Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Twenty-three days after night one, Lao K makes good on “a different person, a different position”: this time nobody is invited. Xiaoman goes out in a short skirt and black pantyhose with nothing underneath to flash at the riverside, gets dragged into the back seat, her hose torn open and fucked from behind, and sits down in a bar reeking of cum. The terrace of the top-floor pool suite is separated from the one next door by a half-open partition. Lao K has her kneel naked in the shallow pool and spread herself, and A-Yan, the lone business traveler next door, climbs onto his sofa and sees. Lao K nods at him, and then says: the door is not locked.

Five days and four nights in Sanya. Xue Hong, thirty-six, spent four days in meetings on the balcony, and Qin Yue, twenty-eight, spent four days by the pool being watched by A-Hai, the twenty-four-year-old lifeguard. She is good to her husband, he is even better to her, he just never looks at her. She put on her sunglasses and asked A-Hai what time he got off, then picked the lounger right under her husband’s balcony. Sunglasses on, keep going; sunglasses off, stop. On the flight home, her husband put his hand on her knee, and she took the sunglasses off.

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.

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.

Three years married, she finds four hundred and thirty-seven nude photos of herself in the locked album on her husband’s phone — and not one of them has ever left it. For two years he has been bragging in a group chat and saying he can’t bring himself to share. She sits on the toilet lid and looks at every one of them, picks out three, and from her own account adds the man who has been waiting two years.

Five years married, two years of watching that scene from the outside. The first time we actually went to meet someone, I set exactly one rule before we left the flat: you can film it, but whether it goes out is mine to decide. At thirty-one I kept the footage locked for three days, and on the fourth I cut thirty seconds myself and pressed send myself. Later that was not enough. I wanted the full one out, with my face in it.

Feng Yuwei, twenty-nine, product manager, with legs the whole office talks about. One year into her marriage, her programmer husband is gentle and sweet: six minutes, fourteen times, not a single orgasm. Then on an anonymous app, someone called K sends one line: Aren’t you the one who wants to be controlled. From then on, every morning at seven, she gets a task: no panties to work, a vibrator inside her through meetings, a soaked chair at the quarterly review right in front of the CEO. She has never seen K’s face, yet K starts telling her how to fuck her own husband. Then a package arrives at her home. Signed for by: Zhou Yi.

Luo Xiao, thirty, runs an animal hospital; long legs from the gym, a husband who is a deputy section chief and hasn’t once gotten her there in two years. The dog trainer she hired to teach a course at her hospital calls her up on stage, buckles a collar on her, and uses her for the demo. After class she stays on the training floor to learn sit, down, roll over — do it right and the reward is one finger. The tag is engraved Xiaoxiao. Behind a park bench he tells her to bark, and she does.

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.

A thirty-four-year-old office manager: by day, a sweet, composed face in the office tower, polite to the point of aloofness, and no one can see the bottomless well of desire hidden beneath that cool, distant mask. In an anonymous online group she stumbles onto a game they call “social death”—sending your most private photos to someone in your contacts, then recalling them one second before they open, using that fraction of a second of ambiguous, could-be-real loss to push herself to the brink where her heart nearly stops. It begins with one recalled nude, and a man she has never met, through a screen, directs her step by step: to touch herself, to be dragged into a group and humiliated in front of everyone, and finally, one night, to walk out her own front door with a toy inside her and hand herself over to two strangers. Three POVs alternate: the stranger on the other side of the screen coolly raising the stakes, the heroine’s civil war between reason and body, and her self-scrutiny across the widening rift between her cold professional shell and her private, wanton hunger.

At the convention she’s the coser who smiles the most — white thigh-highs, a short skirt, a wig combed to perfection, soft-voiced to everyone at her sketch table. No one knows that once the crowd is gone and she’s back in her rented room, she turns off the light, props her phone on the bookshelf, kneels before the lens, and waits for a voice that has only ever existed on a screen to give the orders. He has never seen her face, yet he knows better than anyone the curve of her spine when she kneels, the whimper she chokes back in her throat when she’s commanded. Three months he trained her online — recording her touching herself, making her kneel and count aloud, making her confess to the camera what she is — and then he said: come out. That little copse on the city’s edge is where, for the first time, she wired the voice on the other end of the line into her own body.

Three years married, I saved my most obedient face for my husband and hid my hungriest self inside my phone. That autumn, my best friend A said she wanted to take me to a neighboring-province city called Yunting, to meet four men she had known online for a long time, and play for three days. I said yes so fast it startled even me. Over those three days I stood at the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling window and stripped naked facing the whole commercial street; I wore a collar and a ball gag while A walked me around the room on a leash; a charging cable whipped my back red, and one hand clamped my throat while he came inside me at the deepest point; in a secluded restroom stall in a park I was made to swallow him, trembling as I sent photos to the man waiting far away for my reply, then frantically recalling them. On the last night, four men lined up and filled me one after another while A held up her phone and recorded everything. These were three days when, behind my husband’s back, I gave myself away completely — reason kept shouting stop, and my body kept surrendering. All adults, all agreed in advance, a willing fall.

She flies with her lover A to an unfamiliar city to meet his four male friends. After dinner they enter that low-floor room whose window faces the busy shopping street, and she is ordered to strip facing the glass — from the stiff, shy fumbling of a first-timer to a slap that shoves her into another kind of order. Circle blowjob, group facial, collar and gag, a charging cable, a hand around her throat and a creampie; then walking the streets by day with a little toy inside her, a mouthful smeared even outside a park toilet, filthy talk let loose on camera, and a heart-sign selfie sent to her boyfriend at dawn. Three chapters, multiple POVs: the bitch and exhibitionist drawn out of her, the A who leads her step by step into group play, and the four men who take turns using her.

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.

Graduate student Lin Yue is an old hand at picking up men, but the one thing she truly craves is the thing her lover, Mr. Gu, uses to discipline her. This time he books her for an art photo shoot, dressing her in a traditional Chinese crimson bridal gown — from the studio changing mirror to the gridlocked car, from the brightly lit counter of a sex shop to the small hours in a hotel room, he pushes her step by step into the shame of being displayed in public, and again and again he feeds her full. She goes the whole day without a single meal, yet her belly is packed with what he gives her, so full she floats when she walks.