Write your fantasy,
make it real.

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.

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.

Two thirds of my husband’s stomach was gone. Two weeks in the hospital and I was there around the clock. Old Kang in bed two is fifty, one leg in a cast, and the aide does not come during the day, so the room is down to the two of us. He asked me to help change his dressing and I put my hand inside his hospital pants. Later, while my husband napped, I pulled the curtain and knelt down. The day he was discharged he pressed a key into my hand.

Ten years married, and the hundred-and-forty-square-meter apartment is hers alone most of the year. Her husband is out of town twenty days a month, and under every single thing she posts there is exactly one man who likes it: the chairman of the homeowners’ committee, twenty-sixth floor of her own building. The night the prep meeting broke up he said he was going her way, the car was on B2, and the back seat was stacked with undistributed supply boxes. Three months later she is vice chair, and when the dinner breaks up three men are standing at three doors, waiting to see which way she goes.

Jiang Yue is thirty-three, six years a full-time wife, and does not say three hundred words in a day. At the Mid-Autumn dinner, in the half hour her husband is downstairs buying drink, she walks over and straddles her husband’s old boss, points at the wedding photo on the wall and says: look at that and fuck me. After that, she picks which day of the week she goes to his building. She sets the time.

Yang Ting is thirty, a full-time mother four months postpartum, and her programmer husband will not touch her. She goes in for pelvic floor rehab, and on the second visit the male therapist, A-Jie, stops and asks: press any further and this stops being rehab — do you want it? She says she does. He transfers her remaining eight sessions to another therapist on the spot and tells her he gets off at five thirty. The half year that followed, she typed into her phone one line at a time.

Day eighteen postpartum. Her husband is in Guangzhou closing a three-million-dollar deal and has not come once. What comes instead is the confinement center’s only male masseur, there to do abdominal repair, his hand stopping eleven seconds above her pubic bone. She books one extra session, then nine more. The baby goes down to the nursery, the nurses knock at the door, and he drives into her from behind. The day she checks out her husband pulls up in his Mercedes, and there is a new contact in her phone saved as “Postpartum Repair.”

Zeng Xue, thirty-five, creative director at an ad agency, E cup, one nodule in her left breast. Her husband is a corporate executive, eighty flights a year. A colleague tells her to go for a breast lymphatic detox; the manager says the best therapist is a man. Xiao Kai is twenty-eight. He says: Sis, you’ve got a nodule here. The first time he does the deep-tissue, she comes clutching the sheet. After that, every Wednesday, Room 3, extra sessions, deep-tissue, doubles.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

He is twenty-two years older, has been married, has a grown daughter only a few years younger than me, and he never pretends these things are not true. I thought it was just a deal with warmth layered on top, until I realized the man across the table was actually, seriously, seeing me.

Lu Shiyan is the dream of every girl on campus, and the senior no one dares to provoke. That day he cornered me in the club office and said: to join my team, first remember three rules. I never expected those three rules would, one by one, all be used on me.

Shen Yu is the graduate teaching assistant for our major, cold as an iceberg. When I failed the midterm, he kept me back for tutoring. An empty classroom, just the two of us; he leaned in and caged me: I will teach you this problem three times. Drift off again, and I find another way to make you pay attention.

Gu Cheng is my colleague, and my sworn rival. We fought over everything, from projects to the last cup at the coffee machine, until the day he cornered me by the machine and said with a grin: let us make a bet, whoever falls first loses. I was so sure I would win.

The company retreat took us to a seaside resort. In the last round of truth or dare, Xie Lin was egged on to pick the person he most wanted to kiss. Across the bonfire, he looked straight at me, walked over, and amid everyone laughing, pulled me out of the crowd.