Write your fantasy,
make it real.

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.”

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.

Low season, five of the six rooms empty, and her man on the road two hundred days a year. A photographer from Shanghai moves into the courtyard to shoot the old house, and the one who walks over with a cup of tea and says “take one of me too” is her. She sets the rules: nothing posted, nothing sold, not one cent changing hands. Her husband comes home early and stands in the guest room doorway, and she looks back at him over the other man’s shoulder and does not stop.

A year and two months married, and my husband stands on the balcony with a cigarette and says, Da Wei wants to see you. So I set four rules: he only watches, nobody films, I take my own clothes off, and when I say stop it stops. The first time he sat at the foot of the bed in that ninety-nine yuan chair, and I came with my eyes on his. The second time I let him touch me. The third time I climbed on myself, and my husband sat in the chair. This week Da Wei says he wants to bring a buddy.

Eight years married, three of them with him impotent. That night he stood in front of the wardrobe and said he wanted to find a man to fuck me while he watched from the side. I said yes in ten minutes, with three conditions only: I pick the man myself, I set the rules, and in the room you watch and you do not speak. After that the hotel was booked by me, the condoms were bought by me, and the notebook was written by him because I told him to write it.

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.

Ten years married, and the hundred-and-forty-square-meter apartment is hers alone most of the year. Her husband is out of town twenty days a month, and under every single thing she posts there is exactly one man who likes it: the chairman of the homeowners’ committee, twenty-sixth floor of her own building. The night the prep meeting broke up he said he was going her way, the car was on B2, and the back seat was stacked with undistributed supply boxes. Three months later she is vice chair, and when the dinner breaks up three men are standing at three doors, waiting to see which way she goes.

Yang Ting is thirty, a full-time mother four months postpartum, and her programmer husband will not touch her. She goes in for pelvic floor rehab, and on the second visit the male therapist, A-Jie, stops and asks: press any further and this stops being rehab — do you want it? She says she does. He transfers her remaining eight sessions to another therapist on the spot and tells her he gets off at five thirty. The half year that followed, she typed into her phone one line at a time.

Married a year. Her husband runs a courier station and hauls parcels till past midnight every night. Lin Shan is twenty-seven, a course consultant at a vocational training school; the group leader post was decided by the school affairs committee on September receipts, passed on Thursday, the announcement already queued. For eight hundred eighty she rented ten hours at a recording studio off campus. The owner is fifty-seven, minds the machines and doesn’t teach, and doesn’t know a single person where she works. The first time, she undid her own buttons.

Day eighteen postpartum. Her husband is in Guangzhou closing a three-million-dollar deal and has not come once. What comes instead is the confinement center’s only male masseur, there to do abdominal repair, his hand stopping eleven seconds above her pubic bone. She books one extra session, then nine more. The baby goes down to the nursery, the nurses knock at the door, and he drives into her from behind. The day she checks out her husband pulls up in his Mercedes, and there is a new contact in her phone saved as “Postpartum Repair.”

Zeng Xue, thirty-five, creative director at an ad agency, E cup, one nodule in her left breast. Her husband is a corporate executive, eighty flights a year. A colleague tells her to go for a breast lymphatic detox; the manager says the best therapist is a man. Xiao Kai is twenty-eight. He says: Sis, you’ve got a nodule here. The first time he does the deep-tissue, she comes clutching the sheet. After that, every Wednesday, Room 3, extra sessions, deep-tissue, doubles.

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.

Jiang Xue, thirty-two, company cashier. Her husband blew up his stock account and her credit card is days from going on her credit report. She knocks on the finance director’s door and borrows thirty thousand of his own money, writes the IOU herself, and clears it in one payment the moment the year-end bonus lands. The month-end she tears that IOU up, she is the one who stays behind to reconcile, and she is the one who locks the finance room door. He tells her: walk out now and tomorrow nothing happened. She says, I am not here to pay money back.

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.

Her husband gambled and ran, and the hot pot restaurant had six days until the rent was due. Xiao Chen, the kitchen supervisor, put up a hundred thousand to save it, with one condition: from now on, in this restaurant, you do what I say. House rule one: after close, nothing under the apron. Rule two: no panties in the restaurant. Rule three would be written the day Lao Zhao came back. The thirty-eight-year-old boss lady lay face down on the stainless steel counter, the supplier’s delivery slip still crumpled in her hand.

Wang Qi, twenty-nine, a tour leader for a travel agency, 75E, one meter sixty-eight. Her husband is a middle school PE teacher: twice a month, three minutes a time. She takes a group to Bangkok, the whole group goes for Thai massage, and so does she. Ah Ti, a thirty-year-old Thai masseur, jams his knee in and spreads her legs apart. The next day she goes back to the shop on her own and tells the front desk: I want the special. On day four, with her group singing next door, she gets fucked front and back by two masseurs at once in a private room upstairs.

Han Miaomiao, a kindergarten teacher of twenty-seven, buys a 12,800-yuan pre-wedding body package thirty-one days before her wedding. The male therapist, Ah Wei, says: Bride, the whole body has to be done. The first time his hand stops at the top of her thigh, the second time his fingers go into her, the third time she asks for the intimate care herself. The day before the wedding, the dress hangs on the wall of room three, and she kneels on the massage table and says: shoot it inside. The next day, walking the red carpet, what she thinks of is the sweet almond scent of room three.