Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Fu Yao, thirty, works the night shift on a customer service line. The washing machine at home is broken, so every morning at four she goes down to the self-service laundromat, where Niu Ben, the delivery station manager, is always there. She could still recite her mother’s rules at thirty; now she sets her own: while the drum is turning, anything goes, and when it beeps, she leaves. She never presses pause. Her husband You Kai, a day-shift programmer, fixes the washing machine. She still goes downstairs and presses sixty minutes. One morning at four, he wakes up.

Yi Shan is thirty-three, a Chinese-lit graduate. When her magazine folded she took the front desk at Binhe Swim Center, teaches the evening adult class, and swims half an hour alone every dawn. Gu Zheng, the lane-four morning member, swam for the provincial team eleven years ago and only ever shows up from six to six-thirty. House rule three: cap on in the water. With the cap on she is the front desk. With it off, she is not. Her husband Lai Xu sells cars, has another woman at lunchtime, and has only one thing to say at night: “Dry your hair.”

A downpour strands wedding photographer Yin Duo and his makeup-artist wife Pi Xiaolu at a location base forty kilometers out. The female model never shows, so her husband puts her in a satin gown to be “the bride’s hand” for the sample groom, Hong Jin. When her makeup case is open she’s on the clock; when it’s shut she’s off. That day in the greenhouse she pushed the latch down herself, while her husband pressed the shutter from behind the viewfinder. The sample now hangs in the shop, and every day she touches up its dust.

Mai Qing, who runs a seafood stall, signs up with her husband Sha Cong for Kun Kee’s night-fishing trip, and the list has one extra name on it: Candy, who does nails. Under the white light at the bow, her husband teaches someone to cast with his hands over hers; under the yellow light at the stern, she squats sorting line with A-Kun, the forty-four-year-old skipper. Every time the glow bell on the rod tip rings, they have to stop. It rings three times. The fourth time, she takes the bell off. At dawn they come back to port, each carrying a fish.

Twenty-three below. Yu Fei, twenty-eight, a dental receptionist, is marched onto the slopes by her husband Lang Xiao, thirty-four, and falls twenty-seven times. It is Lao He, the forty-six-year-old guesthouse owner, who carries her off the intermediate run and back to the heated kang. On the kang, her husband makes a proposal: goggles on means yes, and whoever pushes them up calls a stop. She changes one line. If I push them up to my forehead, you both stop. If you push them, it doesn’t count. The walls are thin. Next door can hear everything.

Luo Xue, twenty-nine, is a nude double at Yunqi Film Studios; her face never goes on camera. Her husband Tian Yifan is the best boy on the lighting crew, and in three years of lighting her every scene, her face has always been on the far side of his black flag. In the Scene 47 bed scene, leading man Ji Bei gets hard through two layers of modesty shorts and says sorry. After wrap she borrows a slate and knocks on his trailer door: it starts when you call action, and whoever calls cut, we stop. The next day there is a tenth take on the lighting playback drive. It was not shot.

Coach driver Lu Qingshan is laid up with a bad back, and the company sends Jiang Dacheng, a night-route driver, to fill in. Three days on a mountain tour: guide Qin Wanqiu looks after all forty-seven passengers, and only the man who never talks looks after her, turning the heater her way, covering her lunch, draping his coat over her shoulders. The night the tour wraps, she pulls the little guide flag out of the dashboard: flag in, it’s the itinerary; flag out, it’s her. The engine at the back of the bus runs hot, and at home her husband listens to it idling in her voice message. When the week is over, she slides out from under the flag base a follow-up slip that has been pressed there the whole week.

Guan Xiaoman is twenty-seven, from the Northeast, three years streaming womenswear. Her husband Fang Yu sells cars and keeps a nail-salon girl named Tingting hidden in his phone. She doesn’t make a scene. She opens a late show, and her top gifter, “Beifeng,” drops ten sports cars in a row and DMs three words: Inspect in person. She writes back: I don’t want the cars. I want to see the man, and I set the price. The price isn’t money; it’s nine seconds of sign-off suona, and when the bell rings everyone goes home. In a showroom at the building-materials mall, she sits on a sintered-stone vanity and pitches the goods in her broadcast voice. The second time, the door isn’t locked, and her husband is standing in it.

Qi Ran is thirty-three and sells medical devices; her husband Liu Chong is a construction supervisor, and for two years he has made her send a photo of her hotel door plate before eleven every night. A storm hits Xi’an, the company botches the booking, and she ends up sharing a twin room with Xiang Dong, the new colleague on secondment. She sets one rule: I go back to that bed, you stop. The first night she photographs the door plate and doesn’t send it. The second night her husband video-calls; she answers, camera pointed at the ceiling. When the trip ends he goes through her phone at the airport: six shots of 1409 in the album.

Five days and four nights in Sanya. Xue Hong, thirty-six, spent four days in meetings on the balcony, and Qin Yue, twenty-eight, spent four days by the pool being watched by A-Hai, the twenty-four-year-old lifeguard. She is good to her husband, he is even better to her, he just never looks at her. She put on her sunglasses and asked A-Hai what time he got off, then picked the lounger right under her husband’s balcony. Sunglasses on, keep going; sunglasses off, stop. On the flight home, her husband put his hand on her knee, and she took the sunglasses off.

Ji Tang, a florist, is twenty-nine. Her husband Wu Feng drives a truck and is away four days a week. The spare key lives across the hall with Lao Xue, a forty-five-year-old man who has fixed locks for twenty-two years and lives alone. The night she forgot her key she went over to get it, and Lao Xue came down to fix the lock at her shop and said a locksmith can hear loose from tight. From then on the brass hook on the door frame became a rule nobody said out loud: key on the hook, he comes in; key in the drawer, he opens his own door. Until her husband changed his route to come home on Wednesdays.

At the college reunion Li Xiangdong has only two drinks, and stone sober he bets a bottle of Macallan against his old roommate Nie Chuan: “Three dates with my wife and you won’t lay a finger on her.” Du Xiaoran is thirty, teaches English to adults, and tells bad jokes when she’s nervous. The next morning she messages Nie Chuan herself: bet, date one, Wednesday, you pick the place. The whisky sits unopened on top of the fridge, and the rule is hers: the game ends only when she says “I’m drinking this bottle.” She lets him all three times, so by her rules she won. The trouble is she finds she doesn’t want to stop.

Her husband keeps scrolling through those forum posts about taking a wife while she sleeps. Lu Yao reads one and says only this: I won’t sleep. I’ll pretend. She sips a Long Island iced tea with no alcohol in it and plays drunk, lies on a hotel bed with a black silk scarf over her eyes, and sets a safe word: “thirsty.” A stranger in a white cap walks through the door. He knows she’s awake. But he has to treat her as if she’s asleep.

Ten years married, A-Lan is thirty-two and has started turning her back to Lao Song in bed. Alone in Dongguan, Lao Song spent a whole summer reading hotwife novels, then came home and said into the dark: go out and meet someone from the internet. She said yes, and not because he begged. She wanted to know what she looked like in another man’s eyes. An internet café, a KTV, room 1207 at the Vienna Hotel, and she texts her husband one line at a time. Before going up she sets one rule: both phones off. At dawn she comes home and says nothing happened. He says he doesn’t care about the answer.

I have a very gentle boyfriend. We only ever used a handful of positions, never once tried dirty talk, and he couldn’t bring himself to say a harsh word to me. Mr. Liu was different — I met him at an industry mixer on Teachers’ Day, and over the next two-odd months I practically moved into his apartment. From the start he pinched my nipples, slapped my face, forced me to call him “husband” in the car. He pried open the back hole no one had ever touched, and with barely more than the wetness I couldn’t admit I had, he opened me there for the very first time. It hurt so much I thought I’d split apart; the tears wouldn’t stop. Yet the moment he drove in, I couldn’t help clenching, couldn’t help gushing. He came once in front and once in back. That mouth and that hole my boyfriend never used are now used by Mr. Liu almost every time. The low feeling isn’t fake — but I know we’re only fuck buddies.

Ke Ning, a 25-year-old dance instructor, is the cold, locked-down introvert everyone sees on the outside — every reaction sealed inside her chest. But no one knows the film that loops in her head: being pinned down, being seen through, being slowly pried open in front of a crowd. Her boyfriend Zhou Zhao is a careless philanderer who never once read that dirty little fantasy of hers. Then, in the drunken backseat after a five-person KTV night, Zhou Zhao’s buddy Xu Yu opened her up through her skirt. Riding the liquor, she closed her eyes and, for the first time, let her body make the decision she could never say out loud. A week later, Xu Yu asked her out alone. This man — not as brawny as Zhou Zhao, but patient, lasting, someone who knew how to take a woman apart and reassemble her — used a private booth, an affair, and one filthy line after another to train her from clear-headed resistance all the way to begging on her knees. She grew more contradictory, wetter, more lost by the day — and all of it, kept from Zhou Zhao.

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.

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.