone in Dongguan, Lao Song spent a whole summer reading hotwife novels, then came home and said into the dark: go out and meet someone from the internet. She said yes, and not because he begged. She wanted to know what she looked like in another man’s eyes. An internet café, a KTV, room 1207 at the Vienna Hotel, and she texts her husband one line at a time. Before going up she sets one rule: both phones off. At dawn she comes home and says nothing happened. He says he doesn’t care about the answer.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, ten years married. Last month she met A-Kai, a gym trainer she had been chatting with on a forum for three months, and came home to tell her husband about it in bed, over and over, until she got to “He’s thicker than you” and he was hard. This time he wants to join by video call. She agrees, on two conditions: no face, no recording. But when she holds the phone up to the place where they are joined herself, and then turns the camera to her own face, whose rules they were no longer matters.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, ten years married. This time what he wants is: she pretends to sleep, and the other man, A-Kai, slips into the room in the middle of the night. She sets the rules, and one “lights on” stops everyone. Ji Hotel, room 1207, room 1210 diagonally across the hall; the lights go out, and a black shape comes in through the crack of the door. She was never asleep, and the moment he pressed down on her she panicked for real: one punch, and Lao Song’s nose was pouring blood. Lights on, three people frozen for half an hour. Then it was she who said it: go on, him first, leave the lights on.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, married ten years. Last summer, during the plant’s heat leave, Lao Song arranged A-Feng for her on a forum, a man from across town: video the whole time, condom on, no WeChat, dates set by him. One year and one month later, the tenth time. Express hotel, room 3012. She walks the eight hundred meters over in nothing but a thong, and A-Feng licks her three times over with spit, jelly, and lube, and doesn’t stop when the delivery guy knocks. Afterward, Lao Song types a question mark after the tenth line in his notes.

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.