Lingering Fingers

The round ended, and the five minutes died, and the players rose from their seats while fresh hopefuls surged forward from the crowd to claim the empty chairs. Elder Xuan Wu stood up with them. The mask hid most of his face, but it could not hide the dissatisfied twist of his mouth. The game had been amusing.

It had not been enough. He was already looking past the table and past the crowd, toward the other noises and the other stages scattered across the vast floor, hunting for something stranger and filthier, something that would make this whole morning's exhibition seem like nothing more than the opening wager.

Yan Mei reached back with trembling fingers and pulled her rear panel back into place. She felt it slide straight back into the cleft of her ass the moment she let go.

Her right cheek still burned faintly from the stranger's slaps.

Between her legs she was so wet that the front silk had gone translucent at the centre. It clung to her folds and showed their shape, pink beneath red, and a single bright drop had crept down the inside of her thigh. She did not dare to look down at it.

Yan Tian rose from his chair and adjusted his robes over an obvious hardness, and followed Xuan Wu into the crowd without once asking where they were going next.

Her legs felt unsteady beneath her as she went after him. The heat of the anonymous slap tingled across her cheek, and somehow it seemed to travel forward through her body into her cunt and make the wet silk cling harder. She did not know the man who had groped her. She knew only that the house had its rules, and that her husband had sat down at the table, and that Elder Xuan Wu had pointed into the crowd as if choosing fruit.

Only my buttocks, she told herself. That was all. It could have been so much worse.

The thought did not cool her at all. Instead it made the other words, the ones the game had not reached, glow hotter in her imagination, as though the house man had planted them under her skin.

---

Grand Elder Yan Li did not follow the others at once. He stood at the edge of the crowd around the body-parts table with his hands folded inside his sleeves, so that nobody could see how they were shaking, and watched Yan Mei walk away from him across the floor.

He could still feel her. The memory of her lay across his palms like the heat of a stove after the fire has gone out, the full warm weight of her cheeks and the way his fingers had sunk into them, the faint tremor that had run through her each time he spread her open, the sting in his own hand after the slap.

He flexed his fingers slowly inside his sleeves. Twenty years he had wanted that. Twenty years of banquets and councils and festival processions, of watching Yan Tian lay a careless proprietary hand at the small of her back as he led her into a room, of hearing other men praise her beauty to the family head's face while Yan Tian accepted the praise as his due, as though he had grown her himself in his own garden.

And now he had knelt behind her in a public gambling hall and looked at her pussy from a hand's breadth away while her husband sat in front of her with his back turned, helpless to do anything but imagine.

It was not enough. He had known as he stood up that it would not be enough.

Five minutes of her buttocks had not satisfied anything in him. They had only shown him precisely the size of his hunger and how much of it remained unfed. He had seen her wet. He had smelled her. He had felt her hips push back toward his palm, a tiny shameful movement that she had surely thought nobody noticed, and he had noticed it with every nerve in his body.

He had seen that small pink flower above her pussy twitch under his eyes, and he had not been allowed to put so much as a fingertip to it.

The rules had stopped him, and the rules had been made by the house, and the house could not stop him from wanting.

He rubbed the pad of his thumb slowly across his fingertips inside his sleeve. There was still a faint slickness there, from where his hand had cupped the very bottom of her cheek near the seam of her thigh, and he brought it to his face under cover of adjusting his mask and breathed in. Jasmine. Musk. Her.

He found that he was smiling. Behind the mask nobody could see it, and that pleased him as well.

The most delicious thing of all was that she did not know. And Yan Tian, the proud and untouchable Yan Tian, had chosen the part himself and handed it over to him without knowing. Elder Li savoured it for a long moment, rolling it around his mouth like old wine, before he went after them.

---

Yan Tian walked a pace behind Elder Xuan Wu through the crowded hall and did not look back at his wife, because he was afraid of what she would see in his face if he did.

He had chosen her buttocks because they were the safest choice, he told himself. It was the only part on that list a stranger could handle without entering her, the only one that left her body closed. Any husband in his place would have chosen the same. He had been protecting her.

He had held on to that thought all through the five minutes while some masked stranger knelt behind her and squeezed and spread and slapped her, and he had sat rigid in his chair facing the table with the sound of each slap ringing through him, and had told himself over and over that he was protecting her.

And yet he had not turned around. He could have. Nothing in the rules had forbidden the seated players from watching their own partners. Xuan Wu had kept facing forward while his wife was handled, but that had been Xuan Wu's choice and his pleasure.

Yan Tian could have turned in his chair and watched every moment of what the stranger did to her, and he had not, and he understood now with a slow uncomfortable heat that he had kept his back turned because not seeing it was better.

Hearing her gasp and not knowing why. Feeling the chair shift as she was pushed forward against it, and imagining what had pushed her. It had made the five minutes into something that happened inside his own head, where it could be as much or as little as he wanted it to be, and what he had wanted, sitting there with his cock straining against his robes, had been more.

He thought of the dice game, of Xuan Wu's tongue buried between her cheeks and her helpless, startled moan. He thought of the street outside and the silk merchant staring at her ass with his mouth open.

He thought of the stranger's hands on her a few minutes ago, the hands of some faceless man who might have been anyone at all, a merchant or a mercenary or a beggar who had scraped together enough spirit stones to get through the door, and the thought did not make him angry. It made him dizzy.

He had always believed he knew himself completely. He had built the strongest branch family on the eastern side of the sect on the strength of that belief, on a mind that saw things as they were and a heart that never once let wanting override judgement.

Now he was walking through a gambling hall with his wife behind him half naked and wet from another man's hands, and the thing in him that had woken on the floor of the sitting room last night was awake still, and it was larger than it had been this morning, and it was hungry.

---

Xuan Wei fell into step beside Yan Mei as they crossed the floor, and slipped an arm through hers again, warm and companionable, and leaned close so that her lips nearly brushed the edge of Yan Mei's mask.

"You were very good," she murmured. Her breath was warm on Yan Mei's cheek and smelled faintly of wine. "Truly. I've seen women faint at that table the first time, and you didn't even cry out. My husband was very impressed."

"I don't want him to be impressed," Yan Mei whispered back, and was dismayed to hear how unsteady her voice sounded.

"No," Xuan Wei agreed comfortably, "but he is, and that's what matters." She was quiet for a few steps, guiding Yan Mei around a knot of shouting men crowded about a dice table, and then she added, in a different voice, lower and almost kind, "It gets easier, you know. The first time is always the worst. After that your body starts to understand what's happening before your head does, and it stops fighting so hard."

Yan Mei did not answer. She did not trust herself to.

She could feel the truth of what Xuan Wei was saying in the wet silk clinging between her legs, in the slow warm pulse in her cheek, and in her nipples, which had not softened once since they walked through the doors.

She hated it. She hated even more that some part of her had heard the words and been comforted by them.

The hall went on and on around them.

They passed a table where two men were throwing knives into a wheel of painted wood while the woman strapped across its face laughed and screamed in turn, her bare breasts heaving each time a blade thudded into the wood beside her hip.

They passed another where a dozen grim cultivators played a silent card game for stakes so high that no one around them dared to speak.

They passed a long bar of polished stone where waitresses in nothing but sashes and bells poured spirit wine into cups of jade. The bells chimed with every movement as they bent across the counter to serve, their breasts swinging over the cups, their bare asses tipped up toward the room.

Yan Mei saw a young man in the robes of a minor sect lose a stack of spirit stones as tall as his forearm on a single roll of the dice and simply laugh, and turn, and reach for the woman standing beside him as though she were the next stake on the table.

Everywhere she looked there was gold and lantern light and noise, and bare skin, and masks.

Elder Xuan Wu moved through all of it without hurry, pausing now and then to watch a game for a few breaths before he shook his head and went on. He was looking for something. Yan Mei could feel it in the way he walked, the restless patience of a hunting cat working its way through tall grass, and she was afraid of what would happen when he found it.

Elder Li caught up with them near the middle of the floor and fell in a little behind the women, and Yan Mei felt his eyes settle on her at once, on the bare swing of her hips and the rear panel lost in her cleft. She thought nothing of it. Every man in the building was staring at her ass.

The man behind that masked gaze had been a hand's breadth from that same flesh only a few minutes earlier, and he was remembering, with every step she took, exactly how her right cheek had rippled under his palm.

They were nearing the far side of the hall when the noise in front of them changed.

Ahead, beyond a ring of crowded tables, a raised platform of dark wood stood against the wall under a cluster of bright lanterns. The crowd packed around it was thicker than any Yan Mei had seen yet, and quieter, the men in it leaning forward with the hushed, avid stillness of an audience at a play.

Over the heads of the crowd came a slow, wet sound, and a muffled moan, and then a burst of laughter and a ripple of counting voices.

Up on the boards, someone was kneeling.

Yan Mei caught a glimpse of a woman's bare shoulders, glossy with sweat under the lanterns, and a strip of black cloth tied across her eyes, and a curtain of dark hair swinging forward as she leaned in toward something. Then a broad back in the crowd shifted and blocked her view.

Beside her, Yan Mei felt Xuan Wei's arm tighten very slightly around her own, and then, to her astonishment, Xuan Wei laughed under her breath, low and warm and delighted, like a woman who has just heard her favourite song begin to play.