The following is based on a true story. Some minor details, such as the names of people, have been changed for privacy, brevity, and storytelling purposes.
We met at gym. Specifically, we met as a 40-kilo barbell was threatening to guillotine him after an unsuccessful attempt at bench-press. Seeing this from the treadmill, I jumped over and hoisted it off of him and, to my surprise, he spoke English.
Having spent the last year-and-change in what the government had optimistically called a "tier one" city, I had been horribly isolated. Few people I met spoke English, and even fewer still were willing to speak it.
This was in the days before the pandemic, but it was still a headache organizing Chinese lessons for myself. Between my working hours and postgrad studies, it was hard enough to find time to sleep. I had never progressed beyond a dozen or so phrases a tourist might swot before coming over. And I sure as hell wasn't going to impinge on my gym-time. I was eager to get back into powerlifting competitions, and a local one was coming up in the spring.
This spindly little man, Jin, was affable enough. Even downright enthusiastic to speak to a round-eyed foreigner. It wouldn't take terribly long to find out why. We exchanged initial pleasantries and for a few weeks he seemed to be waiting for me at gym. I'd come through the doors and he'd stop, mid-set, to bound over with a beaming smile and a limp yet energetic handshake, followed by the ever-present invitation to eat lunch with him and his wife. At first, I thought this was some cultural quirk, as it would be the umpteenth time someone would tell me "let's have a meal together" with absolutely no intention of a follow-through.
Jin though, was quite insistent, and after a few weeks of rescuing him from the blood-thirsty barbells, I agreed.
We met in a private backroom of a Sichuan restaurant. The kind of backroom that didn't have the near-ever-present security cameras peering at you. At least none that you could see. I eyed the smoke detector with mild suspicion as I entered.
Jin and his wife were already waiting for me. Out of his tracksuit and in business casual, he somehow seemed even more of a retreating shadow. There was a tiredness in his eyes that was accentuated by his onset male-pattern baldness. It was as if even his hair follicles had surrendered to the demands of life. He still sprang up with surprisingly litheness when he saw me. The wife unfolded her arms and reached over to shake my hand, and in that brief unguarded moment I could not help but notice the curves of her chest, suggesting one of the rarest sights over the last year: breasts that were at least a C-cup. Ginormous for this corner of the world.
His wife in so many ways was his opposite. He I'd estimate to be somewhere in his late 40's at least, but she was a nudge over 27, looking barely 20 if a day. He was thin, drawn, stretched, borderline skeletal. She was slightly moon-faced, doe-eyed, and at least by local standards, a little chubby. His skin was webbed by fine wrinkles, and a little pock-marked. Hers was as smooth as alabaster, with a purple-maroon hue delicately crafted around her eyes and lips, fake eyelashes, big enough to be butterfly wings, wafted as she blinked. She had the double-eyelids that was so vaunted here, whether real or surgical I had no idea. He was on the cusp of balding, her slightly wavy hair tumbled down one shoulder like a midnight waterfall. He was exhausted yet enthusiastic. She was fresh as a daisy, yet completely disengaged. Through the entire meal she barely spoke ten words and was more interested in staring intently at her bowl than looking at anyone. She did at least offer me her English name, after I butchered the intonation of her given name. "Alice."
The meal proceeded much as it began. Jin peppering me with questions about life in China and how it compared to everywhere else I'd been, while Alice sat seeming to want to be anywhere else. Now and again, I caught her glancing at me before her eyes would dart back to her bowl again. It happened so often that I was becoming quite self-conscious.
The food finished, the wait staff started to supply us with rounds of baijiu: a spirit alcohol that one might mistake for being the cousin of vodka, but far more potent and closer to factory effluent.
A few shots in, Jin started looking expectantly at his wife. This seemed to fluster her until she finally stood up and said quite curtly, yet with an accent that would not be out of place in Knightsbridge, "Speak with Jin. He knows what I want." And left without another word. Having the EQ of a kumquat, I had no idea what any of that was about until much later.
In short, a very submissive woman with enough kinks and fetishes to fill a book had the grand misfortune of marrying an equally submissive man. Jin simply did not have it in him to say and do the things Alice wanted, and they agreed to outsource the job. Jin's negotiated position on this was that he would be involved in at least some capacity. I learnt even later that their marriage had been somewhat arranged. At 27, Alice was regarded as a "left-over woman" while Jin was a "diamond bachelor". Jin was a city-living party member - a detail that might have sent me running if I had found out earlier - while Alice was from one of the impoverished mountain villages and had to claw her way to university, and was only allowed to live in the city through her marriage. Her hukou, something like a domestic passport, was only updated with their wedding the year before.
I tried to decipher what exactly they each wanted. What were their limits? What were their interests? Their curiosities? And what did Jin mean exactly by "be involved in some capacity"? He vociferously insisted that he was straight, "but..."
But isn't it
more
servile to suck a cock you don't want than lick or fuck a pussy you do? Isn't it
more
humiliating to have your own wife watch you be forced to do these things? To be powerless to have another man take your woman in front of you? To be weak and powerless under the strength of another man? All his words, not mine. Apparently my little bench-press rescue left quite the impression.
I didn't see him at gym while these messages shot back and forth, but his eagerness spilt all over his typing.
I scrolled through those messages one last time while I stood waiting for the elevator that would whisk me up to their apartment. I shifted the gym bag on my shoulder, some of its unusual contents, meant for a different kind of training, were jabbing into my back. Not for the first time I wondered if this wasn't some organ-harvesting scheme. I'd like to say I'm usually wiser than this, but my dick has led me down some roads I wouldn't go even with a gun. Having effectively no-one else to speak to for over a year probably did some damage to the parts of my brain related to self-preservation as well.
A few flecks of snow dusted my shoulders, but I barely noticed the cold. The adrenaline that started to seep into my veins kept me bouncing on my heels. I was on the opposite side of the dusty factory-town from where I lived and worked. The fancier side, relatively speaking. Organ harvesters wouldn't work out of the BMW area of town, would they? I flicked through the messages one last time as I stepped into the waiting elevator, looking for a hint of incongruence or some suggestion that things weren't kosher. All I saw were answers to my earlier questions, some vivid and direct while others annoyingly vague.
Limits? Not many at all. Interests and curiosities? A lot. Some of them I had to Google, and I thought I was experienced to the brink of boredom. I had to tell them that more than a few of the extreme ones I was not interested in. They were both disappointed, he told me, but still glad I could help them with their "problem", as they referred to it. Alice was in the group chat as well, but never responded except for a terse "ok" agreeing to my preferred safe word of "black". Well, at least I had some proof that she might have read through everything.
My eyes skimmed over the last of our direct messages before that night.
"Do you love her?" I had asked.
"With all my heart."
"If you don't mind my asking, does she love you?" Punctuated by a very long pause.
"I hope. I believe. But she comes from a place where love is" Another pause and a separate message, "Optional."
I gave a deep sigh as the elevator door slid open on the 25
th
floor. I reminded myself that, assuming they weren't about to help themselves to my kidneys, this was their first time doing anything more exotic than doggy-style. Despite the few limits and many interests, fantasy and reality weren't always the same.
Start low, go slow, and pay attention to body language
, I told myself.
I knocked on the door to the apartment and Jin quickly ushered me inside, taking the gym bag from my shoulder and placing it by the door.
Unlike the grey, cracked concrete that constituted the communal areas of the apartment block, their apartment was beautifully adorned with everything lit a warm, soft orange. A sunset in autumn. The door led directly into their living room that played host to a large leather couch on one side, and a hundred-inch TV mounted on the opposite wall. Two mahogany end-tables bracketed the couch, with the tiled floor before it covered by an inch-thick mattress, large enough to blanket a king-sized bed.
Most lovely of all though, was Alice. She knelt by the far end-table in a
very
tight red qipao. The material strained at her every curve, and curvy she was. The locals might describe her as chubby, but the gods were good in the distribution of that chubbiness. I stood in shocked awe of the roundness at her hips, breasts, and thighs, whose curves seemed to be quite successfully exploding through the thin material. Her face was painted almost geisha-white, with fathomlessly dark mascara and eyeshadow pulling you to onyx-dark pupils as inexorably as two tiny black holes. Her hair was tied back in a high ponytail, the athletic style you see wagging on treadmills in gyms around the world. Two arcs of hair were loose from her fringe, framing her face like an "n".
"So, uh," Jin hesitated for a moment, himself in a white collar-less button-up and jeans, "How do we begin?"
"Let's start with a drink."
