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.

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.

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.

Fan Jing is thirty, a graphic designer so quiet at work that her colleagues call her “Silent Mode.” Living alone on the fourth floor of an old apartment block, she goes from sitting by an open window with no bra, to taking out the trash at night with nothing under her skirt, to ordering a seventeen-centimeter anal bead stick online. One Friday near midnight, she stands at the curb with it buried inside her, and the man across the street watches her for ten minutes. Then he starts walking toward her.

Pilates instructor Qiao Tang has spent a year posting faceless photos on a burner account, and one follower named A-Shu has always called her “sis.” The night her husband Zhou Xiao finds the DMs, he isn’t angry. He’s hard. They set three rules: A-Shu stays inside the phone. No meeting. No faces. Friday night at eleven, she presses and holds the record button.

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.

Nine years married, and her husband does not touch her once in a year. At the Tangshan hot springs two couples push their barbecue tables together, and her husband proposes swapping for a night. She says nothing at the time. At ten, in the private bath, she is the one who puts her hand on the other husband’s thigh: my husband proposed it, and I am agreeing now. Who changes rooms, and what time everyone goes back to their own — every one of those is her call.

Ten years married, and at the dinner table my husband said he wanted Fang Zhe, the man he shared a dorm room with at university, to be with us. I did not answer on the spot; I sat on it for two weeks. The day I answered I brought a sheet of paper and read four rules out to the two men, and only when I had finished did I say: then we start. Later he moved into our own compound, the schedule lives on my phone, three days a week.

Six years married, she is a bridesmaid at an old classmate’s wedding, and the best man is Zhou Kai, the one who chased her all through university and never got a single sentence out. Her husband drinks himself under the table and gets hauled up to the room. She has had two glasses and is completely sober. The second the elevator doors close, she is the one who presses the red stop, and she pulls his hand up under the bridesmaid dress: back then you did not dare — do you dare now.

Thirty-eight, partner at an accounting firm, husband a surgeon who is home two nights a week. Every Wednesday at seven the math tutor comes; at nine the lesson ends, the boy is collected, and two people are left in the apartment. She laid it out flat: the lessons go on, the money stays at the original rate, and you can stop any time you want. Nine months, twenty-one thousand six hundred, not a cent more. The day the account was settled in full was the day she threw the deadbolt.

Zheng Wan, thirty-four, a bank branch manager. Her husband drinks with clients till the small hours and comes home only to sleep. She goes alone to the foot spa across from the Wanda mall, and Xiao Liu, the twenty-six-year-old technician crouching at her feet, asks: “Sis, want to extend?” She extends. From her feet to her calves, from her calves to the tops of her thighs inside her stockings, from the private room downstairs to the soundproofed suite on the second floor. She starts going every week, then three times a week, and then she brings her husband along.

Luo Ya, a thirty-two-year-old history teacher, is married to a tax clerk so by-the-book he’s by-the-book in bed too. A bad back walks her into a blind-massage shop, where the male masseur Old Sun is blind, his hands unerring. One line—“I can’t see, you can take it off”—presses her, step by step, onto that pink massage table. Extra time, requesting him by name, the lights blazing over the mirror—she sinks deeper and deeper, until the glint in the gap of the door curtain.

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.