“I want us to make the reeds tremble tonight,” Jun whispered into her husband’s ear, employing the euphemism her grandmother’s generation had used before the revolution. Knowing that sleep would assuredly not come that fateful night, Kim Sun Park agreed. Jun helped her husband out of his drab blue party uniform and then she undressed herself. She watched Kim rub his cock, working up his erection and slipped her own finger...

Once, when Jun was younger and engaged but not yet married, there had been an incident in the Pyongyang apartment block where she had lived with her parents and brother. A couple had been overheard making love too loudly. The police had come and hauled them outside, and the incautious lovers had been forced to stand naked in the open air outside the building. Almost the entire building had come out to subject them to crit...

Barcelona. Eight months after the last story. As Carlos’s bedroom door closed behind her, Jun experienced a frisson of something like guilt. Sleeping with Dani had been agreed to and arranged by Kim, her husband. Sleeping with Albert had been her choice, but she had not yet been pregnant at the time and she had needed a baby at all costs, even at the price of fidelity. Carrying and birthing a Spanish baby was her best hop...