Write your fantasy,
make it real.

A young language teacher born in ’99, raised under an iron-strict upbringing, a blank page before marriage — the most daring thing in her college years was holding hands. Two years into the marriage, her husband is so busy he treats her like air, and she can only feed her own hunger with toys that keep getting bigger. An inter-school teaching seminar leads her to add a fellow male teacher on WeChat, and over two weeks of chatting they only grow closer. On the day he is on duty with his family away, he invites her over — and when her husband, at a dinner banquet, tells her to stay safe, she is in fact already driving to his place.

Shen Zhiwei, twenty, the face of the dance-performance department, one meter seventy-four tall, drilled since childhood through piano, painting and vocal exams, her poise honed by an aristocratic upbringing until it was flawless — the whole school’s picture of the demure, ice-cold young mistress. But nobody knew what ran through her head as she crossed the long corridor in a short skirt: the wish to be undressed with a stranger’s eyes through the hem of her skirt, to grind her bare cunt against a cool slick seat, to throw away all that breeding and do one filthy thing. The night before New Year’s the pressure finally broke through; she arranged to meet a stranger off a dating app, laying down her single condition: he could not take her virginity. She thought that keeping that thin membrane intact was the same as keeping her dignity — yet in that hotel room she saw for the very first time a real, erect thing, far bigger than she had imagined — and then, with those clean, gleaming feet that had danced for over a decade, clumsily, trembling, she finished him off.

She is a junior-high English teacher. At twenty-four she loved a man inside the education system, and got repaid with his cheating and a breakup his mother bought with a wad of cash. She changed cities, changed who she was, married at twenty-nine, and thought that page was long turned. But award season arrived, and he came to her school for the meeting as the superior in charge of the honors — married, a kid at home, still that same lukewarm man. This time she is no longer the girl who wept her way out the door. She is the one who brings up the “perks,” who feeds her husband a half-true excuse about a demonstration class, who climbs into his big Benz and goes to the king-bed room of a five-star hotel. What she wants is not him — it is that bonus, that road he has kept pinned under his foot, and a revenge that runs entirely on her terms.

I went with my boyfriend back to his rural hometown in the north for the New Year, and at the class reunion I ran into his sworn enemy from middle school — that short, heavyset man who went to a diploma-mill college and never even landed a decent job. He stole glances at me across the table. At the second gathering my boyfriend drank himself unconscious, and I asked the man to help carry him to the bed in town. Late at night, with only the two of us left in the living room, he started with crude jokes; I stood up to send him off, but he grabbed me and pulled me back. Struggling, resisting, half-forced and half-yielding, I was dragged into the room right next to my boyfriend’s and thrown onto the bed — “what right does a loser have to land a girl like this” — and with humiliation and a size I refused to admit, he pried my body apart from my reason, inch by inch.

To her coworkers, Su Man is the aloof goddess of the office — but she hides a secret: she posts her own nudes to a foreign corner of the internet. When she meets Director Lu from headquarters, that door swings open, and this master couple trains her, step by step, into a bitch who kneels on the floor and acknowledges her owners.

Graduate student Lin Yue is an old hand at picking up men, but the one thing she truly craves is the thing her lover, Mr. Gu, uses to discipline her. This time he books her for an art photo shoot, dressing her in a traditional Chinese crimson bridal gown — from the studio changing mirror to the gridlocked car, from the brightly lit counter of a sex shop to the small hours in a hotel room, he pushes her step by step into the shame of being displayed in public, and again and again he feeds her full. She goes the whole day without a single meal, yet her belly is packed with what he gives her, so full she floats when she walks.

The pandemic restrictions had just lifted, and the cinema was so empty only a scattered few remained. Her husband picked the film for her, packed a trunk full of toys into the car, and then handed her over to a stranger she had met only twice. Two-plus hours in the dark: she crawled across the carpet wearing a collar, knelt between a stranger’s thighs, went to the restroom to wake her husband over the phone camera — and in the end she was pressed down into the seat and taken from behind, a scalding load fired into her bowels, the anal plug shoved right back in to seal it, a vibrating egg pushed into the other place. They left before the film ended; she went down to the underground parking garage with her thighs clamped shut, the things inside her rocking back and forth with every step. Three people, three heartbeats: the wife used in public, the single man who treated her as a trophy, and the husband on the far side of the screen, proud and aching all at once.

Kai roped me in as his wingman, to help him chase Su Qing, a woman two years older than us. When the dinner broke up, he was the one who’d drunk too much, and he was the one she turned down—yet she added me on WeChat, and it was me she started meeting. By day she’s the worldly, sharp older sister who says exactly what your heart needs to hear; by night she slips into a thin nightgown and becomes someone else entirely—someone who pins me down, forbids me to pull out, and grinds me to surrender against her cervix. I went from bystander to the one she chose.

She has a boyfriend who is always working late, and a fuck buddy named P who grows bolder by the day. From washing each other in the shower to him slipping his phone between their joined bodies and casting it onto the wall, from showing up to a date in nothing but a trench coat to being fucked hard against the floor-to-ceiling window—the most outrageous time of all, he put the call on speaker and made her talk to her boyfriend while he fucked her. Three people each hold a piece of the truth: she only knows she wants it more and more, P controls the whole rhythm, and the boyfriend on the other end of the line, half-aware, hands her over.

The midnight column “Letters from the Other Me” takes anonymous mail only. Tonight it opens three envelopes. Niannian, a polished office worker, finds her boyfriend’s secret switch on Christmas Eve: the moment she mentions her ex, he goes hard. Yiyi, the ice-faced lead dancer who never smiles at curtain call, spends every annual leave in a town where nobody knows her, hunting the least respectable man she can find to break herself open. And Shen Wei, a thirty-year-old executive, parks her car at midnight and pays Xiaoyu, a girl working the street, to put her under her feet. Three women, impeccable in daylight. Three pleasures that cannot stand the light. Every line anonymous. Every line true.

The new column, Backpage Confessions, takes no letters — only questionnaires. Twelve questions, anonymity allowed, one rule: no lying. The first batch brings back two envelopes that never flinch. Tangtang, a twenty-three-year-old office clerk, answers the wildest-thing question with eleven naked minutes in her building hallway at two a.m., and fills the what-you-crave line with a single word: outdoors. Three weeks later her second letter arrives — she has done it. Xiaoman, twenty-four, leaves eleven questions blank and answers only one: her most unforgettable night, and a video that exists on exactly two phones. Anonymity lent them the nerve; their bodies signed the page.

Twenty-five-year-old Ranran works overseas markets and dates a man two thousand kilometers away. Her boyfriend K sends the Friday task: a 28cm pleated skirt, a sound-activated vibrating egg, and a pair of panties made of nothing but three pearls — go to the mall arcade and dance one full song on the dance machine. An arcade is never quiet, not for a second. She thought those three minutes would be the hardest part, until she opened her front door and the video-call inspection turned into something else entirely.

A handwritten questionnaire arrives at the column: neat, disciplined script, and one attached photo — a close-up of a moon-white satin blouse fastened with pankou frog buttons, no face in frame. Linglong is twenty-one. In public she buttons that collar all the way to her throat; on paper she writes exhibitionism and swallowing. The rooftop she has scheduled for Friday midnight is already on her calendar, planned down to the weather. And beneath the box marked the wildest thing you have ever done lies something her boyfriend has never heard of — the summer she turned twenty, an empty courtyard on the edge of the Gobi wind, three childhood friends, and four rules she wrote herself. Porcelain looks cold until you hold it. Some girls only tell the truth to paper.

The Double Life Mailbox receives two diaries instead of letters. Zhixia, twenty-four, a second-year grad student, sits unnoticed in her lab by day; at night, one line — looking for an obedient little bitch to play with — sends her pulse into free fall. From sexting assignments to crawling on a collar, and finally an afternoon of being passed between men on a yacht, she hands herself over layer by layer. The second diary comes from Ah-Li, a billiards-hall coach: the dead corner behind the green felt tables, a slap in a KTV room, the long crawl from a hotel doorway to the edge of the bed. Two women, one identical closing line: I think I am so cheap, and I love it.

At twenty-nine, Yining is cornered at a tea table packed with relatives and blamed, alone, for a childless marriage — and her husband hands her a single line: do not take it to heart. That night she refunds a one-yuan transfer back to its sender with four words attached: When? Where? What follows is an October mountain trail, a white sports bra glowing in the sun, and a hillside house emptied of everyone but its master. Inside her waist pack rides a box bought just in case — and in the end, it prevents nothing at all.

In her third year of grad school, she was crushed under her thesis and her advisor, prim and proper as a porcelain figure set on a windowsill. Until she met Xiaohang, a freshman from the sports college — nineteen, a javelin thrower, shoulders broad enough to block out an entire window. One party where everyone drank too much cracked that porcelain open, and a young, powerful body pushed in through the crack, slowly filling and prying open twenty-four years of hoarded restraint. Later came a tall exchange student from England. She went from a graduate student who nodded and smiled politely in the hallways to a woman who wanted nothing more than to be stuffed full by young men, growing more addicted the more cuckolded her men made her feel.

At thirty, Keke is poised and capable, having risen to deputy director at her company. In public she is meticulous to a fault; in private she guards a marriage stretched thin across two provinces, swallowing alone a thirst pressed down to its very deepest point. She has always known what the older senior manager feels for her; she has simply gone on pretending she did not understand. Then comes a business trip, one hotel, two rooms. Mature and practiced, he pushes step by step, and the desire she has suppressed for too long quietly gains the upper hand. In the half-yielding, half-resisting, her reason gives way first, and her body betrays her right behind it. This is not a matter of who forced whom. It is a lonely young wife, after a long stretch of repression, finally admitting to herself that she wanted it.

Her husband has been posted overseas for more than a year, and she keeps a hollow apartment in the Jiangnan region all to herself. After joining a local badminton club, she meets the “big brother” who organizes the group’s gatherings. Over the May Day holiday, an invitation to a villa retreat halfway up the mountain rips open the loneliness she has bottled up too long—a blindfold, stockings, one stranger after another. For the first time, she lets her body speak before her reason does.

In her parents’ eyes she is the pure, well-behaved girl raised in the palms of two families who have been close for generations — a grown woman now at university, flawless. But only the boy she has known since childhood knows the truth: three meetings, each one deeper than the last, until she willingly hands herself over and kneels as his rabbit, his alone. The red qipao on Lunar New Year’s Eve, one afternoon of humiliation that spun out of control, right up to the day she buys rabbit ears and a collar herself and stands before the floor-to-ceiling window. This is the ruin no one else ever sees, hidden beneath the pure little shell.

By pure chance, I ended up staying at that quiet villa on the edge of the city, and I met her — the woman someone kept there. Forty-six, yet you could not find a single trace of age on her, her charm so thick it would not dissolve. She was not divorced, she even had a boyfriend, yet within these four walls she indulged herself openly, without shame. I became a regular, coming almost every week, tasting for the first time the very peak of what a mature woman could be. Then one holiday, when I went looking for her again, the house was already empty, wiped spotless, leaving me only that old affair in my memory — strange, unforgettable, and impossible to let go.

She is the homeroom teacher of a top high school, spending her days on the podium controlling the grades of over forty students, then coming home at night to an empty apartment — her engineer husband is stationed out of town year-round and barely makes it back a few times a year. She hands her too-tightly-wound self over to the gym, and there she meets the young man who comes to lift after work. After one overseas-feeling quarrel with her husband, the weekend gym is empty except for the two of them, and hormones catch fire in the smell of sweat and the metallic tang of the machines. From the first time at the hotel, to the rough encounter in the restroom, to the phone call she works up the nerve to make after the year-end dinner — she is torn back and forth between “delete him” and “call him over one more time.”

To everyone who knows her, she is the good girl everyone praised growing up - sweet-mouthed, soft-faced, quiet. But no one knows that on an anonymous account where nobody can recognize her, she hides another side of herself: a red bikini, a see-through nightgown, selfies shot from a low angle. Over a long holiday, a group of old classmates who grew up together - now all working or home from university, all adults - gather at the four-story villa a guy just bought, drinking, singing karaoke, playing truth or dare. As the alcohol hits, secrets get pried open layer by layer. The guy who stays the night finds her anonymous account - and from then on, her good-girl shell is peeled open from the inside, inch by inch.

By day she is the quiet, near-invisible good girl — too timid to speak up in a queue, curled into a corner scrolling her phone at parties. But only she knows that in the blue glow of her screen late at night she opens, over and over, those forbidden, discipline-themed fantasy videos, folds her body into a tight ball, and lets shame and craving claw at each other inside her. Then came the night at the club, when for the first time she reached her hand toward her best friend’s boyfriend, when for the first time she tasted what it means to cross the line — and learned that the sweetest thing of all is always the one who already belongs to someone else. From then on she sinks into an endless game of seducing other women’s men: the more shameful it is, the more she cannot stop.

Two lovers, apart for three months, meet again on the other side of the city. She’s a young teacher barely a year into the job, nicknamed Miss Fries by her students; he still remembers the secluded little pavilion where they used to meet in secret. Fingers that have missed each other can’t help testing the way forward, breaths kept low hide among the tree shadows in the dark night, and a half-public reunion out in the open turns scalding sweet.