Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Ten days before the wedding, she returns to the southern water town that raised her, wanting only to live out her last quiet days as an unmarried girl. But Lu Zhixing is there too—her fiancé’s childhood friend, the two of them thick as thieves since diaper days, the man who has coveted her with his eyes since they were teenagers, and who now lives on the top floor of a building on the town’s edge, complete with a wine cellar and a private playroom. A jar of aged nü’er hong, and a string of old memories he lifts up one by one and lays before her again, pry back open the door in her heart that was about to close. From one grip through her shirt, to the stripping away of the ivory-white lace she had prepared for her wedding night, to that line when he was buried deepest without a condom—“Can I just go in like this?”—and finally to his two equally discreet friends joining in, the last no-tomorrow madness before the wedding. When dawn breaks they all scatter, she washes herself clean, dons the white veil, and carries this secret no one will ever know into the wedding hall. Three chapters alternating between viewpoints: Lu Zhixing’s obsession hidden for years, her layered tug-of-war between guilt and a body that betrays her on the eve of her marriage, and the fiancé off in another city, run ragged over the wedding, oblivious to all of it, who has even entrusted his childhood friend to “look after my bride-to-be for me.”

Fresh out of college and into her first office job, petite Lin Wan keeps getting dragged by her towering, 1.92-meter platonic best friend Zhou Lang into his crew of basketball buddies. One dinner, buzzed on drink, Zhou Lang and his friend Jiang Hang float a half-joking dare — go big tonight. Nobody called it off first; the liquor and the unspoken understanding pushed the three of them into a private lounge booth, and a boundary none of them named yet all three understood began, just like that, from a single joke.

Lin Wan is a gardener born in ’99: five foot eight, one hundred thirty pounds, a pair of E cups, an ass round and heavy, thighs so lush a fingertip sinks in. Raised under a strict household, married two years, before her wedding she was almost a blank page — even flirting stopped at holding hands. But her husband took on a new project and works past midnight; month by month the two of them do it less and less. She learned to comfort herself on an empty bed with toys, the boxes growing bigger with each order, yet filling her less and less. A fellow gardener she met at a training seminar, a man online, coaxes the little flame in her heart up bit by bit through the screen — until at last he comes to her home. He kisses her the moment the door opens, gropes her, kneels to serve her with his mouth — he is plainly far bigger than her husband; the instant he stretches her open through a condom she knows there is no going back, and in the end she herself lets him peel the rubber off, lets scorching burst after burst flood into her deepest place. From then on she drives out again and again to keep their trysts, or lets the man in through her own door, while her husband, drowning in his work dinners, never notices a thing. Three viewpoints interweave: the man online and his hunt and awe, Lin Wan and the inner self her own body betrays step by step, and the husband, buried in banquets, who compliments his wife on how well she has been looking lately.

A young language teacher born in ’99, raised under an iron-strict upbringing, a blank page before marriage — the most daring thing in her college years was holding hands. Two years into the marriage, her husband is so busy he treats her like air, and she can only feed her own hunger with toys that keep getting bigger. An inter-school teaching seminar leads her to add a fellow male teacher on WeChat, and over two weeks of chatting they only grow closer. On the day he is on duty with his family away, he invites her over — and when her husband, at a dinner banquet, tells her to stay safe, she is in fact already driving to his place.

To her coworkers, Su Man is the aloof goddess of the office — but she hides a secret: she posts her own nudes to a foreign corner of the internet. When she meets Director Lu from headquarters, that door swings open, and this master couple trains her, step by step, into a bitch who kneels on the floor and acknowledges her owners.

Kai roped me in as his wingman, to help him chase Su Qing, a woman two years older than us. When the dinner broke up, he was the one who’d drunk too much, and he was the one she turned down—yet she added me on WeChat, and it was me she started meeting. By day she’s the worldly, sharp older sister who says exactly what your heart needs to hear; by night she slips into a thin nightgown and becomes someone else entirely—someone who pins me down, forbids me to pull out, and grinds me to surrender against her cervix. I went from bystander to the one she chose.