Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Almost ten years married, and all that was left in our bed was dirty talk neither of us took seriously anymore — “let Lei fuck you,” “let Qiang join in too.” Until one day I clocked off early and came home without a word. The iron gate swung open, and the sounds inside turned those words, one by one, into something real. I never went in. I stood in the stairwell with the door half-open and listened to the whole thing: they asked her where to come today, she said not inside, and then came a sobbing I had never once made her make, muffled grunts of it being poured in, the sound of water splashing on the floor. I closed the door, went downstairs to smoke, and waited until eight to call her and say I was almost home.

Late summer, alone, she took on that rarely-walked wild mountain trail with nothing but her phone and one bottle of water. When the bottle rolled off the slope, when she got lost, when her throat burned with thirst, a foreign man with fluent Mandarin pulled a water bladder from his pack and handed it over. Half a head shorter than her, not exactly built, yet his eyes kept sliding down below her chest. One bet after another, from racing up the slope to “let me get a good look at your ass” — she is a married woman, but in the mountain wind her body betrays her inch by inch. Pure exposure and teasing, soaked through, yet never once crossing that final line.

He never hid the fact that he was a cuckold in the truest sense — in bed he insisted she tell him about the other man, B, insisted she replicate onto his own body, exactly, every single thing she had ever done for B. Home after half a month away on business, the first thing he wanted was for her to lather him in body wash and give him a titjob while she talked about “showering with B”; a whole cleavage full of the cum he had saved up for two weeks. Then he wanted her to give him a footjob in stockings, wanted her to take him to the very hotel where she and B had first gotten a room, and reenact that whole night from foreplay to position. She played along, teased him, now and then deliberately said B was better, watching jealousy make him rougher — shame and control burning in her at the very same time.

Gu Zhiwei — the aloof campus beauty of the art academy, student council vice-president and class rep — is, in public, the model good girl who always keeps her knees pressed together and her spine ramrod straight. In private, she has turned exhibitionism and self-bondage into an addiction she cannot stop. One secret solo session on the dorm balcony at midnight gives her, for the first time, the out-of-control thrill of a heartbeat racing to the edge of suffocation. On the day of the final movement-class assessment, she squeezes into a leotard a size too small, hides a remote-controlled bullet vibrator inside her body, and bets her scholarship on getting through the whole dance while holding it in. After the assessment, an even more reckless plan takes shape in her mind — a single handcuff, a vibrator that ramps up on its own, the deserted men’s room in the empty arts building. It is only when she hears the gears click shut that she realizes she has made one fatal mistake.

Just past five foot seven, slender and long-limbed, she thought her love with J was steady and ordinary. Until the first time that hemp rope cut into her flesh — the night she was bound kneeling, face pressed to the grass, brutally taken from behind — it opened a door in her that could never close again. The whip, the clamps, the razor, being displayed, being shared: each fall deeper than the last. She despised her own baseness even as she grew unable to live without those shameless, violent waves of climax that came only when she was bound. It was a secret that belonged to the two of them alone — until that door swung open, and two strangers were standing behind it.

She had a boyfriend of two years, yet the senior from the department next door had chased her for a whole semester, fully aware she was already spoken for. She agreed to see him one last time after class—just a hug, to let him give up. In a secluded corner of the park, a body that pressed closer and grew harder against her tore her promise of just a hug to shreds, inch by inch. From the park to an empty public restroom, the line she crossed was one she could never step back over.

In her sophomore year she stumbled online into a circle where men trained girls to be bitches. She started as a watcher, curious and ashamed, then the man who called himself Master reeled her in step by step — into the group, into photos, into heat, into addiction. A little over a month later he came to Shanghai from a thousand miles away, and with a single word he could make her wear the clothes he chose and complete every humiliating task in public, inside a private Japanese-restaurant room. This is the story of how she handed herself over, left her last pair of panties in that room with her own hands, and crawled on her knees into a hotel room.

Dumped to her face by the first love she had dated for a year — who brought his new girlfriend along to gloat — twenty-five-year-old she cried until nightfall, went a whole day without eating, and wanted nothing but to drink herself blind. Dressed to bare her skin, she slipped into a corner of a bar and threw back beer after beer until she lost count, when a foreign stranger sharing her table asked why she was drinking alone. Drunkenness, heartbreak, and a self-destructive, vengeful recklessness pushed her step by step toward the hotel down the street — toward something her hand could not even close around. After a surrender that was half refusal and half consent, she realized there was no going back.

She is the homeroom teacher of a third-grade class, born in ’96, five-foot-three, ninety-eight pounds, fair-skinned, and the pair of C-cups on her chest are the one flaw she cannot hide. In front of others she is the strict teacher who snaps her chalk and shows zero tolerance for typos; behind the scenes she has been trapped for three years by a husband who only shows up for breakfast, a husband who never once takes a proper look at her. Until that day after school, when the mother who usually came to pick up her child didn’t show — replaced by that father she had never met before: tall, clean-cut, with fine lines at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. She regretted not wearing makeup that day, regretted tying her hair up carelessly, regretted being nothing more than a stern-faced teacher in front of him. And so came the second day’s lipstick, the WeChat account added under the pretext of the child’s studies, the late nights that drifted from small talk into talk of marriage, and the kiss in the mall’s underground parking garage — the one she instinctively wanted to push away but ended up wrapping her arms around his neck for. A husband who could never satisfy her, and a man who could keep her going for a full hour in a hotel and leave her wanting more afterward. On the lectern she is still the proper teacher; beneath him she is a bitch wagging her tail — two faces, ones she can tell apart more and more clearly, and the one she is less and less willing to give up.

More than a year after her divorce, she is thirty-six and has poured her homeless desire into the exhibitionist circles of Twitter. On a hot summer holiday afternoon, egged on by her online friends, she wears nothing but lingerie, tights, and killer heels as she slips alone into two deserted public toilets on the edge of the city — the first so quiet it deflates her, the second echoing with the sound of a strange man relieving himself. A jolt runs through her, she is soaking wet, and her fingers cannot stop. The whole piece is her solitary monologue: the abandon of divorced life, the shame and pleasure of an exhibitionism that keeps escalating step by step, the pounding heart of hearing someone right beside her and nearly being caught, and the moment she finally admits she can never go back to who she used to be.

A weekend afternoon showing, barely anyone there. They picked the two seats at the far edge of the second-to-last row. She wore a hoodie over a short skirt, and underneath, that set of lace so thin it was nearly see-through. As the screen flickered from bright to dark, his hand started at her knee in the darkness and moved up, inch by inch — she bit her lip, swallowing back every moan that threatened to spill out. The whole theater was so quiet she could hear her own heartbeat, and feared everyone else could too. This is an afternoon about losing control in public while desperately pretending nothing was happening.

She is a twenty-five-year-old legal counsel at a law firm — cold-faced in public, speaking like a court verdict, never a word wasted. On a rainy day her delivery order spilled its soup, and she offhandedly left a one-star review, blasting the rider for his foul attitude. A few days later a stranger added her on WeChat and sent photos: the door number of her rented flat, her shoe cabinet, and her pair of black high-heeled leather shoes — with a still-wet load of a man’s spend pooled inside one shoe. He tells her that calling the police is useless; he isn’t afraid of going down in flames. Panicked, she asks how to make it end; he says he’s heading back to his hometown this month, and she can help him work off a month’s worth of lust. She should have called the police, should have toughed it out — but beneath that cold face hides another self even her boyfriend has never seen, and, spinning her own lie, she agreed. For that one month, apart from the weekends her boyfriend occasionally visits, every single night belongs to him. He is a whole size bigger than her boyfriend, his desire a fire that never burns out. At month’s end he merely nods at her door and leaves, as if nothing ever happened. She deletes every trace of contact, sits back down at her desk, and fixes that cold face back on.

To everyone else she was the quietest girl in the whole university — bangs cut to her brows, voice soft, always hugging the wall when she walked. But only she knew that her body trembled the instant anyone touched it, that even a fingertip grazing her collarbone raised a shiver of goosebumps. In her junior year she started wearing the shortest skirts alone in her rented room, standing before the mirror and fantasizing about being seen through, recognizing in herself a contrast-slut hidden inside a good-girl shell. One consensual, adults-only night at a club, the alcohol loosened the grip she’d held for years, and for the first time she was filled by more than one man at once, for the first time she heard herself beg, “Don’t stop.” Afterward she didn’t collapse in shame — instead, in the bathroom mirror, she admitted that identity to herself, and she left behind a fixed, on-call tail for whenever she wanted more.

Gu Wanqing is the girl no one can reach — the acknowledged campus belle of all four college years, freshly graduated, aloof of brow and eye, holding every suitor’s advances a full arm’s length away. Only Shen Zhiyan is the exception: her best guy friend of six years, the one person allowed to sit inside her world. This summer, with her parents away on business, only the two of them remain in the empty apartment. The boy she has treated as “safe” for years finally, on one sweltering afternoon, turns six years of buried longing into a hand that crosses the line. Her reason screams no, but her body betrays her a step ahead — coaxed wet, nipples going hard, and caught between shame and desire, the ice-cold campus belle surrenders the first time she had guarded all the way to graduation.

I’m the kind of girl whose feed is full of crop tops, spaghetti straps, and micro-skirt selfies that rack up hundreds of likes — bold on the surface, but the truth is I’d never once truly let go. Then sophomore year I ended up sharing a dorm with L, a dance major — a spade tattoo high on her inner thigh, more on her ankle and chest, always out at bars and karaoke joints. One night I caught her secret. Two weeks later she slipped two things into my bag, and after that I turned, step by step, into someone I didn’t even recognize. This is the whole story of how my best friend corrupted me, how a pair of toys fed my addiction, until one gathering of six people where, for the first time, I fell completely.

In my senior year, wearing the titles of student council president and class monitor, I got assigned to intern at a cram school for adult art-exam students. My long-distance boyfriend kept pushing me further away, while that six-foot-five grown art student — the one rumored to have flirted with half the girls — used one filthy line after another, in the empty hallways and in the deserted men’s room during the lunch break, to tear the spotless intern teacher I was into the girl who moaned the loudest in his phone’s camera.

A grown foreign exchange student in the vocal-music program, she looks like a pure-white little sunbeam of an ENFP — but underneath she’s a bitch in heat with a savage appetite, the ultimate contradiction. In the expat scene she found herself a “Master” to take on short-term tasks — and this time, he pushes her toward a Halloween sex bar: wear lingerie, hook a foreign man, hand your body over. From the little grove by the door bouncer, to the “accidental” hands in the crowd on the way in, to being surrounded and played with by a pack of strangers in the men’s room, she cashes out his orders one step at a time — and confirms, one step at a time, exactly what kind of thing she is.

Barely twenty, fresh out of a small town to study at a junior college, she was the kind of girl who knew how to work a room — sweet-mouthed, bold in what she wore, mobbed by a crowd the second she posted in the group chat. She thought she already understood how it all worked, until she met Brother X, a man from the streets. It took him just one drink, one hickey, one kiss that pinned her against a door, and one hotel room next to the bar to break her down from a pampered little bad-girl darling into a bitch on a leash. She followed along, half-resisting, sinking step by step into the pleasure of being led astray, until she was passed around and toyed with by him and his whole circle of grown-men friends — and even learned to rinse her mouth out with a sip of water before letting anyone kiss her. This is the story of how a confident girl willingly hands herself over and sinks down, ashamed and thrilled all at once.

Two years after the breakup, nurse Lin Wan runs smack into her ex, Shen Zhixing, at the station on her way back into the city. She adds him back on WeChat; after two months of talking, he asks to meet, quits his job, and moves to her city. Across the two-year gap, they make love again. She quickly senses something off—he finishes faster than she remembers, and he keeps prodding, afterward, about her time in bed with the boyfriend who came between them. Reading people is her profession, and she sees straight through to the hidden kink he cannot name: the thrill of being cuckolded. But she does not expose him. Instead she makes it real, feeds it to him line by line, and slowly trains a man who dared not admit it into someone willing to kneel in the palm of her hand.

Lin Wan is twenty-nine, running a café across from the football pitch. In public she is the cool, beautiful, unapproachable proprietress, with suitors lined up to her door—but only she knows the truth: with the boyfriend she has dated for years, they do it just once a month, and her desire has long been ground raw through countless masturbating nights. At a friends’ dinner, the newly arrived foreign coach Mike sits across from her, and once the drinks are flowing the girls start goading him about his size and his history with Chinese girls. Mike grins and pulls out his phone to show them—and in that single glance, Lin Wan’s hands heat up faster than her head. Walking home the same way after the party, the tipsiness, the moonlight, and the hand he wraps around her waist drag her over the threshold she has never crossed in her life.

By day she is a dentist in a crisp, immaculate shirt, sparing with words, cold enough that even the disinfectant smell keeps its distance and the intern nurses dare not ask her anything, 25 years old, 165 cm, 49 kilos. Only her long-distance boyfriend vaguely knows she has another side in private, yet all he knows is the masturbation layer, not the deeper one beneath it. Home from a long stretch of holiday shifts, in the gap of one shower and one takeout pickup, the three seconds she opens the door wrapped in a towel get photographed by someone. A few days later that delivery guy turns up at her door again, opens the album on his phone, and names a single condition. She thinks the words call the police will scare him off, only to be shoved back through her own door.

Six months into her first job, she is the aloof colleague in the turtleneck sweater — while hiding an exhibitionism streak no one suspects. On her day off she fixes a flesh-toned realistic toy inside her face mask, pressing it against her throat, and heads out — until she walks into a crowded, bright clothing store where a shop girl will not stop staring at her mouth; until, in the fitting room, the saliva-soaked toy is left behind and her ultra-short pleated skirt flips up and exposes her. On the day of her total public humiliation, she comes home and opens the drawer where her secrets are kept.

Lin Man, a thirty-six-year-old English teacher, has endured a marriage that exists in name only for far too long; her body is like a well someone has sealed shut. This summer, her husband’s sister’s son — Gu Shizhou, twenty-three and fresh out of college — moves in to study for his graduate exams. A strong young body, hormones so abundant they all but spill over, collide under one roof with the longing she has suppressed for years. Reason tells her this is a taboo she must never touch, an ethical abyss; yet when those young hands actually land on her, the first thing to betray her is her body.

She anonymously posts her location and outfit, playing a game of being hunted, the passphrase being: find me, and you can do whatever you want with me for a day. She never expected to run into a man who truly treated her as prey — and on that day, her mind and her body fell apart, each in its own way.