Second Round

The cards went round again. In the second round Yan Tian won, and the fat old man drew the lowest card. Since breasts had already been taken, he shrugged his heavy shoulders and chose his partner's mouth.

Yan Tian looked back over his shoulder into the crowd and picked out an old, thin, grey-bearded man who had been standing just behind the fat man's partner and staring at her the entire time.

The old man came forward with surprising speed for someone his age.

He took the young woman's face in one bony hand, tilting it up toward the lanterns, and pushed two fingers of the other into her mouth. He played with her tongue as if he were testing a piece of fruit for ripeness, pressing it down, stroking along its length, drawing his fingers out slick and pushing them back in, until a thin line of spit stretched from her lower lip to his knuckles and broke.

Then he took his fingers away and replaced them with his own mouth.

He kissed her deeply and wetly and with open hunger, as though he were claiming her. His beard scraped her chin. His tongue pushed deep between her painted lips.

Saliva shone at the corners of her mouth and ran in a bright thread down to her chin. Her hand came up and rested on his thin shoulder, as lightly as a dancer's.

The crowd counted down the five minutes aloud while the old man devoured her mouth in front of them all.

She whimpered into him once, near the end, a small helpless sound that made the men nearest her groan in sympathy. The kiss lasted until the house man called the time.

When the old man finally let her go, she straightened behind the fat merchant's chair. Her lips were swollen and smeared, the paint worn away at the centre. She wiped her mouth delicately with the side of one finger, and smiled down at her patron as though nothing at all had happened.

The fat man patted her hip without looking up from his cards.

Yan Mei, watching, saw the woman's eyes slide sideways toward her for a moment, cool and assessing beneath the black edge of her mask. They measured the newcomer's breasts and hips and the wetness on her silk with the professional interest of someone who earned her living at tables like this one.

There was no pity in the look, and no malice either. There was only a kind of tired recognition, as though the courtesan had seen a great many wives brought through these doors by their husbands for the first time and knew precisely how each of those evenings ended.

Yan Mei stood behind her husband and felt her own mouth go dry as dust.

She licked her lips without meaning to and tasted her own sweat, and thought of the old man's fingers stroking the courtesan's tongue, and pressed her lips tightly together.

She understood how the game worked now, and the understanding was its own torment. With every round that passed, the parts that remained on the list grew fewer and worse. If she was chosen early, it might have been her breasts in a stranger's hands, and that would have been dreadful but bearable. Every round she survived untouched only meant that what waited for her in the next was more dangerous.

The cards came round a third time and were slapped down onto the felt, and when they were turned over, Yan Tian held the lowest card at the table, and Elder Xuan Wu held the highest.

She felt her husband go still in front of her. He was the loser, and that meant the choice of her body was his, a part of his own wife to be handed to a stranger from the crowd for five minutes of play.

The parts that remained were her buttocks, her anus, her pussy, and her mouth. She knew which he would choose before he spoke, and when he did, she was so grateful that she was ashamed of herself for it.

Her ass was the only one of the four that did not open her body to anyone. A stranger's hands there could squeeze and slap and stare, but they could not go inside her.

"Buttocks," Yan Tian said. His voice was steady. When he glanced back at her, his eyes behind the mask were not steady at all.

Elder Xuan Wu turned in his chair and looked out over the crowd with the small satisfied smile of a dealer who already knew which card he meant to draw. He raised one finger, and let it travel slowly across the packed faces, and stopped it, pointing.

He was pointing at Grand Elder Yan Li. The crowd did not know whom he had chosen. The masks hid everything. But Yan Li knew, and Xuan Wu knew, and Han Fei, who stood close enough to follow the line of that pointing finger, knew it as well and very nearly laughed out loud. Yan Mei, who could not see where the finger had landed, knew only that a masked man was pushing his way through the crowd toward her, and that the crowd was parting for him.

Xuan Wu settled back in his chair to enjoy it. He had not needed to think about whom to choose. He had watched Yan Li at breakfast that morning and on the long walk through the streets, and he had seen exactly what lived in the man's eyes whenever they rested on Yan Mei, the old sour jealousy and the older hunger beneath it, twenty years of wanting fermented into something close to hatred.

A man like that would not touch her the way a stranger would. A stranger would grope her greedily and gratefully for five minutes and go home happy. Yan Li would touch her like a man settling a debt.

And Yan Tian sat in the next chair with his jaw set and his eyes fixed straight ahead, while the hands on his wife belonged to the rival who had smiled at him across the council table for two decades.

Xuan Wu found that a great deal more amusing than any game of cards.

Elder Li came forward slowly. He had waited years for this, and he did not mean to hurry any part of it.

He had stared at Yan Mei's ass more times than he could count, across banquet halls and family councils and the paved paths of the mansion gardens, and he had never once been allowed to touch it. He had watched her walk away from him in clinging green silk that showed the shape of her cheeks far too honestly, and had gone home afterward to women who were much less beautiful, with his cock aching and his pride bitter in his mouth.

His own son had lusted after the Cao girl and poisoned Yan Tian's boy out of jealousy, and never in all his scheming had Yan Jing come near anything like this.

And now here she was, standing behind her own husband's chair, waiting to be punished in a game that her husband had agreed to play. Her famous face was hidden behind black silk, but her body was bared for anyone to see, the body that every demonic elder in Jinling had secretly undressed in his dreams.

The crowd shifted to let him through. Somebody's elbow brushed his ribs and somebody else muttered a crude joke about luck, and he heard none of it. The noise of the hall had gone thin and far away, the clatter of dice and the bellowing of winners reduced to a dull surf at the edge of his hearing.

All that remained sharp was the woman in front of him, the faint jasmine of her skin reaching him through the smoke and spilled wine, and the slight quick rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed.

Yan Mei heard the footsteps stop behind her.

She could not see him. She could feel him, though, the heat of a big body a hand's breadth from her back and the slow weight of his attention settling over her bare skin like a cloak she had not asked to wear. Her fingers tightened on the carved back of Yan Tian's chair. Her eyes went to the side of her husband's face, to the hard line of his jaw beneath the mask, and found him staring straight ahead with his hands flat on the table.

She drew a breath, and let it out, and stayed where she was.

He moved in behind her, savouring each step of the approach, and laid his hands on her ass.

It was softer than he had imagined, and warmer, and heavier. His fingers sank into it and at once wanted to sink deeper. The full round cheeks were too large to fit easily in his palms, so that the white flesh swelled up between his spread fingers and spilled over the edges of his hands. He felt the heat of her through his palms, and felt her flinch under his touch, a small startled jump that ran through both cheeks at once and set them quivering.

Then he took hold of the small rear panel of her skirt and lifted it out of the way, and looked at what the city streets had only hinted at all morning.

Her ass was perfect and white and completely bare. There was no underwear at all, and the thin silk that had been sunk in her crease all through the walk had now been pulled aside, so that he and the whole watching crowd had a clear view of her cheeks.

The lantern light lay across them in a warm sheen. A faint pink line ran across the left one where the edge of the silk had pressed into her skin for an hour, and he wanted to trace it with his tongue. Yan Mei trembled.

Shame and a strange bright heat ran through her in the same current, so tangled together that she could not have pulled one thread loose from the other. The air of the hall was warm, but on her bared cheeks it felt cool, and every stare in the crowd seemed to land on her skin with its own small weight.

The crowd pushed in tighter around them. A ring of masks and open mouths stared at the pale cheeks of a beauty whose name none of them knew, knowing only that she was the most desirable woman at the table. Someone whistled low. Someone else gave a soft hungry groan. He squeezed her.

He kneaded the soft heavy flesh slowly between his fingers, working his thumbs in deep circles near the crease where her cheeks met her thighs, feeling the give of her and then the faint firm resistance of muscle beneath it. Her breath hitched above him. He did it again, slower, and felt her weight rock forward onto her toes.

Then he took a cheek in each hand and spread them.

The crease opened under his hands, and the warm private smell of her rose to meet him, musk and jasmine and the salt of a long morning's sweat.

He went down onto his knees behind her to look more closely. The boards were hard under his kneecaps and he did not care. From below he could see everything that the rules still forbade him to touch.

The front panel of her skirt had worked its way up between the lips of her pussy with all the walking and all the wetness. On either side of the narrow strip of silk her pink folds lay clearly visible and openly wet, swollen and glistening in the lantern light, a thin bright thread of her slickness stretching from the silk to the inside of one thigh.

When he spread her cheeks wider, her asshole came into view above that wet pussy, a tight pink flower-shaped pucker, so pretty that it was humiliating.

It twitched under his gaze. He watched it clench and slowly loosen, and his cock throbbed so hard against the inside of his robes that he had to breathe through his teeth.

He could not touch her pussy. He could not touch her anus. The rules of the game allowed him only her buttocks, and the restriction made him want the forbidden places more fiercely than he had ever wanted anything.

He could hardly believe that he was looking at her like this, from so close, in front of Yan Tian, while Yan Tian sat facing forward in his chair and could only imagine what was being done behind him.

Above him, Yan Mei felt the cool air touch places that no air should have touched in a public hall, and felt her own wetness gather and slide, and heard a man somewhere in the crowd murmur that the lady was dripping.

Her face burned behind the black silk. Her hand slid along the top rail of the chair until her fingertips brushed her husband's shoulder.

"Tian'er…" she breathed, so faintly that only he could have heard it.

His shoulder went still beneath her fingers. He did not turn. After a moment his own hand came up and covered hers, warm and heavy, and pressed it once.

She closed her eyes, and let her weight settle back into the stranger's hands.

Every slight and every rivalry of the last twenty years flared up in Elder Li at once. He pulled back his hand and slapped her right cheek, hard enough that the sound rang out over the noise of the table.

Smack!

Yan Mei jolted forward against the back of her husband's chair. The pain bloomed hot and bright across her cheek and spread outward in a widening ring, and for one disordered instant she did not feel it as pain at all.

She felt it travel through her flesh and down between her legs like a struck bell humming. She felt her pussy clench around nothing, hard, and then again, a slow wet pulse that she was sure the kneeling man could see. A sound came out of her own throat that she had not given it permission to make, a low broken moan that the crowd caught and answered with a ripple of laughter.

She bit down on her lip so hard that she tasted blood.

Who is he?

She did not know who was behind her. She did not know whether he was old or young, handsome or hideous, whether she had passed him a hundred times in the street or never seen him in her life. The not knowing made it worse, because her body had answered his hand without waiting to find out.

In front of her, Yan Tian's shoulders tensed.

But neither of them had any idea who stood behind the mask that was spanking her. The rules of the house and the masks made the punisher a stranger, and Elder Li found that he enjoyed that anonymity almost as much as the warm weight of her ass under his palm.

He squeezed the reddened cheek, soothing the sting with a slow circle of his palm, and felt the heat of his own handprint rising under his fingers.

Then he slapped her once more, on the left this time.

Smack!

He watched the full round cheek ripple and settle. The red print of his hand bloomed across the white skin, five fingers and a palm laid there like a seal on a document, and Yan Mei rose up onto her toes with a gasp and came down again slowly, her thighs trembling, the wet silk between her legs darker than before.

He drank the five minutes down to their last drop.

He spread her and let her close and spread her again. He traced the crease with the very tips of his thumbs, stopping a careful hair's breadth short of the places he was not allowed, and felt her hold her breath each time he came near them and let it out in a shaky rush each time he drew away.

He cupped the undersides of her cheeks and lifted them and let them fall, just to watch the heavy flesh bounce. He slapped her twice more, lighter, quick, one on each side.

Pat. Pat.

Each time her hips pushed back a fraction toward his hand before she caught herself.

When the house man called the time, Elder Li rose and returned to the crowd with his cock aching and his revenge only half fed.

The last round was dealt. The fat old man won it, and the clever-looking man lost, and the only parts left for his partner were her anus and her pussy. After a moment's thought he chose the anus.

The man the fat merchant picked from the crowd was another young one, wiry and eager.

He went behind the mature woman in her one-piece dress and bent her forward over the back of her partner's chair. She went down, her forearms resting on the carved wood, her cheek almost touching her husband's hair. The young man hitched her skirt up over her hips, the clinging fabric peeling up over the full curves of her ass and bunching at her waist.

She wore nothing beneath it.

He spread her cheeks with both thumbs until her asshole lay open to the lanterns, a small dusky pucker that tightened under the crowd's eyes and then slowly eased.

Then he put his mouth to it and began to suck.

Shlurp.

She moaned. It was helpless and surprised at first, a startled sound jolted out of her as his tongue pressed flat against her. Then it came again, lower and longer, with a reluctant and unmistakable pleasure in it, and her hips pushed back toward his face.

As the minutes passed, he pushed his thumb slowly inside her.

She gasped. Her fingers clenched on the back of the chair. The crowd behind her stared at her opened hole, at the thumb sliding in to the knuckle and drawing out shining, with their cocks straining at their robes.

Wet sounds came from behind her, and muttered curses from the crowd, and now and then the sharp smack of the young man's free hand on her hip.

Smack.

Yan Mei watched it happen and thought, with a relief so sharp that it made her dizzy, If Tian'er had lost one round later, that would have been me.

The relief lasted only as long as it took her to see the woman's face.

When the five minutes ended and the young man stepped back, the mature woman stayed bent over the chair for a little while. Her skirt was still bunched at her waist and her cheeks were still spread where his thumbs had held them, glistening with his spit. She was breathing hard.

When she finally straightened and turned, Yan Mei saw beneath the edge of her mask a flush so deep, and an expression so dazed and unguarded, that it was impossible to mistake for anything but pleasure.

The woman's husband, the clever-looking man, reached up and touched her hand where it rested on his shoulder. She laced her fingers through his and smiled down at him, and the smile was tender.

Yan Mei looked away as though she had been burned.

She understood that she had just seen something much more frightening than a stranger's mouth on a woman's asshole. She had seen a wife come back from it to her husband's hand as if nothing had been lost between them, and some small treacherous part of her had wondered how that would feel.