Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Nine years into their marriage, Zhou Yu hid an absurd “cuckold manifesto” under the takeout menus on the fridge door and never found the nerve to bring it up. Lin Wan found it first — and went through it line by line with the red pen she uses to edit manuscripts. Some points she cursed, some she struck out, some she marked “open to discussion.” That night they talked about sex for the first time in their lives, set three rules, and invited to dinner the older classmate she never quite said no to in college.

By day she is the most flawless project manager in the cubicle rows, measured in speech, immaculate in makeup; deep at night she carries out a stranger’s commands one by one, holding her own panties in her mouth for the camera, waiting for a single cold word of reward from him. Cyber-domination tames her bit by bit, until one day she books a cross-city ticket and walks into that rented flat — the door shuts, her clothes are torn off, a leather collar is buckled around the back of her neck, and a leash tows her crawling across the floor. Three points of view take turns telling this descent that spreads from the screen into the flesh: how he turns a single declaration into a panting bitch, how her body mutinies out of shame before reason can catch up, and how that respectable daytime self keeps remembering the ring of marks on the back of her neck in the meeting room.

She has been a professional dancer for over a decade, poised and self-contained onstage, yet offstage she hides a fierce exhibitionist streak — one button of her practice leotard deliberately left undone, rehearsing bare underneath, swaying in black lace lingerie before the mirror, fantasizing that someone in the building across the street is holding binoculars. Then, in the rehearsal hall one late night, behind that door left ajar, a man really is standing there — a man she has secretly longed to have watch her. Being watched becomes being taken; shame becomes the fiercest climax of her life. Alternating points of view: the man who catches her, the inner self fracturing beneath her decorous shell, and the gaze that has always lingered in the dark.

165cm, 60kg, 80H — Yao Yan is one of the busiest veteran shoot models in the scene, her skin luminously pale, her heavy breasts capable of straining any tube top past its limit; they are the asset she carries into every studio, the one thing that never loses her a booking. Demure on the surface, wildly the opposite in private, she is opened up inch by inch, starting the evening a shoot wraps, by a patron who spends without flinching: from cash slipped into her bag at the dinner table, to the first time her chest is kneaded open through a sports bra in the car, to becoming his acknowledged mistress, flown across the world on his arm — until she leads her own best friend into the bed of a threesome with her own hands. Three chapters trace how a woman who treats her body as capital sinks, step by step, through money, through the pleasure of being drawn out, through the shame of being shared — until the man who first opened her returns to her city, treats her as a gift ripened to perfection, and passes her to two of his friends. Three alternating points of view: the patron’s calculation and control, her own steady defeat between reason and flesh, and the greed of the man she is shared with, watching from the far bank.

The year she graduated, she and her boyfriend — a track-and-field athlete — rented a one-bedroom on the edge of the city, cramming both their luggage, both their futures, and her increasingly honest body through a door that sealed the world out the moment it clicked shut. He was lean, his clothes hiding a frame whittled sharp by the track and the barbell, but the thing between his legs was absurdly large; the first time it truly pinned her down, she understood — she would never get away in this life. From then on he set her a code of rules that held only inside that door: his morning erection had to be sucked awake on her knees, no underwear was ever allowed at home, the laundry basket was entirely hers, and even his sweat-soaked athletic socks and briefs had to be brought to the tip of her nose and breathed in before she was permitted to drop them into the washing machine. She cursed herself as filthy in her heart even as she willingly ground her knees into the floor. Three chapters — from the rules laid down on the first day of moving in, to the round-the-clock domestication of a single day, to a bout of home sex that filled her utterly and poured into her deepest place — a story of how a girl, through days that were both heaven and hell, lived the nickname “Number Forty-Three” into her most secret identity.

At 171 centimetres, Xu Qingyan is the design department’s acknowledged ice-cold heiress — her posture forever straight, her replies forever impeccable, her tall boots striking the corridor like they tread on the upward gazes of everyone else. But after she moves out and lives alone at university, she discovers another self in the small hours: peeling off her stockings and lifting the arch of her foot — gone sour after a whole airless day — to her nose, that scent of her own, private and never meant to be smelled, unlocks a switch she has never dared admit to. Three chapters tracing how an ice-cold top student sinks inch by inch through scent-fetish and online training, how she walks into the most formal public settings with a toy inside her, swallowing back down her throat, under countless watching eyes, an orgasm she strains to hold until she shakes — on the surface, a long-legged prodigy; in secret, a wild thing tamed by her own smell.

She is the homeroom teacher of a top high school, spending her days on the podium controlling the grades of over forty students, then coming home at night to an empty apartment — her engineer husband is stationed out of town year-round and barely makes it back a few times a year. She hands her too-tightly-wound self over to the gym, and there she meets the young man who comes to lift after work. After one overseas-feeling quarrel with her husband, the weekend gym is empty except for the two of them, and hormones catch fire in the smell of sweat and the metallic tang of the machines. From the first time at the hotel, to the rough encounter in the restroom, to the phone call she works up the nerve to make after the year-end dinner — she is torn back and forth between “delete him” and “call him over one more time.”

By day she is the quiet, near-invisible good girl — too timid to speak up in a queue, curled into a corner scrolling her phone at parties. But only she knows that in the blue glow of her screen late at night she opens, over and over, those forbidden, discipline-themed fantasy videos, folds her body into a tight ball, and lets shame and craving claw at each other inside her. Then came the night at the club, when for the first time she reached her hand toward her best friend’s boyfriend, when for the first time she tasted what it means to cross the line — and learned that the sweetest thing of all is always the one who already belongs to someone else. From then on she sinks into an endless game of seducing other women’s men: the more shameful it is, the more she cannot stop.

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.

The reception is over, and two married couples end up crammed into the same suite. He has long harbored a craving he could never say aloud — the desire to watch his small, delicate wife pulled into another man’s arms; and she, the shy one who earned her master’s degree and works in an office tower, discovers that night a beast hiding inside her body that even she doesn’t recognize. Three lines of sight cross in the dark: her mix of shame and wantonness, his pride and jealousy, and the breath of a stranger drawing near.

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.

She and Xiao Wang had the kind of relationship neither of them ever put into words — once a week, then each of them went home alone. Until the night of her birthday, when Xiao Wang said, for the first time, that he wanted to write her name into the blank marked ‘girlfriend.’ Before either of them had figured out whether it counted as love, a couple named Brother Li and Xiao Man barged into their weekend, and one steam-filled hot-spring villa pushed everything ‘they could not put into words’ to the point where it had to be said out loud.

A young couple, five years together, finally speak aloud the wife-swapping fantasy they’ve buried for so long. Online they meet an older married pair — from cautious probing across a screen, to their first face-to-face over coffee on a street corner, to the four of them trading partners in a quiet hotel room in a riverside apartment. She is filled inch by inch by a stranger while he watches from the side, taking another man’s wife, pride and bitterness twisting together in his chest. Three interlacing points of view: Lin, bashful yet wanton; the boyfriend, cuckolded, aroused and jealous at once; and the seasoned older man who controls the tempo with practiced ease.

She’s a thirty-year-old independent designer whose studio is barely staying afloat. A big client who controls a whole year’s budget slides his offer under the table — an unspoken exchange, an intimate tug-of-war between ambition and self-humiliation. She loathes herself even as she discovers her body is more honest than her mind.

She is the HR manager at a trading company, forever wearing the cold, unapproachable face her colleagues have learned not to test. On a business trip to a southern city, at a welcome dinner, she meets a tall foreign executive — he is in no hurry; he simply drops his words right beside her ear and pours the liquor straight into her hand. From the KTV to the bar to the hotel, everything she has held down for far too long breaks loose in a single night. She thinks it is just one slip, only to find herself inventing reasons for business trips, flying over every week, all to be filled by him once more.