Write your fantasy,
make it real.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Six years married, she is a bridesmaid at an old classmate’s wedding, and the best man is Zhou Kai, the one who chased her all through university and never got a single sentence out. Her husband drinks himself under the table and gets hauled up to the room. She has had two glasses and is completely sober. The second the elevator doors close, she is the one who presses the red stop, and she pulls his hand up under the bridesmaid dress: back then you did not dare — do you dare now.

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.

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.