It had been months since she had touched me. Whether she had another lover or not, I didn’t know, although I could have found out easily — a quick look into her eyes when she would come to my house straight from work, her whole body smelling of camphor. A peek into the photos on her computer, if she chose to leave it overnight, as she sometimes did when she decided to stay for two days in a row. I knew the password because she kept it the same for everything — ATEVA004! — and I knew this password because she trusted me with it. She trusted me with everything–money, watches, bills, time. So what right did I, her chosen confidant, have to doubt her?

Her official title was “Topical formulation scientist”, mixing and measuring and melting ingredients to make pain ointment for a famous Chinese company. The work was not enjoyable for her; monotonous, uncreative. At night as I tucked my head into the crease of her armpit, she would tell me what she really wanted to be:a perfumer, developing all the different scents she wanted instead of the same sharp, cold medicinal smell.

The beauty of fragrances, she told me as I stroked the side of her cheek, her stomach, all the parts of her I could touch, was that they came alive in different ways on everyone’s skin. It all depended on the person wearing them. Sometimes, she would make small vials of scents for me — saving the leaves of the tomato plants that grew wild in the field behind the factory, plucking blossoms from the yuzu trees in people’s yards as she walked from the train station, saving discarded orange peels from the compost, boiling these down into different oils for me to smear across my neck, my wrists, the backs of my ears.

Truth be told, I didn’t care much for them. I wanted to smell like myself. Like nothing. But I appreciated the gestures for what they were — offerings of love, or something like it, I told myself, and so kept them in small vials, each labeled with the date she had given it to me and the ingredients they contained in the bottom of my dresser.

If I thought about it now, though, it had also been a long time since she had given me anything like this either. Lately our evenings were as they had been when she first came to me — hours of us clawing at each other, our moans low and desperate as we bucked against each others’ wet lips or fingers or pussies. But we didn’t speak. Even if I tried. Even though I did try.

Maybe it was true that she knew my secret, had heard the rumors, and that was why she had responded to me the way she did at the grocery store, when I asked if she would like to spend time with me one day.

Up until that point we had only known each other in passing, brief chats at our friends’ parties about what we did, our shared interests, small spurts of conversations — underneath which I hoped she couldn’t sense my desperate longing.

One night she had stretched her leg across mine at a club as our friends danced, drunk and illuminated by the purple lights, the clouds of white smoke. I felt like I was going to die if I looked at her, so I tried my best to keep my eyes straight ahead, staring at our friend Jiani as she shrieked and spun and kissed different strangers around her. I managed to work up the courage to look at Min, both fearful and hopeful that she would be looking at me with desire, or anything really. I could have done with anything. But instead she was just looking at her phone, her other hand combing through her hair as if she were distracted.

I didn’t know what to do with the leg on top of mine, wanted to touch it but anxious this would be the wrong move, so I floated my hands above it for a second before I settled on pretending I was on my phone as well. I felt terribly embarrassed and awkward. I told myself the next day it probably didn’t mean anything at all.

But at the grocery store, when I had seen her in the dried food section picking out packets of squid and plum, I had asked her anyway. Would you like to go out with me sometime? I said. I forced myself to look at her face when I said it.

Of course. I’ve wanted you for a long time.

Those were the words she used. She had smiled at me, the dimple on her right cheek showing, and I had felt my face burning as we exchanged our WeChat accounts.

Later, when I went home, I repeated those words in my head, rearranged them into different sentences until I fell asleep.

Wanted me? Did want mean sex or love? Did that mean the leg incident had been real? A long time — how long was that? If she used the word “want” instead of “like” did that mean she only wanted me because she wanted to have sex with me?

Anyway, it didn’t matter. I thought about her leg on top of mine in the club, then what she looked like underneath the tight-fitted black pants she had been wearing that day, then I thought about her lifting my legs above her shoulders and making slow motions with her tongue on my clitoris, around it. I was so lost in the fantasy that I surprised myself that when I came, I moaned her name out loud. It was such a shameful thing. What right did I have to say her name like that?

But that was then and this was now.

She opened the door, which I now left unlocked most nights so that if she needed to get in, she could. She knew the passcode for the building, had a to get through the gate as well. Walking to the kitchen after giving me a brief hello, she grabbed some boxes of food out of the refrigerator and turned around to heat them up on the burner.

When she saw me she dropped everything. The pan, the pork, the eggs, the vegetables, all of it smeared across the tile.

“What did you do to yourself?” Min asked. I couldn’t tell if she was happy or horrified. “What did you do?”

“What you wanted me to do,” I said. I glided across the floor and kissed her. After a moment, her lips kissed me back. Soft at first, then harder and harder until it seemed like we were trying to swallow each other.

First I became a cloud-woman. Min had always liked watching them as a child, one of her only good memories from that period. Laying on the grass with her father, pointing out their shapes in the sky.

Illustration by Lauralee Benjamin

I lifted up my skirts, let her lap up my water. Her mouth was covered in dew when I kissed her. When she slipped her fingers inside of me, she muttered, Fuck. You’ve never been this fucking warm and wet before. I went down on her and my tongue was so soft, like dragon’s beard candy, she actually cried from how good it felt. I absorbed her smell, her sticky residue like a sponge inside of me. It felt good to hold this much.

Next I became a piano-woman. Min used to love to play the piano when she still had time, making up beautiful songs that no one had heard except for me, and even then only a few selected ones. Not even half of the melodies she composed. Her fingers ran over my keys, which had taken my ribs’ place, as she fingered me from behind. Each time her fingers pushed inside of me it was like she was playing again. Music pouring out of me, her music. Again, she wept. I cradled her in my arms afterward, petting her head, kissing her face. The first time she ever allowed me to do something like that.

I was a flower-woman. She loved how I smelled, like hibiscus, like lavender, like roses. Some of the names I didn’t know, flowers I had never seen, so I had her describe them to me. She squeezed my buds until they blossomed, burst, my pollen everywhere, all over her face, the bed, our bodies. We went through a flower encyclopedia afterward, and she pointed out her favorites — peonies, chrysanthemums, orchids — and told me why she loved them. Their curving stems, their large, pink faces.

I was a sea-woman. I was a book-woman. I was a honey and a fruit-woman, too. I loved slipping under her tongue like a secret, and I loved the way her body slid down the corners of whatever body I had. Whatever she wanted, I became. I was learning so much about her I had never known before. It didn’t matter if I disappeared.

Eventually, of course, she wanted me to change back. She said she missed my face. She said she missed spending time with the real me. Going out to bars, passing time with our small jokes, the way I used to talk to the food as I cooked it in order to make sure it was delicious.

I had to explain to her, then, of course there were rules to this. And the rule was that each time I changed, I would have to have someone remind me of myself in order to morph back into that form after everything had ended: Your hair is dark black. You are very tall. You don’t like mung bean. You are scared of heights. You were from a city that you never went back to after age 18. Things like that.

She couldn’t believe it. Her body kept twisting as she screamed with despair, rocking back and forth as she held herself like a temperamental child.

Why didn’t you tell me? Min asked. Why didn’t you say anything beforehand?

I was, of course, another woman now. I had taken the shape of her dead ex-girlfriend — plump lips, sharp bob, beautiful smile. Her final request. Mei Xiang, dead at 20 after a car accident. Her first love. It had made me so happy. Finally, she would want me.

I wrapped a hand around her shoulder as she wept, called her the nickname she had told me Mei Xiang always had — “little duck” because of the way she walked. I was beautiful. I was perfect. I was what she wanted, and she would realize soon that my original core was just a disgusting thing that we had disposed of, together.

“It’s okay, little duck,” I said, kissing her eyelids as she began dozing off to sleep, tired out from all the tears. Soon it would be time for another work day, and she would return to me every night as she had for the last month. Everything was so beautiful. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

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