Write your fantasy,
make it real.

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.

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.

I cancelled four times. Real reasons, then made-up ones, then no message at all. His reply to the no-show was one line: hope everything is alright. The fifth time, I went. At the bar there was a second glass he had not poured yet.

In four months, he never once sent two messages in a row without a reply from me in between. It fascinated me and it broke me a little. I could not tell if it was distance or discipline, and I still do not know.

He ordered for the table without making a performance of it. No hum of self-presentation, nothing being proved. For a few hours in good light, I was with someone who was not trying to become anything, and was not asking me to either, and I felt, strange word, rested.

There is a loneliness I did not have a word for: being in the room with someone who wants you, and knowing what they want is the lit version, not the fuller one waiting outside. Visible and invisible at the same time.

I stood outside the restaurant for four minutes, after walking three blocks past it and looping back. What kept me from bolting was something embarrassing. But I went in, and he stood up, and all night I kept measuring something I was not ready to admit.

I spent forty-five minutes deciding what to wear, twenty-five of which were just standing in front of the closet, thinking in circles. I walked in prepared to evaluate an experience, and walked out with a different question: what exactly was I measuring it against?