Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Jiang Xue, thirty-two, company cashier. Her husband blew up his stock account and her credit card is days from going on her credit report. She knocks on the finance director’s door and borrows thirty thousand of his own money, writes the IOU herself, and clears it in one payment the moment the year-end bonus lands. The month-end she tears that IOU up, she is the one who stays behind to reconcile, and she is the one who locks the finance room door. He tells her: walk out now and tomorrow nothing happened. She says, I am not here to pay money back.

Song Jia, twenty-eight, a sales consultant six months married, is three units short of her annual target. When Old Jin from Wenzhou comes to see the model unit the director has assigned someone else, so she walks into his office and says: I want this client. In the master bedroom of the model unit the curtain stays open, and she says, whether you buy is your business, and this is this. By year-end she is a manager, and on launch day she walks to the Maybach at the door herself.

Xu Wei, thirty-three, acting head nurse of Obstetrics at the municipal women and children’s hospital, eleven months in the job. The selection is scored by a panel of seven, two of them brought in from another hospital; the department director holds one vote, and losing only means going back to her old post and four hundred a month less. He says all of that to her face first — and then she locks the on-call room door herself. Eleven months of scheduling seventeen people, and the only empty square is her own. The day the roster becomes hers alone, she fills it with seven days of leave.

Ye Nan, thirty, is the first Party secretary posted down from a municipal bureau, eleven months into her village assignment. The road is built and the lamps are up; the county assessment team brings in a third party, draws sixty households at random, and the score comes back ninety-one, signed off that same day. At the celebration dinner she does not touch a drop, and after everyone leaves she bolts the second-floor meeting room door herself and climbs up on that long table herself. After that she goes up to the second floor every night. The loudspeaker pole at the village entrance was her choice, and the order of the three men was hers to set.

Shen Qing, thirty-six, has sat in the archive room of the municipal water group for ten years. Thirteen hundred people’s promotions, penalties and marriages have passed through her hands, and her own line has been one line of text for ten years. Her husband’s case closed in three days, and the deputy secretary of discipline inspection was left holding nothing on her at all. She went up to the ninth floor herself, undid her own shirt, and bent over in front of her husband’s file cabinet. After the resignation letter went in, the rules for the annual party were hers too: when each man is finished, she says Thank you, Leader.

Zheng Wan, thirty-four, a bank branch manager. Her husband drinks with clients till the small hours and comes home only to sleep. She goes alone to the foot spa across from the Wanda mall, and Xiao Liu, the twenty-six-year-old technician crouching at her feet, asks: “Sis, want to extend?” She extends. From her feet to her calves, from her calves to the tops of her thighs inside her stockings, from the private room downstairs to the soundproofed suite on the second floor. She starts going every week, then three times a week, and then she brings her husband along.

Seven names on the layoff list, and the seventh line she typed in herself. The next day the boss lady crossed that line out in red pen and wrote “renew for three years.” With the contract settled, the thirty-four-year-old HR manager pulled her leggings down to her knees in the factory gym, looked back and said: my contract is already approved — don’t think this is a trade for anything.

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.

Wang Qi, twenty-nine, a tour leader for a travel agency, 75E, one meter sixty-eight. Her husband is a middle school PE teacher: twice a month, three minutes a time. She takes a group to Bangkok, the whole group goes for Thai massage, and so does she. Ah Ti, a thirty-year-old Thai masseur, jams his knee in and spreads her legs apart. The next day she goes back to the shop on her own and tells the front desk: I want the special. On day four, with her group singing next door, she gets fucked front and back by two masseurs at once in a private room upstairs.

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.

Luo Ya, a thirty-two-year-old history teacher, is married to a tax clerk so by-the-book he’s by-the-book in bed too. A bad back walks her into a blind-massage shop, where the male masseur Old Sun is blind, his hands unerring. One line—“I can’t see, you can take it off”—presses her, step by step, onto that pink massage table. Extra time, requesting him by name, the lights blazing over the mirror—she sinks deeper and deeper, until the glint in the gap of the door curtain.

Feng Chuchu, thirty-three, regional manager at a multinational, skirt suit and black stockings, sees her university-lecturer husband fewer than sixty days a year. Her flight is delayed three hours, and the masseur in the VIP lounge says: Your flight has been delayed. I can help you relax. Fifteen minutes on the neck and shoulders is free; a private room is two ninety-eight. She says: Full body. When the boarding call sounds, she is on her knees on the massage table, stockings torn open, and she does not stop.

Han Miaomiao, a kindergarten teacher of twenty-seven, buys a 12,800-yuan pre-wedding body package thirty-one days before her wedding. The male therapist, Ah Wei, says: Bride, the whole body has to be done. The first time his hand stops at the top of her thigh, the second time his fingers go into her, the third time she asks for the intimate care herself. The day before the wedding, the dress hangs on the wall of room three, and she kneels on the massage table and says: shoot it inside. The next day, walking the red carpet, what she thinks of is the sweet almond scent of room three.

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.

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.”

Fresh out of college and into her first office job, petite Lin Wan keeps getting dragged by her towering, 1.92-meter platonic best friend Zhou Lang into his crew of basketball buddies. One dinner, buzzed on drink, Zhou Lang and his friend Jiang Hang float a half-joking dare — go big tonight. Nobody called it off first; the liquor and the unspoken understanding pushed the three of them into a private lounge booth, and a boundary none of them named yet all three understood began, just like that, from a single joke.

Married six years, Jiang Zhi and Su Yan — a couple of engineers — knew each other so thoroughly that the bedroom had gone lukewarm. It was Su Yan who first spoke the thought aloud in the dead of night: she wanted a man she didn’t know to take her roughly, just once; she wanted to be dominated and humiliated right under her husband’s gaze; she wanted a taste of total loss of control. Jiang Zhi wasn’t angry — he was aroused instead. So, like drafting an engineering plan, they talked the whole “stranger bull” domination game through line by line: a safe word, hard limits, him present the entire time to watch but never intervene, her free to stop at any moment. From a small private adult circle online he picked a man who was solidly built, knew where the line was, and was hard enough. They met at a very well soundproofed apartment on the city’s edge. All night Su Yan stayed lucid — lucidly half-yielding, lucidly humiliated pressed against the floor-to-ceiling window, lucidly driven speechless, filled with his release, filled to the brim; and lucidly savoring that contradictory pleasure of reason abdicating while the body defected first. And Jiang Zhi sat in the dark, jealous to the point of burning and aroused to the point of trembling, watching the wife he loved so deeply bloom, beneath another man, into a flower he had never seen before.

She has been a professional dancer for over a decade, poised and self-contained onstage, yet offstage she hides a fierce exhibitionist streak — one button of her practice leotard deliberately left undone, rehearsing bare underneath, swaying in black lace lingerie before the mirror, fantasizing that someone in the building across the street is holding binoculars. Then, in the rehearsal hall one late night, behind that door left ajar, a man really is standing there — a man she has secretly longed to have watch her. Being watched becomes being taken; shame becomes the fiercest climax of her life. Alternating points of view: the man who catches her, the inner self fracturing beneath her decorous shell, and the gaze that has always lingered in the dark.

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.

Lin Man is the front-office manager of an upscale hotel — born in ’98, one meter seventy, fifty-two kilos, the kind of ice-cool woman who commands a lobby: uniform pressed sharp, smile held in check, not a single strand of hair out of place. But only she knows that on the deep overnight shifts, once the whole floor falls quiet, she slips down to the far end of a corridor no camera covers and, leaning against the cold wall, does something that would make no one recognize the daytime her. She hid this secret craving for half a year — until the patrolling security guard caught her in the blind spot. Three alternating POVs: the guard who takes over everything from behind, the inner Lin Man who is caught yet only sinks deeper, and her flawless, ice-cold professional self clinging to its last shred of composure before it collapses.