Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Thirty-one-year-old Su Wan, a Chinese language instructor at the county workers’ spare-time college, had been passed over for a mid-level title for three years. She deliberately left that button undone, locked the principal’s office door, and made a deal with him: only saying “red pen” meant a real stop—every other “no” was part of the act. Being forced, having no choice—that was the script she wrote for herself. From the principal’s sofa to the section chief’s back seat, then to Room 1806 at the Jinjiang Hotel, she kept crying “no” all the way while delivering herself to their doors.

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.

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.

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.

Married a year. Her husband runs a courier station and hauls parcels till past midnight every night. Lin Shan is twenty-seven, a course consultant at a vocational training school; the group leader post was decided by the school affairs committee on September receipts, passed on Thursday, the announcement already queued. For eight hundred eighty she rented ten hours at a recording studio off campus. The owner is fifty-seven, minds the machines and doesn’t teach, and doesn’t know a single person where she works. The first time, she undid her own buttons.

Zhou Yu, twenty-nine, contract clerk at the district court, her bar certificate locked in a drawer for two years. Getting on staff comes down to one written exam in April, and nobody can lend her a hand. And it is the Political Department that sends her to compile the oral history of Yan Song, a judge two years retired: an apartment full of old case files, and his robe hanging in the wardrobe. The first time, she was the one who put the robe on and climbed on top of him.

Lin Lan, twenty-nine, four years an off-establishment grid worker for the sub-district. The district ran an open recruitment, she came first in the written exam, and on August 21st her name went up for public notice — thirty days with no letter of complaint and the post is hers. But the second week the red paper was up, she found she was not happy at all. On the third evening of the posting she went up to the fifth floor herself, knocked herself, undid the buttons herself. Reading off the roster under the Party flag, the basement, the property monitoring room — and the Tuesday and Thursday slots were hers to schedule.

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.

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.

Four years married, and her husband Xu Lang touches her less and less — and when he does, it is over fast. Alone in the dead of night, Lin Jianxia sends herself over the edge with one massage wand after another, each one bigger than the last, then goes to work the next morning as poised as ever. She had been dodging Shen Yan, the male coworker whose eyes always undressed her — but she could not dodge him forever. First it was in his car in the underground garage, where, as if possessed, she took him in her mouth; later it was a booked hotel room, a set of black lace maid lingerie laid out on the bed, and he fastened it on her button by button, then pressed her down inch by inch, licking her nipples, licking her clean-shaven sex below. She let this affair in. Shen Yan bought her lingerie, taught her how to use her mouth, how to ride him, and at the end pulled off the condom and came in her mouth. And her husband, who so rarely did it, one day suddenly praised her: lately you seem to have… figured it out. Three points of view interweave: the coworker’s hunt and patience, the wife’s inch-by-inch fall inside the contrast of pleasure, and the husband’s oblivious dullness and his ironic praise.

Lin Wan is a gardener born in ’99: five foot eight, one hundred thirty pounds, a pair of E cups, an ass round and heavy, thighs so lush a fingertip sinks in. Raised under a strict household, married two years, before her wedding she was almost a blank page — even flirting stopped at holding hands. But her husband took on a new project and works past midnight; month by month the two of them do it less and less. She learned to comfort herself on an empty bed with toys, the boxes growing bigger with each order, yet filling her less and less. A fellow gardener she met at a training seminar, a man online, coaxes the little flame in her heart up bit by bit through the screen — until at last he comes to her home. He kisses her the moment the door opens, gropes her, kneels to serve her with his mouth — he is plainly far bigger than her husband; the instant he stretches her open through a condom she knows there is no going back, and in the end she herself lets him peel the rubber off, lets scorching burst after burst flood into her deepest place. From then on she drives out again and again to keep their trysts, or lets the man in through her own door, while her husband, drowning in his work dinners, never notices a thing. Three viewpoints interweave: the man online and his hunt and awe, Lin Wan and the inner self her own body betrays step by step, and the husband, buried in banquets, who compliments his wife on how well she has been looking lately.

To everyone she meets, she’s the good girl — plain, quiet, soft-spoken to a fault. But only one man knows the kind of beast that’s been starving beneath that blank-page surface. Three years ago, an ex-boyfriend so dominant he bordered on tyrannical took the naïve version of her apart inch by inch and trained her into a slut who couldn’t live without being handled roughly: mouth, ropes, outdoors, exhibition — she gave him all of her firsts. After they broke up, she found a gentle, considerate new boyfriend, but the gentler he was the emptier she felt, the more considerate the thirstier she grew. So again and again she went behind her new boyfriend’s back and crawled back into her ex’s bed — slapped, spanked, filled inside — until one act of cheating that nearly got exposed in the stairwell finally let the beast all the way out.

For the three days her husband is away on business, a stranger behind a sunglasses avatar invites her to the ninth floor of an old factory district to shoot artistic swimsuit photos. She says it is only photos, but beyond the lens her body betrays that ring a step ahead of her.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.