Blindfold Wager

The platform stood under a cluster of low oil lamps that turned everything on it gold and shadow.

The crowd packed around it was so dense and so hushed that Yan Mei could hear, over the roar of the rest of the gambling floor, the wet sounds coming from the boards above their heads: a slow suck, a gasp, a long liquid slide, and then the murmur of a hundred men counting under their breath.

Even with masks hiding every face in the house, most of the men they passed on the way there had turned to stare at the two half-naked women walking through their midst, and Yan Mei felt their eyes on her like heat on bare skin.

The scraps Xuan Wei had dressed her in that morning clung to her body as though the silk itself wanted to confess her shape.

Her breasts strained against the thin strips with every step. Their heavy weight bounced in a slow rhythm that made strangers forget their dice in mid-throw, rising, hanging, falling, and her nipples pressed hard points into the cloth, stiff from the cool drafts between the tables and from the lingering burn of the stranger's palm on her ass at the last table.

The rear panel had sunk into the cleft of her cheeks again. The full white curves flashed on either side of it as she walked, rolling and settling, and the lantern light slid over them like a hand.

The front silk stuck damply to her pussy where the body-parts game had soaked her through. With every stride it peeled away a fraction and pressed back, a small wet kiss she could not stop.

She was Lady Yan of the branch family. She was also, this morning, a masked woman whose body the house treated as fair game, and the faint heat across her right cheek reminded her of it with every step she took.

Beside her, Xuan Wei walked with the loose confidence of someone who had worn filth as fashion for years.

She did not blush. Her breasts swung free and easy in their strips, her hips rolled, and when a man at a dice table whistled at her, she glanced back over her shoulder and let him see her lick her lips.

If the heat between her own thighs troubled her, nothing in her stride admitted it.

Elder Xuan Wu went ahead of them both, his mask hiding everything except the restless glitter of his eyes. Yan Tian kept pace at Yan Mei's side with his robes arranged carefully over a hardness he made no serious effort to conceal. Behind them came Elder Li and the disciple Han Fei, like two wolves who had already tasted blood and wanted the next course.

The house roared around them. Dice clicked in lacquered bowls and cards slapped wood, and moans rose from tables where punishment games chewed through dignity five minutes at a time. The air was a braid of incense and sweat and spilled spirit wine, so thick and warm that it clung to Yan Mei's bare skin and gathered in a fine dew between her breasts.

Smoke from the braziers hung under the ceiling beams in a flat grey layer, and the lanterns turned it the color of old honey. Servants in plain tunics threaded through the crowd with trays of cups held high, calling out the names of wines, and where they passed the spilled drink on the floor left dark commas that the next pair of boots smeared away.

The walk to the stage had not been short. The first floor of the Heavenly Gambling House was a maze of tables and screens and low platforms, and every turn of the path brought them past another game that seemed designed to strip a little more pretence away from the people who played it.

At one table a young woman in a jade mask sat on the edge of the felt with her knees drawn up and spread. The men around her were throwing dice into a porcelain bowl set between her thighs, so that every throw clattered against the glaze an inch from her pussy, and the winner of each round was allowed to lay one finger wherever he liked on her body for the length of a breath.

Clack. Clatter.

A thick-wristed man won and set his fingertip on her inner thigh, high, and drew it upward slowly while the others counted aloud.

Yan Mei looked away from her too late and caught the woman's eyes behind the mask, glazed and patient and wet at the edges, and felt something low in her own belly answer with a guilty throb.

At another table a heavy man had lost a wager and was kneeling on the floor beside his own wife while a stranger fondled her breasts above him. The stranger weighed them in his palms and rolled her nipples between finger and thumb as though testing ripe plums, and the wife's head had fallen back against his shoulder. The expression on the kneeling husband's face was not anger at all, but something so naked and greedy that Yan Mei could not look at it for longer than a heartbeat.

She looked instead at the floor, at the polished boards and the wet rings left by wine cups, and walked on with her own breath gone shallow.

A man passing in the other direction slowed as he came level with her.

The air around him smelled of cedar oil and cold sweat. Behind him a gong sounded somewhere deep in the hall, one flat clang that rolled across the ceiling and was swallowed by the noise, and half the room turned its head toward it and then turned back.

She felt him before she saw him, a shift of warmth at her side, and then his knuckles brushed the outer curve of her hip, lightly and almost politely, as though he were testing the quality of a bolt of silk in the market. The touch slid from the top of the curve down toward her thigh and lifted away.

Yan Mei's breath caught. Heat climbed her throat so fast that her ears prickled with it, and she found herself drifting half a step closer to her husband until her bare arm brushed his sleeve.

The man laughed under his mask and moved on without looking back.

Nobody else seemed to think anything had happened. Not a single head turned. In the house, a touch like that was a compliment, and Yan Mei felt the faint ghost of his knuckles still lying on her hip like a fingerprint pressed into warm wax.

Yan Tian had seen it. His jaw tightened beneath his mask, and for one moment his hand moved as though it meant to reach for the stranger's collar, but it fell back to his side, because there was nothing to be gained by drawing attention in a place where attention was the only currency anyone cared about.

What disturbed him more than the stranger's knuckles was the heat that had gone through his own body when he watched them land. He had felt it at the punishment table as well, when the anonymous man had knelt behind his wife and spread her cheeks with both hands while the sandglass ran, and he had felt it the night before with Elder Xuan Wu's cock in her mouth.

It was a heat he had never known he carried, and every hour in this house seemed to fan it a little higher.

Behind them, Elder Li walked with his hands clasped at the small of his back like a scholar on a garden path, and under the mask his face was flushed with private triumph.

Yan Mei still had no idea whose hands had been on her ass at the punishment table. He had made sure of that, keeping his voice low and his robes unremarkable, letting his palms speak instead.

He could still feel the weight of those cheeks in his hands and the give of them when he squeezed. He remembered the shiver that had gone through her when his thumbs drew her open, a fine trembling that had travelled up her spine and into her shoulders, and the way the lamplight had fallen on the pink little flower that no man but her husband should ever have seen.

He remembered the sound she had made at the first slap, low and broken.

He watched her walk ahead of him now. The silk was buried in her crack again, drawn tight between her cheeks with every step, and the faint pink of his handprints still showed at the lower edges where the skirt panel lifted and fell. Her thighs shone.

Each stride made one round cheek rise while the other settled, a slow heavy rhythm he could have counted like a pulse, and when she turned her head to look at something on a passing table, the curve of her breast swung into view beyond her arm and swung away again.

He found himself wondering what else the house might give him before the day was out, and the wondering made his cock ache.

Now they stood at the edge of the stage crowd, and Yan Mei finally saw what was happening on the boards.

Four men stood in a line across the middle of the platform with their trousers down and their cocks out, erect and glistening under the lamps, and a woman knelt in front of them.

Her wrists were bound behind her back with black silk cord that pressed shallow grooves into her skin. A strip of dark cloth was tied across her eyes.

As Yan Mei watched, the woman shuffled on her knees from one man to the next. She leaned in to sniff each cock first, her nose almost touching the root, her nostrils flaring. Then she licked it, one long slow stroke from base to tip. Then she took it into her mouth, hunting by smell and taste for the shape of her own partner among three strangers.

Slurp.

The crowd counted under its breath. Someone laughed when she lingered too long on the second man. Someone else groaned when she took the third deep into her throat, spit shining on her chin.

Yan Mei could not stop watching her.

The woman was perhaps thirty, with a full figure and long black hair that had come half loose from its pins and hung down her back in a dark rope. She wore nothing at all above the waist. Her breasts swung freely each time she leaned forward, and her nipples, large and dark, brushed against the men's thighs as she moved from one to the next.

Her lips were swollen and shining. There was a smear of something white at the corner of her mouth that she did not seem to have noticed, and her chin was slick with spit.

Every time she drew back from a cock that was not her husband's, she made a small frustrated sound, as though she had been robbed of something. Then she shuffled to the next one on her knees with a determination that the crowd found hilarious.

The fourth man was a broad, quiet figure in a plain grey mask.

The moment the woman's nose touched the root of his cock, her whole body changed. Her shoulders loosened and her spine curved, and she made a low, almost tender sound in her throat.

Instead of sniffing or licking, she simply took him into her mouth and sank down until her lips were pressed against his belly.

The crowd cheered before she had even finished, because there was no mistaking a woman who had found her own man.

She sucked him with long, slow, loving strokes, her head moving in a rhythm that had obviously been learned over years. When he came, his hand rested gently on the crown of her head while she swallowed every drop, her throat working, and she kept him in her mouth for a long moment afterward.

Yan Mei realised that she had been holding her breath. There was something in that last moment that frightened her more than all the obscenity before it. The woman had knelt blind among strangers and sucked three of them in front of a crowd, and yet the look on her face when she found her husband was one of pure devotion, as if all the filth around her had only been a path that led back to him.

Yan Mei did not know what to do with that thought, so she pressed it down where she pressed everything else this morning, under the wet silk and the heat in her face.

The rules, a man beside them explained to his companion with relish, were simple. The woman had to find her partner by recognising his cock with her mouth, by smell or tongue or any sense except sight. Anyone could enter.

The organiser chose three other men at random from the crowd to stand in the line beside the husband, and the test was hers, and the entertainment belonged to everyone else. If she failed, she simply spent more time on her knees with more strangers in her mouth. If she succeeded, the crowd cheered her for knowing her man's cock better than her own reflection.

Elder Xuan Wu watched with his head tilted, the way a connoisseur watches a rare dish being plated. His posture was relaxed, but his attention was not. The woman on the stage found her man on the fourth try, swallowed what he gave her with a practised gulp, and was helped down to scattered cheers, while the three strangers who had stood beside her husband went back into the crowd grinning, their shafts still wet with her spit. Xuan Wu made up his mind at once.

"We're going," he said, already moving toward the steps of the stage, in the mild, certain voice of a man who never asked permission of rooms he walked into. "Wei'er."

Xuan Wei followed him.

Her bare feet whispered on the boards. She climbed the steps with her hips swaying and her chin high, the gold of her waistband catching the lamplight, the rear panel lost between the rolling cheeks of her ass.

When she reached the last step, her breasts bounced once against the thin silk, heavy and full, and half the front row leaned forward to see.

At the rail, Elder Li stopped in his tracks. Surprise cut through the lust that still lingered in him from Yan Mei's ass.

He could still feel it. Even now his palms remembered the weight of those cheeks, the way the white flesh had swelled up between his fingers, the sharp ringing sting after each slap and the wet pink glimpse of her beneath the silk. He had wiped his hand on nothing since. He did not intend to.

He glanced sideways at her where she stood beside her husband, at the faint red edge of his own handprint still showing beneath the rear panel of her skirt, and felt his cock stir all over again.

The organiser, a thin man in a house mask with a voice like oiled silk, blindfolded Xuan Wei with practised hands. The black cloth went over her eyes and was knotted behind her head, and her sight was sealed away.

Then he drew her wrists behind her and bound them with the cord.

It pulled her shoulders back into a graceful arch. Her breasts lifted against their strips until the upper curves nearly spilled free, pale and full, the red silk biting into them and the nipples standing hard at the centre of each.

She stood in the lamplight looking magnificent, a mature body framed in scraps, blind and bound and waiting like a prize the house had decided to unwrap slowly.

The light caught the undercurves of her breasts. A faint sheen of sweat had already gathered in the valley between them, and as Yan Mei watched, a single bead broke loose and ran down over her belly and vanished beneath the gold of her waistband.

"The lady knows the rules?" the organiser asked her, in a voice pitched to carry to the back of the crowd.

"I know them," Xuan Wei said, smiling beneath the blindfold.

"Then I'll say them for the gentlemen who have just arrived." He turned to the crowd with a showman's sweep of his arm.

"The lady will be presented with four men. One of them is her own. She may use her nose, her lips and her tongue, and nothing else. She may take as long as she likes with each, but when she names a man, her choice is final. If she chooses wrongly, the man she chose may do with her mouth as he pleases until the lamp is trimmed."

He gestured to a small brass lamp on a stand at the side of the stage, its wick burning low. "If she chooses rightly, the house pays her husband five to one on the stake, and the three gentlemen who stood beside him will have had a very pleasant morning for nothing."

The crowd laughed. Coins were already moving along the rail, men calling odds to one another in low, eager voices, and Yan Mei heard someone near her say that the lady had the walk of a woman who would know her husband by taste on the first try, and someone else answer that a mouth like that would surely want to taste all four before she decided, husband or no husband.