Bathwater Talk

Yan Mei lowered herself into her private bath until the water closed over her shoulders, and stayed there until the worst of the trembling had gone out of her fingers.

She washed between her legs carefully, and then less carefully.

Seed had dried there in the night, his and her own slick mingled together, flaking from the fine hair of her mound and crusted in a stiff film on the insides of her thighs. The warm water loosened it. It came away under her fingers in slippery strands that clouded the water around her hips.

The memory came away with it. She felt again the thick, heavy drag of Xuan Wu's cock through her cunt while she kissed her husband's mouth, the stretch, the fullness, the helpless sounds she had made into Tian'er's lips.

She scrubbed harder than she needed to. Her fingers slid over her folds and between them, and the flesh there was so tender and so swollen that the touch made her hips jerk under the water.

She told herself she was only getting clean.

She had just closed her eyes and laid her head back against the warm stone rim when the door slid open, and Xuan Wei walked in naked.

The morning light through the high window seemed to love her.

It slid across her full breasts as they swayed with each unhurried step, rolling heavily against each other and parting again, and it caught the dark pink of her nipples and made them look wet. It traced the narrow dip of her waist above the generous curve of her hips. It slid down over the slight round of her belly and found the place between her thighs.

Her pussy was smooth and bare, the lips a deeper rose than Yan Mei's own and still faintly swollen from Yan Tian's cock. When she walked, they shifted and pressed together. When she stepped down onto the first stone stair of the bath, they parted just slightly, and Yan Mei looked away a moment too late.

She stepped down into the bath, so that the water rose around both of them, and sank in up to her collarbones with a long contented sigh. Her breasts floated up in front of her, pale and buoyant, nipples just breaking the surface.

She smiled across the steam as though sharing a tub with the woman whose husband she had fucked last night were the most natural courtesy in the world.

Yan Mei managed a weak smile back.

They bathed together, and the steam softened the edges of her shame without ever quite erasing it.

When politeness required it, Yan Mei washed the other woman's back. She worked the cloth in slow circles over Xuan Wei's shoulders and down the long valley of her spine, and felt the smooth, warm skin under her palms, unmarked by any trace of embarrassment. Xuan Wei leaned back into the touch like a cat. Near the base of her spine there was a faint red mark, the shape of a man's thumb, and Yan Mei's cloth passed over it twice before she realised it was her husband's.

In return Xuan Wei washed her shoulders. Her hands were slick with bath oil and very sure of themselves. They slid over the curve of Yan Mei's shoulders and down her arms and back up again, and then drifted lower, across her ribs, along the heavy outer swell of her breasts, and lingered there a little too familiarly, the heel of one palm resting just beneath the weight of her breast as though testing it.

Yan Mei held very still. Xuan Wei's fingers moved on after a moment, unhurried.

Neither of them spoke of dice. Neither of them mentioned assholes or throats, or the way Yan Tian had stared while his wife came apart on another man's cock. The silence between them was almost gentle, and Yan Mei, lulled by the heat, said nothing.

When they stepped out of the water at last, it ran down Yan Mei's breasts in slow rivulets.

It beaded on her nipples and dripped from their tips. It slid down into the valley between her breasts and out along her ribs, tracing shining paths across the curve of her belly and the tops of her thighs and gathering in a bright little trickle that ran down the crease of her groin.

Between her legs, her flesh was clean now and flushed pink from the heat, tender in a new way that she did not want to think about. When she pressed her thighs together, she could feel her own pulse there.

Xuan Wei dried herself with open laziness. She dragged the towel across her own heavy breasts and lifted each one in turn to dry beneath it. She propped one foot on the bath's stone rim and drew the cloth slowly up the inside of her thigh and between her legs, without a flicker of modesty, while Yan Mei tried and failed to find somewhere else to look.

Then she reached for the outfit she had worn when she arrived, and began to put it back on.

It was the same design as before.

The two thin red lines went across her nipples first, and she tugged each one snug with a little flick of her fingers, so that the stiff dark tips stood up beneath the silk like buttons. The golden waistband followed, settling into the curve above her hips, and its narrow panels fell into place in front and behind.

Last came the fine chain with its scrap of cloth, which she drew up between her thighs and fastened with a tiny click, the silk fitting itself into her cleft as if it had been cut to her measure.

She looked obscenely beautiful in it, and completely at ease.

Then she turned and looked at Yan Mei, who had taken a proper morning robe from its peg and was lifting it from the hanger.

"Sister Yan," Xuan Wei said sweetly. "You're not thinking of dressing differently from me again, are you?"

Yan Mei froze with the robe in her hands. "I—"

"If you put on modest silks while I walk beside you dressed like this, what will people think of me? That your guest is some hired slut, and the famous Yan Mei is far too virtuous to match her?" Xuan Wei's smile did not waver, but her eyes had gone flat and hard. "Wear it. The same as last night. Or I shall take offence, and so will my husband."

There was no polite war that the wife of a branch family head could win against the wife of a main-clan elder over a few scraps of cloth. Yan Mei had known that last night, and nothing that had happened since had changed it. She hung the robe back on its peg.

Her hands were shaking as she dressed.

The outfit Xuan Wei's maid brought out for her followed the same pattern as before, except that the strips crossing her nipples were a little wider this morning. That might have been Xuan Wei's idea of a small mercy, or it might equally have been her idea of a joke, since a little wider still meant almost nothing.

Yan Mei's heavier breasts strained against them at once. Her nipples pushed up into clear hard points at their centres, and the pink edges of her areolae still showed at the sides however she arranged them. Pale flesh swelled out above and below each strip like rising dough pressed by a ribbon. When she breathed in deeply, she could feel her breasts trying to leap free, the strips biting into the upper curves and then slipping a hair's width lower.

The waistband settled on her hips with its two short panels of thin silk. With last night's scrap ruined and thrown away, there was nothing at all beneath the front panel. The silk lay directly against her bare pussy, still warm and flushed from the bath, and clung to it the moment the faintest dampness touched it, outlining the plump lips and the shallow cleft between them.

From behind, half of each round cheek was naked. The cleft of her ass swallowed up the rear panel the instant she took a step.

Xuan Wei looked at her embarrassed face, at the flush climbing from her throat and the strips straining across her breasts and the silk already clinging between her thighs, and smiled more widely.

"Perfect," Xuan Wei murmured. "Come. It's time for breakfast."

---

Three men were already sitting at the round table in the family dining hall when they came in: Elder Xuan Wu, Yan Tian, and Han Fei.

Two empty seats waited, one beside Yan Tian and one beside the elder, and the women took them without anyone saying a word, Yan Mei beside her husband and Xuan Wei beside hers, as though the ordinary seating of an ordinary marriage still meant anything at all after last night.

Yan Mei could not hold her husband's eyes for long.

When she managed to meet them, she found that he was looking at her breasts. He was looking at the slightly wider strips and the hard bumps of her nipples beneath them, and at the heavy weight that threatened to spill free with every small movement of her arms, and embarrassment scorched her throat.

She turned her face away and found Elder Xuan Wu watching her from across the table with a strange, knowing smile, his eyes fixed on exactly the same place.

Her nipples stiffened under the thin cloth. It was the cool air of the hall and the heat of being watched in equal measure, and she felt them harden into aching points until the red silk was stretched taut across them.

When she had sat down, her bare ass had met the cold lacquered seat of the chair with almost nothing in between. The chill went straight up into her pussy and left it tingling and sensitive. The front panel stuck to her. She wanted to squirm, and would not let herself, and sat rigid with her thighs pressed together while the cold slowly warmed beneath her.

Beneath the table, Elder Xuan Wu's cock was already hard. He looked at her curving body and her flushed lovely face and remembered how tightly her pussy had squeezed him last night. She was a mother of two grown children and the most famous beauty of the Yan branch.

He had not felt that kind of excitement with any woman in years. He had not felt it even with Xuan Wei, who was eating her breakfast quietly beside him as though nothing in the world were strange.

Yan Tian ate and said very little. His eyes kept returning to his wife's bared breasts and to the colour in her cheeks, and the hungry thing that had woken in him on the floor of the sitting room was plainly still awake.

Han Fei ate with the appetite of a young man who had emptied himself into a pair of twin maids until dawn and somehow wanted more. He glanced once at Yan Mei's outfit and then made himself look down into his bowl, because even a disciple of the main clan understood that some stares could start wars.

They had nearly finished when the doors opened again and Grand Elder Yan Li walked in.

He had come, of course, to pay his respects to Elder Xuan Wu, since no ambitious elder of the branch would waste a chance to stand a little closer to an inner elder of the main sect who walked in Grand Elder Lan's shadow. He bowed with practised respect, and his greeting was smooth and correct in every particular. His eyes, when they found Yan Mei, were neither smooth nor correct.

He had known her for many years with her proud posture and her majestic aura, the untouchable wife whom Yan Tian displayed to the world like a trophy behind glass. This morning she sat at the table like a girl caught in her own shame, her lovely skin shining in the light and her breasts almost bare and her waist open, her thighs pressed together on the chair.

The shameless outfit made her look good enough to eat. And in Elder Li's chest, fully formed in a single instant, there bloomed a plan for revenge against Yan Tian, for every slight to his status and his pride and for the way the family head had always walked as though his wife's beauty were his private property, and for his son's broken face in the market road.

"Since Elder Xuan Wu will only be with us for a short while," Elder Li said, smiling, "why don't we show him something of our little city today? Jinling is not the main sect, of course, but it has its charms."

He addressed the words to Xuan Wu, and his tone was nothing but hospitality. His eyes flicked once more across Yan Mei's nearly bare breasts and the open line of her waist, and they were something else entirely.

Elder Xuan Wu was not a child. He heard the word sightseeing and understood the deeper meaning beneath it perfectly well. Walk the famous Yan Mei through the public streets in clothes like these. Let the citizens stare, and the shopkeepers forget their prices.

Let Yan Tian's pride choke on his wife's exposure, and let the whole of the humiliation be dressed up as a courtesy to a guest of the main sect. It was the kind of cruelty that smiled while it cut, and it suited one of Xuan Wu's oldest hobbies so perfectly that he could almost have kissed the man for suggesting it.

He looked across the table at Yan Mei and smiled, and the smile said quite clearly, I know what he wants, and I want it too.

"Of course," Yan Tian said. "It would be our honour."

He agreed easily, and he looked at his wife as he said it, at the strips across her nipples and the flush at her throat.

Showing her to the city was not the same as sharing her. But the thought of other men's eyes on what had always belonged to him alone made his cock stir beneath the table in a way that simple possession never had.

Yan Mei's fingers tightened in her lap until her nails bit into her palms.

"Husband," she began quietly, "perhaps—"

Yan Tian's glance cut her off before she could finish. It was not unkind. It was not open to refusal either. In front of Elder Xuan Wu, and in front of Grand Elder Yan Li, the wife of a family head did not refuse to accompany a guest on a walk through her own city.

Xuan Wei reached across under the table and patted Yan Mei's bare thigh, affectionate as a sister and merciless as a co-conspirator.

"It will be fun," she whispered. "The city air is good for beautiful women."