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.

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, 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.

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.

Suo Min, thirty-one, plays bass for Low Pressure Trough. Her husband Ying Hao is the drummer, out with a wrist injury, not allowed to touch a single stick. At soundcheck for the Fengkou Music Festival, Da Li, the monitor engineer, pushes her low end up two notches. She sets the rule: with the pass hanging on her neck he can touch her; off and on the console, he stops. After the show, behind the black drape with close to ten thousand people still out front, her husband sits across from her with a bodypack on, listening, counting one two three four over the comms. A month later, at her husband’s comeback show, she hangs the pass on the drum kit.

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.

No tickets together for the holiday rush, so Tong Rui, thirty-four, an administrator at an adult night school, takes the soft-sleeper lower bunk while her husband Qi Yuan sits in a hard seat in another car. On the bunk across is Wen Tao, forty-one, a pharmaceutical rep who lives on long-haul trains. When the lights go out he says: the curtain shut means one thing, open means another. After Qinggang it’s all tunnels, one after another. Before the train pulls in, she hands her husband her ticket, with the number of the man across written on the back.

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.

Qin Yutong, thirty-five, runs a bookstore. Strictly raised, she never takes off the sandalwood prayer beads her grandmother left her. Divorced five years, she visits her ex-husband once a year, on his birthday, to bring a cake. This year she put the prayer beads in her bag. On her carpenter ex-husband’s elm workbench she argues every step with her grandmother while the beads rattle in the bag to his rhythm. Her current husband sees her location, does not call, and simply buys a new string of beads and lays it on her pillow. She goes wearing that string, does it wearing that string, the string breaks, and of eighteen beads she picks up seventeen.

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.”

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.

Six years into their marriage, every time they were in bed, He Yu asked about her ex. Then one night Wen Ning switched off the light and said: You’ve always wanted to know, so I’ll let you see it with your own eyes. She booked two adjoining rooms, set up the camera herself, sat her husband next door with headphones on, and went to open the door for her ex.

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.

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, ten years married. This time what he wants is: she pretends to sleep, and the other man, A-Kai, slips into the room in the middle of the night. She sets the rules, and one “lights on” stops everyone. Ji Hotel, room 1207, room 1210 diagonally across the hall; the lights go out, and a black shape comes in through the crack of the door. She was never asleep, and the moment he pressed down on her she panicked for real: one punch, and Lao Song’s nose was pouring blood. Lights on, three people frozen for half an hour. Then it was she who said it: go on, him first, leave the lights on.

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.