Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Lao Lang, thirty-eight, lives out of a suitcase and scores everyone he meets. Behind door C of Haijiao’s Yong’an Building, she opens the door and hands him a laminated course sheet: basic eight hundred, eating her out plus two hundred, tongue kissing plus two hundred, no condom crossed out twice. He orders the cheapest line, and neither of them is into it. On the second night she says please wait. On the third he never looks at the sheet and only asks which one she likes best herself. She turns the paper over. Her name is written on the back.

Lao Lang, thirty-eight, works in foreign trade, second time at that apartment building in Hancheng. Old Park said this time it’s the fourteenth floor, and the doorknob still turns three times. The one who opens the door is called Jisoo, twenty-six, her palm slightly cool, all the mineral water labels facing the same direction. She asks “may I” before every step forward, and the scoring system he’s used for sixteen years can’t fill in a single column. Before leaving, he turns a bottle of water the other way; she turns it back, saying next time he can turn it again.

Lao Lang, thirty-eight, foreign trade, divorced, one red windbreaker. His client Old Park drops him off at an apartment building by the Han River: sixteenth floor, the door at the end of the hall, three twists of the handle. The door opens, and she stands in the light. Soyeon, twenty-seven, hotel front desk, red-orange hair, a little canine tooth. A single “oppa” pulls him back to Eunhee thirteen years ago, and he tries to fall in love in a paid-for apartment, until that single drop of white cream hangs on the tip of her nose.

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.

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.

A-Yuan is thirty-one, Tian-Tian is thirty, married eight years. In junior year, in his rented single room, she said “I want the elephant,” and neither of them knew how to 69; it took six tries before he got inside, and she told him, “I can’t let you have me too easily.” Eight years later, on the last day of a trip, the alarm goes off and she does not stop; she shakes her head three times before spreading her legs, and it is eighteen minutes after the alarm when they finish. Back home she is unusually eager: lifting her top to feed him in the morning, lying on the bed at night waiting for him to grind against her, her voice shaking when the delivery man knocks. On Friday, she has a new toy.

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.

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.

Bai Jing, thirty-eight, is a regional manager at a foreign company, single, and practically lives in hotels. In a hotel gym in Lisbon she meets an American named Marcus. One drink, one hand around her waist, and a current runs from her ear down to the soles of her feet; she gives herself to him that same night. From then on, the first thing she checks on every business trip is the gym, until she meets Qi Ze, a younger man, six foot six, who squats two hundred twenty kilos and opens his mouth to say “older pussy cools the fire.”

Four years married, and her husband hasn’t touched her in three months. Chi Yue, a buttoned-up back-office clerk at an insurance company, has always played it safe, until her coworker Jiang Man offers to take her out to play with men. On the first night Wang Ye only holds her while she sleeps; the second time, she’s the one who says no condom. Rope, a collar, anal: she learns them one by one, until the night she pushes open a hotel room door to find three men waiting, and, flushed red, she says: “Go ahead.”

Fan Jing is thirty, a graphic designer so quiet at work that her colleagues call her “Silent Mode.” Living alone on the fourth floor of an old apartment block, she goes from sitting by an open window with no bra, to taking out the trash at night with nothing under her skirt, to ordering a seventeen-centimeter anal bead stick online. One Friday near midnight, she stands at the curb with it buried inside her, and the man across the street watches her for ten minutes. Then he starts walking toward her.

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.