Write your fantasy,
make it real.

At the Lakeside Hotel on Suzhou’s shore, thirty-two-year-old qipao tailor Shu Man sits by the floor-to-ceiling window in a black lace dress of her own making, saying nothing. The rule is hers: each time she undoes a frog button, the single man Cheng Jun may take one step closer; each time she fastens one back, everyone stops. Her husband Meng Yu stands outside the balcony door, his voice so soft it only ever offers suggestions—until he steps across the sliding track himself.

On the third day in Bali, Liang Zhiyuan and his wife Zhuo Ying walk into the tidal spa by the beach for a ninety-minute couples massage. The front desk makes it clear: no touching between therapists and clients. Zhuo Ying is thirty-three, thin-skinned, never able to say what she wants out loud—but her foot touches the male therapist Yono first, and the condom in her bag is one she brought herself. Her husband sees the condom on the nightstand, but not the moment she put it there.

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.

Twenty days of picking season. Yu Lan, thirty-six, runs the kitchen at the family farmstay and feeds twenty workers, and she gives the new kid, Xiao Feng, one scoop more. She lays the rules out to his face: wages are paid by the day and have nothing to do with this; the fruit basket set under the trees means yes, the basket in her hand means no. The row at the foot of the hill ripens late, and nobody goes there. When the fruit is in, Xiao Feng leaves, the basket goes up on the kitchen wall, and her husband sets a half-used bottle of toilet water beneath it.

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.”

After Night Four, Lao K said the next one should be someone doing it for the first time. Two rooms on the same floor, for safety. A-Ning has never done this; he knocks like opening a blind box, and behind the door is Xiaoman, naked in a collar, waiting for him. He flinches from the camera and never even takes the leash. Test cards, the wait, Lao K off to the shower, and she has his trousers down before anyone gives her leave. The leash, one mouthful left and one right between two cocks, her first deep kiss with anyone but her husband, a cushion of flesh beneath her and a big cock behind, and a novice ridden until he begs. This is Lao K’s hotel diary, Night Five.

Moving day, and her husband is off waiting on a ticket number. Hao Sisi, thirty, a game concept artist, is left in the empty apartment with Da Zhuang, the mover. She sets the rule: boxes sealed with tape are off-limits, open ones are fair game. At the new place the mattress is still wrapped in plastic and the apprentice is unpacking next door when she rips the tape off her finger: “I’m open today.” A week later her husband finds a box in the corner that never got unpacked. The tape on it is new.

Wen Shuyao, thirty-two, restores ancient books. Six months after spinal surgery, her husband Sheng Lang still cannot make love to her. He suggests his oldest friend Gu Yihang: the best man who handed over the ring at their wedding, the surgeon who stitched him closed. She refuses three times. The fourth time, she takes off her wedding ring herself and sets it on the nightstand. Ring on the nightstand, he comes in; ring on her hand, nobody does. Through the wall, her husband listens to her recite the Book of Odes. The scar aches. Below it, he is hard.

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.

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?

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, ten years married. Last month she met A-Kai, a gym trainer she had been chatting with on a forum for three months, and came home to tell her husband about it in bed, over and over, until she got to “He’s thicker than you” and he was hard. This time he wants to join by video call. She agrees, on two conditions: no face, no recording. But when she holds the phone up to the place where they are joined herself, and then turns the camera to her own face, whose rules they were no longer matters.

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, married ten years. Last summer, during the plant’s heat leave, Lao Song arranged A-Feng for her on a forum, a man from across town: video the whole time, condom on, no WeChat, dates set by him. One year and one month later, the tenth time. Express hotel, room 3012. She walks the eight hundred meters over in nothing but a thong, and A-Feng licks her three times over with spit, jelly, and lube, and doesn’t stop when the delivery guy knocks. Afterward, Lao Song types a question mark after the tenth line in his notes.

A month before her birthday she was the one who said it out loud: this year I want a man I do not know. Her husband only sourced the channel. Of three photos she tapped the third, and she read the terms aloud in front of him before she signed. Hotel room 1706: she wants the twenty-seven-year-old model on his knees licking her first, her husband seated two meters away, watching. Just past midnight she says: extend it. Extend to eight in the morning.

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.

Zhou Yu, twenty-nine, contract clerk at the district court, her bar certificate locked in a drawer for two years. Getting on staff comes down to one written exam in April, and nobody can lend her a hand. And it is the Political Department that sends her to compile the oral history of Yan Song, a judge two years retired: an apartment full of old case files, and his robe hanging in the wardrobe. The first time, she was the one who put the robe on and climbed on top of him.

Lin Lan, twenty-nine, four years an off-establishment grid worker for the sub-district. The district ran an open recruitment, she came first in the written exam, and on August 21st her name went up for public notice — thirty days with no letter of complaint and the post is hers. But the second week the red paper was up, she found she was not happy at all. On the third evening of the posting she went up to the fifth floor herself, knocked herself, undid the buttons herself. Reading off the roster under the Party flag, the basement, the property monitoring room — and the Tuesday and Thursday slots were hers to schedule.

Song Jia, twenty-eight, a sales consultant six months married, is three units short of her annual target. When Old Jin from Wenzhou comes to see the model unit the director has assigned someone else, so she walks into his office and says: I want this client. In the master bedroom of the model unit the curtain stays open, and she says, whether you buy is your business, and this is this. By year-end she is a manager, and on launch day she walks to the Maybach at the door herself.

Xu Wei, thirty-three, acting head nurse of Obstetrics at the municipal women and children’s hospital, eleven months in the job. The selection is scored by a panel of seven, two of them brought in from another hospital; the department director holds one vote, and losing only means going back to her old post and four hundred a month less. He says all of that to her face first — and then she locks the on-call room door herself. Eleven months of scheduling seventeen people, and the only empty square is her own. The day the roster becomes hers alone, she fills it with seven days of leave.

Han Jing, thirty-five, dean of studies at a primary school, ten years married to Wang Lei, who sells building materials. Their life is so good it has gone dead. Then he finds the novel she hid inside her lesson plans and asks whether this is how she wants to be treated. Belt, kneeling pad, collar, the rules go up one at a time, and then he says he wants other people to see how well he has trained her. At a business dinner she is under the table sucking off two of his partners while, above her, he signs a one point four million contract.

With her husband posted to Saudi Arabia for six months, she is the only one who can keep an eye on the renovation of 1602 next door. On day one the foreman, Old Li, says: you do what I say. Hauling bricks, serving water, squatting to hold a level, she does it all in her stockings. On day eight, in a bathroom with no door yet, he says two words: kneel down. On completion day she is cable-tied to the newly installed Jomoo shower bar while four workers line up for the inspection. Her husband comes home, gives the bar a tug, and says: solid.

At the convention she’s the coser who smiles the most — white thigh-highs, a short skirt, a wig combed to perfection, soft-voiced to everyone at her sketch table. No one knows that once the crowd is gone and she’s back in her rented room, she turns off the light, props her phone on the bookshelf, kneels before the lens, and waits for a voice that has only ever existed on a screen to give the orders. He has never seen her face, yet he knows better than anyone the curve of her spine when she kneels, the whimper she chokes back in her throat when she’s commanded. Three months he trained her online — recording her touching herself, making her kneel and count aloud, making her confess to the camera what she is — and then he said: come out. That little copse on the city’s edge is where, for the first time, she wired the voice on the other end of the line into her own body.

Four years married, and her husband Xu Lang touches her less and less — and when he does, it is over fast. Alone in the dead of night, Lin Jianxia sends herself over the edge with one massage wand after another, each one bigger than the last, then goes to work the next morning as poised as ever. She had been dodging Shen Yan, the male coworker whose eyes always undressed her — but she could not dodge him forever. First it was in his car in the underground garage, where, as if possessed, she took him in her mouth; later it was a booked hotel room, a set of black lace maid lingerie laid out on the bed, and he fastened it on her button by button, then pressed her down inch by inch, licking her nipples, licking her clean-shaven sex below. She let this affair in. Shen Yan bought her lingerie, taught her how to use her mouth, how to ride him, and at the end pulled off the condom and came in her mouth. And her husband, who so rarely did it, one day suddenly praised her: lately you seem to have… figured it out. Three points of view interweave: the coworker’s hunt and patience, the wife’s inch-by-inch fall inside the contrast of pleasure, and the husband’s oblivious dullness and his ironic praise.

Yun is a teacher, 168 centimeters tall with waist-length straight black hair, and a cold face that can freeze an entire office solid — until she opens her mouth and every bit of that ice melts away. She used to be a livestreamer sustained by countless lenses, and only shut the channel down after a stalker hunted her home; then she turned and stepped onto a lecture platform — but the body remembers what it is to be watched. Her boyfriend, who is also her Master, hands her an order one day: go and help a shy sophomore, A, “loosen up.” In a library discussion room there is a low-cut white blouse, perfume, a scorching gaze, and one line — “let your senpai help you.” This is a lesson taught with the Master present, where Yun is the teaching aid, and also the woman whose aloof mask cracks, burning with excitement inside her own submission.