Stairway of Stares

The organiser untied Xuan Wei's wrists and drew the blindfold away from her eyes. They were bright with satisfaction and leftover arousal, and she blinked once in the lamplight and smiled.

Faint red grooves ringed her wrists where the cord had pressed. She rubbed them idly as she rose, unhurried, her knees pink from the boards.

She stepped down from the stage with a faint shine of seed still at the corner of her lips and drying in pale streaks over the tops of her breasts, smiling as though she had just finished a pleasant stroll through a garden.

Elder Xuan Wu came down beside her, his mask hiding a contented mouth, and tucked his cock away with the casual neatness of a man putting away a tool.

She came straight to Yan Mei.

Before Yan Mei could step back, Xuan Wei had taken her hand in both of her own. The fingers were still warm and faintly sticky. She leaned in close enough that Yan Mei could smell the men on her breath, all four of them layered together, salt over salt, and beneath it the sweet musk of her own arousal rising from between her thighs.

"You were watching me the whole time," Xuan Wei said softly, delighted, as though they were two friends sharing a secret over embroidery. "I could feel it, even with the cloth over my eyes. Did you like it, Sister Yan?"

"I don't know what you mean," Yan Mei said, and her voice came out so thin that she barely recognised it.

Xuan Wei laughed, low and warm, and let her gaze drift down to the dark patch on the silk between Yan Mei's thighs, and then back up to her face, and said nothing more about it, which was far worse than anything she could have said.

Instead she squeezed Yan Mei's hand once and leaned closer, until her lips were nearly touching Yan Mei's ear. "The first time is the hardest," she whispered. "After that you only remember the part where he finds you."

Then she let go and returned to her husband's side, swaying her hips, and left Yan Mei standing in the crowd with her heart pounding and her hand still tingling where it had been held.

Han Fei came down the stage steps behind her, tucking himself away with a satisfied grin, and caught Yan Mei looking at him before she could turn her face aside. He did not leer.

He simply met her eyes through the slits of his mask with a kind of easy friendliness, the look of a young man who had just been sucked dry by his master's wife in public and saw no reason at all to be embarrassed about it, and somehow that unnerved her more than if he had leered.

In this house, and among these people, shame was a thing that belonged only to her.

Then he looked at Yan Mei.

For a heartbeat the thought was written plainly on him. He would make her play the same game. He would bind those wrists and cover those famous eyes and put her on her knees in front of four cocks, and watch the proud wife of Yan Tian learn strangers by taste.

He could almost see it already. Her heavy breasts swaying as she leaned in to sniff. Her pink tongue curling around the wrong cock. Her face wet with another man's seed while her husband watched from the rail.

Then boredom flickered across the idea and dimmed it.

He had just seen this show, and his wife had performed it perfectly. Repeating the same stage with a different woman in the same morning felt small to him. He wanted something stranger and filthier.

---

He walked on with Xuan Wei at his side, scanning the floor with restless eyes, and the rest of them followed, masked and still sticky with the heat of the stage.

They passed dice tables and murmuring card pits, a fan-tan board where a woman sat naked in the dealer's chair with the beads heaped in her lap, and a rope-ringed square where two masked wives wrestled in oil while their husbands shouted wagers from the rope.

In one corner a woman was bent over a barrel while the winner of some game played with her asshole beneath a five-minute sandglass. His thumb was shining. He worked it in slow circles and then pressed it inside, and her moans came out cracked, her fingers splayed and clawing on the curved staves of the barrel.

Squelch.

Xuan Wu's gaze passed across all of it without catching on anything. His boredom was a hunter's boredom, not the absence of desire but the refusal of anything less than the next sharper knife.

They passed a long table where six women knelt in a row with their heads down and their asses raised, each with a numbered card tucked into the waistband of her scraps.

The men around the table were placing bets on which of them would come first under the hands of the house attendants who knelt behind them. Six pairs of hands moved at six different speeds, some circling, some stroking, one attendant working three fingers in and out with a wet steady rhythm, and the women's moans rose and fell in a ragged chorus.

One of them, a slim woman with a scar on her shoulder, was crying out so high and so continuously that the men who had bet on her were already cheering.

"Four! Four! Come on, four!"

Yan Mei walked past with her eyes fixed on the floor. The sounds followed her for twenty paces, and her thighs slid against each other with every step in a way that made the wet silk cling and let go, cling and let go.

Beyond that was a quieter corner where a pair of elderly cultivators played a slow game of stones on a board inlaid with ivory.

Between them on the floor knelt a young woman with her mouth open and her tongue resting on her lower lip. Each time one of the old men captured a stone, he dropped it into her mouth.

Tok.

She held them there without swallowing, her cheeks slowly filling and her eyes streaming, a thin line of spit running from the corner of her lips down to her chin, while the men discussed the weather and the price of spirit herbs as though she were part of the furniture.

Xuan Wei glanced at it with mild professional interest. Xuan Wu did not glance at it at all.

"Nothing here," he said, mostly to himself. "Children's games."

Elder Li, overhearing, felt a chill run down his spine despite the heat. There were cultivators on this floor who would have counted any of these games among the most depraved of their lives, and Xuan Wu was walking past them like a man walking past market stalls selling cheap trinkets. Whatever the inner elder considered worth stopping for, Elder Li was beginning to suspect that he would not have the stomach to watch it, and he was even more afraid that he would.

Yan Mei walked beside her husband and tried to breathe.

The hall air was thick with incense and spilled wine and the warm salt of a hundred bodies, and every breath she drew seemed to carry some other woman's moan inside it. The wet silk between her thighs clung and let go with each step. Her nipples had not softened since the stage, and the thin strips over them rasped faintly with every stride, a small constant friction she could not stop noticing.

Yan Tian's sleeve brushed her bare arm as they walked. She let her fingers find the edge of it and hold on.

The image of Xuan Wei kneeling on the boards would not leave her. It sat behind her eyes like a lamp left burning. Every time she blinked she saw the black cord at the other woman's wrists, and the shine of spit on her chin, and the white streaks drying on her breasts, and the calm, almost peaceful look on her face as she swallowed.

Between Yan Mei's own thighs the silk was still soaked and warm. It had not dried at all. If anything it was wetter now than it had been at the stage.

She did not understand that look on Xuan Wei's face. She was afraid that, before this visit was over, she was going to.

"You're shaking," Yan Tian said quietly, without turning his head.

"It's cold," she said.

It was not cold. The air in the hall was so warm that sweat was running down the small of her back. He did not argue with her. After a moment his hand brushed the small of her back, not quite protective and not quite possessive, as though he were reminding himself that she was still his while the house went on reminding them both that ownership was a soft word under hard rules.

Then Xuan Wu saw the stairs. They rose against the far wall in a sweep of dark carved wood, their rails polished by a great many hands, and halfway up stood a house attendant with a polite bow that clearly meant that money went higher.

Xuan Wu turned toward them at once, and the others followed him as he began to climb, the steps creaking softly beneath them. Elder Li knew what waited at the top. He had been coming to the Heavenly Gambling House for many years and knew the geography of its filth the way a cartographer knows roads.

The first floor was cards and buttocks and guessing games and public mouth work that still pretended at novelty. The second floor belonged to the higher players of the demonic clans, where the stakes were stricter and the rules no longer bothered to pretend at all.

At that moment, though, Elder Li was not thinking about rules. He was climbing a few steps behind Yan Mei, and he was staring at her ass.

Each step lifted and dropped her full cheeks.

The rear panel sank deeper into her cleft with the motion, until her ass was entirely bare from behind, white and full and framed by the thin dark silk. As she climbed, each cheek rose in turn, tightened over the step, and then dropped and jiggled as her weight came down, left and right, left and right, in a slow heavy rhythm that his eyes could not escape.

When she took a longer stride, even the cleft itself opened to his eyes. He caught the pink shadow of the little flower he had seen when he spread her during the body-parts game.

Below it, the damp edges of her pussy lips pressed around the front strip until the cloth was little more than a dark line between her thighs. They glistened. When her thigh lifted for the next step, he could see the silk pull and the plump flesh bulge on either side of it.

He had already played with those cheeks downstairs, squeezed them and spanked them and knelt behind them for five minutes that had not been nearly enough. It would never be enough.

He climbed with his erection standing obviously beneath his robes, its tip wet enough to mark the cloth, and kept his eyes locked on the bounce and spread of her ass all the way up.

"Elder Li," Yan Tian said quietly from beside him, without turning his head.

Elder Li started, as though he had been caught with his hand in the offering box. "Clan Leader?"

"Watch your step," Yan Tian said. "These stairs are steep."

It might have been a warning or it might have been nothing at all, and Elder Li could not tell which from the flat calm of his voice.

He murmured his thanks and looked down at his feet for three whole steps. Then his eyes rose again, as helplessly as water runs downhill, to the bare white curves bouncing in front of him.

Yan Tian did not say anything else. He had felt Elder Li's stare on his wife's ass all the way up the staircase, as surely as if it had been a hand.

The most shameful thing he had discovered about himself today was that he had not spoken to make the old man stop. He had spoken because he wanted the old man to know that he had seen him looking, and he wanted to find out whether the old man would look anyway.

The old man looked anyway, and Yan Tian's cock throbbed in his trousers as he climbed.

Han Fei brought up the rear with his hands clasped loosely behind him and his eyes moving between the two women ahead of him with the contented air of a man strolling through an orchard in late summer.

Xuan Wei's ass swayed above him on the stairs, bare and familiar and still faintly pink at the knees from the boards. Yan Mei's rolled heavier beside it, white and full, the silk vanished between her cheeks. He looked from one to the other like a man choosing between two ripe peaches.

He had come twice already that morning, once in Xuan Wei's mouth on the stage and once, at dawn, into one of the twin maids, and he felt pleasantly light and pleasantly empty and not in the least finished.

He watched Elder Li's head bob along behind Yan Mei's ass like a dog following a butcher's cart and found it very funny, and he watched Yan Tian pretending not to watch Elder Li and found that funnier still.

His master had told him on the road to Jinling that the branch families were dull and that the visit would be a chore. His master had been wrong, and Han Fei suspected his master had known it all along.

Yan Mei's legs felt unsteady on the stairs.

The wet silk between her thighs stuck and released with every step, a small filthy kiss against her pussy each time she climbed. The polished rail was cool under her palm. The stairs were steep enough that she had to lift her knees high, and each time she did, she felt the air of the stairwell slide over her bare cheeks and into the parted cleft between them.

Behind her she could hear somebody breathing much too hard.

She did not know who it was. She knew only that the breathing had been following her since the stage, and that whoever it belonged to was watching her climb as though the staircase itself were a performance staged for him.

Ahead of her, Elder Xuan Wu's shoulders moved with the easy certainty of a man who always found the next table.

Near the top she glanced down over the rail and saw the whole first floor spread out below her: the hundreds of masked heads and the lantern light and the gold heaped on the felt, and the stage where Xuan Wei had knelt, standing empty now under its cluster of lamps, waiting for the next woman.

The roar of the hall rose up the stairwell and fell away again like a tide going out.

Then Xuan Wu stepped through the archway at the top of the stairs into a quieter, richer, darker room that smelled of expensive wine and something sharper beneath it. The attendant there bowed low to him, and Yan Mei followed her husband through the arch after him.