Living in Shanghai as a Chinese woman, I have always enjoyed flirting with foreign men at parties. And my husband enjoyed watching me doing it. He is also Western and very open-minded, and he always felt proud when he saw other men lavish envious attention on me, his sexy, flirty Shanghai slut-wife. But the last party I went to didn’t turn out as I had planned. For most of the night, it was no different than the dozens of...

If you’d asked me that Thursday morning how my day was going, I probably would’ve rolled my eyes and changed the subject. Nothing had gone right. I spilled coffee on my shirt before leaving for work. My boss dropped a last-minute project on my desk. Lunch ended up being a vending machine sandwich because I was too busy to leave the office. By five o’clock, I was tired, annoyed, and ready to get home as quickly as possible...

She steps in barefoot, carrying her shoes and a glass of white wine she doesn’t remember picking up. She presses thirty-seven. The elevator reeks of bleach and somebody else’s perfume. In the light up there, she looks fifteen years older than she did at lunch. Four hours of behavioral economists agreeing with one another and patting one another on the back about it. Her feet are ruined. The wine is warm. She drinks the wi...

I didn’t know much about women like Stella, just that you didn’t meet them by chance. Women who looked like Ava Gardner didn’t wander into a place like mine unless they were looking for something. Or hiding from someone. In her case, it was both. She took a seat in the corner booth, tucked away where she wouldn’t be noticed but still had a clean look at the room. She sat there for a few minutes expecting to be served befo...

“Bree! Come on in, have a seat. Can I get you anything? Coffee?” “Please,” I answered Chris and nodded to his secretary, Jan. I felt a quiet rush of pride at the fact that she no longer needed to ask how I liked it. I had a standing coffee order in the office of Chris Fucking Jameson. How many people could say that? “A couple of things have come up that we need to go over,” he said, turning to tap away the lockscreen on h...

"Last Christmas..." et cetera. It's like Wham! is personally mocking me through the speakers. Then again, it's actually my fault for going to the office Christmas party days after getting dumped. And to top it all off, they had to make it a costume party. The worst part is that I have to be here because, well, it's promotion month, and every social point counts. So there I was, a white guy in my late 30s wearing a red nos...

I approached the clapboard house as if I thought a big, feral dog was about to come charging out of it. August was home; I had to walk right past his Ford F-150 on my way to the porch. I didn't belong in this hollow. I had no relatives out this way. Even now, I could feel stares on me from surrounding houses. All around, mountains collected the early evening shadows. Before I had a chance to reach August's front door and...

He could still taste her on his lips when he realized that every clock in the shop had stopped. 20:59. Pendulums hung mid-swing, and second hands stood poised like knives. Elias’s breath came in ragged bursts. His shirt was half-untucked, and his knuckles clutched the counter until they turned white. He felt oddly separate from his own body, as if the wanting hadn’t been his idea at all. Marisol slipped the antique watch...

When the COVID-19 lockdown was first announced, my girlfriend took the opportunity to completely clean the house from top to bottom. She even took down the curtains to wash them, but somehow, they came out of the washer only half of the original size. Now you must know that our house was almost directly on the road, and the curtains were the only thing that kept passing people from looking straight into our living room. B...