Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Lin Zhixia is the kind of woman who makes people sit up straight the moment she walks into an office—a few years out of school, already a manager, with a cool, unshakable authority in her eyes. She has a boyfriend, Zhou Xu, so gentle he is almost translucent, who gathers her whole body into his arms and hums to her when she cannot sleep. And yet this woman everyone treats as a model met a man online who calls her only one thing: good girl. From the rope and blindfold pulled out of that black canvas bag in the hotel room, to the endless waves of climax forced out of her by a vibrator, to the scalding candle wax running down her back, her breasts, her thighs in that apartment—inch by inch she loses the disciplined, respectable self who never even learned how to be coy. Every night she returns to Zhou Xu’s arms, she knows with perfect clarity that she can never go back. So when the message “Let’s play again” lights up her screen, she answers with a single word: yes.

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.

One October weekend, she did her wifely duty for the husband she was quietly at war with, only to be publicly slighted at his family’s tea table. Out of spite, she messaged the foreign man. Early the next morning she pulled on workout clothes, took the long way to buy a box of large-size things, and walked into his empty house—the whole family had left for Diwali, leaving him alone. He liked her with the smell of sweat on her; he pinned her to the couch, stroked, tested, entered. He poured the white liquid from the condom into his palm, mixed it with tanning oil, and spread it over her belly and her whole body, saying it would keep her skin supple. Coated in oil that smelled of him, she lay on the rooftop to sunbathe, and before the sun went down she took him to the very last drop and asked him a question.

Su Wei is the kind of wife everyone considers the most proper. One afternoon she goes alone to a photo studio converted from an old warehouse for a private shoot. The man behind the lens is called A-Wei — low voice, soft words. One line, “Your other half will never know,” pushes her past the first line of defense. From the first mouthful she swallows to the sudden phone call from her husband on an abandoned floor, she holds only one boundary the whole way — she will never let him come inside her. But it is that very line that finally breaks and slips loose. On the way home she detours to the docks, letting the river wind blow away the scent on her that does not belong to home.

Zhou Min is in her early thirties: two kids, a job that grinds a person dull, a husband who has gone a little soft around the middle. Her days feel like being pressed slowly into warm water and simmered. At the tenth-anniversary reunion for her graduating class, she runs into Aqiao, her closest male bestie from back then — the one who understood every one of her silences. After the party the two of them slip away from the crowd and drink until they are tipsy, and years of unsaid words and long-untouched bodies loosen all at once. That night he opens a place on her that no one had ever touched, and out of the pain surfaces a weightlessness and release she had never known. She flees home, swears never to see him again, and then replays it over and over on the high-speed train. This year the holiday came early; she went back to her parents’ place alone, and arranged to meet him a few more times. Until her husband spots a small scorch mark, burned by cigarette ash, on the underwear she had taken off.

On a rainy night, I was driving my buddy’s wife, Lin Lan, back to her place, but the road was cut off halfway. The umbrella couldn’t hold off the slanting rain, and the nearest door was my little rented room. The moment she leaned in on her own, a line that should never have been crossed had already loosened between our lips and teeth. Later she smiled and climbed on top, telling me to grab a condom — that was the one layer still between us. But panting, she said she wanted to try it bare, said she wanted that direct heat driving all the way deep, flesh pressed to flesh. The third time, pressed on top of my buddy’s wife, I stripped that thin barrier away completely and poured myself deep inside.

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.

He figures he is holding a winning hand — the face, the mouth, the patience to coax anyone. From the summer he met his first girl at driving school, he glides effortlessly between relationships: the flirting, the promises, the cheating, and a tacit no-strings arrangement he keeps on the side. This is the confession of a womanizer, and also the private history of the women he stirred up — women who knew they were playing with fire and fell in anyway. It was not that they never saw through him. Their bodies simply chose one step ahead of their minds.

She is the most poised literature teacher in the whole high school, immaculate at the lectern, yet coming home is like walking into a house where the heating has been off for years — her husband is there, but he stopped giving her any warmth long ago. At one parent-teacher meeting she meets that student’s father: a man who raised his child alone, mature, restrained, a man who truly looks into her eyes when he speaks. It starts with a cup of coffee gone cold, and inch by inch this man rekindles her. Shame, longing, transgression, surrender — for the first time she discovers that her body was never broken; it had simply been put in the wrong place.

At twenty-four, fresh out of college, I joined the company on a project and was still practically a virgin at everything. The archivist who sat across from me, Chen-jie, was four years older than me, gentle, with a steady long-distance boyfriend. A bit of horsing around in the office drew us close, the tension fermenting little by little in the empty office during overtime, until one deserted lunch break she led me, taught me, and became my first. When the project ended we scattered to different cities, and neither of us could quit the other—one meeting a month, like an illness neither of us was willing to wake from.