Skill Over Beauty

Yan Mei was still slowly kneeling in front of Elder Li.

The men who had bet on her began shouting at her to hurry, their voices sharp and impatient, some of them crude enough to name exactly which part of his cock they wanted her lips on first.

She glanced once across the stage. Yan Tian stood with Xuan Wei's head already moving at his hips, and his eyes were not on Xuan Wei at all. They were on her. They were burning.

She looked back at the erection tenting Elder Li's trousers and swallowed hard enough that her throat clicked. Then she lowered the cloth with trembling fingers.

A huge cock sprang out and fell heavily across her face.

Thwap.

It was bigger than her husband's, thicker and heavier, the shaft ridged with veins and the head swollen dark and shining. The weight of it lay across her cheek and the bridge of her nose like a claim, hot against her skin and smelling strongly of man, sweat and musk and the faint bitter salt that had leaked from him while he waited.

From the crowd below the stage, Han Fei cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at her to hurry up before the other side finished the job, and the men around him laughed. Yan Mei heard the laughter as if from the bottom of a well. Her knees found the boards. The wood was warm from the women who had knelt there before her, and slightly damp, and she did not let herself think about why.

"To think this old man was hiding such a big weapon!" someone in the crowd yelled, and laughter mixed with a fresh wave of bets.

Yan Mei stared, surprised despite everything the morning had already done to her.

The cock covered half her face. Its head rested near her eye, a bead of precum trembling at the slit, and its shaft pressed against her lips without asking. She could feel it pulse against her mouth, slow and heavy, in time with a heartbeat that was not hers.

Above her, Elder Li smiled down with pride and hunger in every wrinkle around his eyes.

He had been hard since the ass game downstairs, since his palms had sunk into her cheeks and his eyes had drunk in her pink little asshole and her wet pussy lips from below. Now that proud and beautiful face was lying under his cock. Many men in the clan had wanted her body through years of banquets and stolen glances across courtyards, and none of them had come close to this.

He silently blessed Elder Xuan Wu for the opportunity as her hands closed around his shaft.

Her fingers were warm and beautiful. They trembled once before they steadied, wrapped around him, and gave him a single slow stroke from root to tip, as if testing his size. Her fingertips did not meet around him.

Then she stretched out her tongue toward the head and slowly licked it.

His precum spread across her taste buds. The strong salt and musk of it made her nose wrinkle, and made her pussy clench under the wet silk in a slow betraying pulse.

She began to suck from the front. She wrapped her lips around the thick head and swirled her tongue in slow wet circles, tracing the ridge of the crown and dipping into the slit, and Elder Li watched every second of it as if he meant to remember it on his deathbed.

Slurp.

The most beautiful woman in the branch, his rival's wife, was sucking him in public under house lamps while strangers cheered. Her lips stretched around his girth until the pink rim of them shone with spit.

Then her eyes lifted and met his through the mask.

The eye contact doubled the pleasure at once. His hips twitched and a groan escaped him that he did not bother to hide.

For Elder Li, the first touch of her tongue was like being struck by lightning in a dry field.

He had imagined this mouth for so many years that he had stopped believing it could ever be real, and now it was wet and hot and hesitant on the head of his cock. The hesitation was the best part of it, because it meant she was shy of him and was doing it anyway.

He could feel her breath shaking against his skin. He could feel her lips trembling as they parted around him.

He stood with his hands at his sides and did not touch her at first. He wanted to be able to remember every detail of this without the distraction of his own movement: the faint scrape of her teeth when she misjudged his size, the small wince of her eyebrows behind the mask, the way her throat worked as she swallowed back the taste of him.

Then she began to suck in earnest, and he stopped being able to think about anything at all.

As she kept sucking, she forgot the people watching her.

The noise of the crowd became distant weather, cheers and curses and the clink of coin far away beyond the lamps. In spite of herself she began to enjoy it: the thickness on her tongue, the challenge of making him come first, the heat between her own legs that the first floor had never cooled and the second floor kept feeding.

She took him deeper.

She held his hips for balance and pushed her head down until he slid into her throat. Her eyes watered. Her nose pressed into the give of his belly, into coarse grey hair that smelled of sweat and sandalwood, and she held him there while her throat fluttered and squeezed around the head.

Glk.

She drew back with a long wet gasp, a rope of spit stretching from her lip to his tip, and went down again.

Saliva and precum mixed into a slippery mess that made obscene wet sounds with every stroke.

She remembered Xuan Wei's advice then, and lifted her eyes.

She looked up at Elder Li through the mask with his cock stretched across her lips, and let him see her face, the shame and the fury and the helpless arousal all mixed together in it.

She felt him jerk on her tongue as if she had struck him.

His fingers came down and curled into her hair, not pushing, only holding, and his breathing changed into something hoarse and shallow. For the first time since she had knelt, Yan Mei felt something that was almost like power.

It frightened her how good it felt.

She held his gaze and slid down his shaft slowly, inch by inch, watching his face break above her, and the crowd that had laughed at the old man's luck went quiet to watch it.

Gluck. Gluck. Schluck.

Spit dripped from her stretched lips onto her breasts in shining strings. It soaked the thin cloth until her stiff nipples showed dark through it and the valley between her breasts gleamed under the lamps, and every bob of her head set the wet strips swaying.

Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and slid down beneath the edge of her mask.

She went on trying to make him come faster anyway, pride and urgency braided together into the same desperate rhythm, her free hand stroking whatever part of him her mouth could not take, twisting at the base each time her lips came down to meet her fist.

Elder Li was weakening.

His knees had begun to shake and his breath had grown short, and his cock pulsed on her tongue in quick hard throbs. She felt it and sped up.

She focused her tongue on the tip in tight fast circles that made his thighs jump. Then she lifted his cock with one hand, so that it lay heavy and wet along her cheek, and went lower, down the shaft to his tight, hairy balls.

She took them into her mouth one after the other. She rolled her tongue under their weight and sucked gently and then harder, until he made a sound like a man being strangled, and then she let them slip from her lips with a soft wet pop.

Pop.

She licked her way back up his whole length in long wet strokes that left him shining.

Her pussy was wetting openly now. The silk between her thighs had gone dark and was stuck to her, outlining every fold, and a thin line of arousal tracked down the inside of her leg toward her knee.

In the crowd, Elder Xuan Wu watched Yan Mei take the old man's balls into her mouth and smiled the slow, pleased smile of a teacher whose student has surprised him. "Wei'er has been giving her lessons," he said to Han Fei. "That was never in the lady's repertoire last night."

"Will it be enough, Master?" Han Fei asked.

Xuan Wu glanced across the stage at his wife, at the rhythm of her head and the set of her shoulders and the way Yan Tian's knees had begun to buckle, and shook his head. "No," he said, without regret. "But it will be close, and close is always more entertaining." He tossed another gold tael onto the betting tray, on Yan Mei's side this time, purely for the pleasure of losing it.

The crowd cheered louder, because Yan Mei looked unbearably sexy on her knees with a heaven-defying face behind a crooked mask, her breasts wet with her own spit and her throat working and her eyes streaming, an old man's balls in her mouth.

Only two days before Elder Xuan Wu arrived at the family, touching her had been nothing but a dream for Elder Li. He had only been able to stare at her across banquet halls and go home to lesser women with his cock aching and his pride bitter.

In two days the game had changed completely.

That majestic beauty was sucking his balls with passion while her husband was sucked ten paces away by a woman who made wet music with her tongue. Elder Li could not resist her slippery tongue and her eyes and the years of wanting any longer.

He gave up on winning in the same pulse that he came.

His hips jerked and a broken sound tore out of his throat. She pulled back with her mouth still open and he released everything onto her face in thick ropes. The first struck the edge of her mask, the second her parted lips, the third her cheek, and the rest dripped down in sticky white lines from her chin toward her breasts.

Splat.

She knelt with her eyes half closed and her tongue still out, feeling each warm pulse land.

On the other side of the stage, though, Yan Tian had already come in Xuan Wei's mouth a few seconds earlier.

He had known it was coming for the last full minute, and he had fought it with everything he had.

He had fixed his eyes on his wife and tried to make the sight of her a reason to hold on, her lips stretched around Elder Li and her eyes lifted to the old man's face. It had done the opposite.

Every time Yan Mei's head went down, Xuan Wei's went down with it, as though the two women were dancing to the same drum. Every wet sound that came from his wife's throat seemed to come from the mouth around his own cock.

When Yan Mei took Elder Li's balls into her mouth, something in Yan Tian simply gave way.

He did not decide to come. He watched his wife suck another man's balls under the lamps of a gambling house and his body made the decision for him, and the shame of it was so perfectly mixed with the pleasure that he could not tell where one ended and the other began.

Xuan Wei had been ruthless with him, her tongue working inside her mouth while she sucked and her breasts brushing his thighs, years of filthy training turned into a timer that Yan Mei could not hope to beat. In the last half minute she had let go of his shaft and slid her fingers beneath him to cup his balls, rolling them gently and then squeezing at the exact instant she took him to the back of her throat.

Yan Tian had held on with all his strength and still emptied himself into her with a muffled groan, his cock pulsing hard against her palate. She held him there through every pulse, her throat working around him and her eyes lifted to his face with lazy satisfaction, and did not let a single drop escape her lips.

Xuan Wei swallowed with a satisfied sound and drew off him slowly, wiped her lip with her thumb and looked toward the judges, and the house announced in a clear voice that Elder Li's side had won. Coin moved and bets were paid out, and somewhere in the crowd a man who had mocked the old man cursed beneath his mask.

Yan Mei knelt with cum on her face and frustration burning under her embarrassment. She had lost.

A heaven-defying beauty had gone against absolute skill, and skill had won. Xuan Wei's years of training had emptied Yan Tian first, and Yan Mei's desperate deepthroat and ball-sucking had come a breath too late.

She wiped her face with a shaking hand and tasted Elder Li on her tongue, salt and musk and a victory that was not hers. Then she stood up on unsteady legs while the spit and cum cooled on her breasts, the boards creaking under her, her knees marked pink from the wood.

When she was on her feet again, Elder Li was still standing there swaying, his cock still twitching in the cool air.

He looked down at his own seed dripping from her chin and the edge of her mask, and for a long moment he simply did not move. Twenty years of wanting had ended in under a quarter of an hour, and it had been worth every one of those years. He could have wept.

Instead he reached down and, with a tenderness that surprised even him, brushed a strand of wet hair away from her cheek with his thumb, smearing a little of his cum along her skin as he did it.

She turned her face aside from his hand, the flush running hot down her throat.

Xuan Wei came down the stage steps a little ahead of the others and waited for Yan Mei at the bottom, and when Yan Mei reached her, she did not gloat.

She looked at the cum on Yan Mei's face and the tears that had dried in tracks beneath the mask. Then she leaned in and kissed her lightly on the corner of the mouth, where Elder Li's seed was thickest.

Her lips were warm and unhurried. The tip of her tongue touched the white smear and gathered it, and she drew back licking her lips, tasting it the way a woman tastes a sauce to judge the cook.

"Close," she said warmly. "Very close. Another month and you'll beat me."

Yan Tian found his wife at the foot of the stage steps. For a moment neither of them spoke. He looked at the white smears drying on her face and her breasts, and at the wet ruin of the silk over her nipples, and she looked at the shine of Xuan Wei's spit still on him and at the flush that had not left his cheeks, and something passed between them that had no name in any language either of them had been taught.

Then he took a cloth from his sleeve and wiped her face with it, carefully, the way he might have wiped a child's face after a meal, and she stood very still with her eyes closed behind the mask.

"You were beautiful," he said quietly, so that no one else could hear.

She opened her eyes and stared at him. She took the cloth out of his hand and finished cleaning her breasts herself, and then folded it and gave it back to him, and walked on toward the counter where Xuan Wu was waiting. Behind her, Yan Tian stood holding the soiled cloth and found that his cock, emptied less than a minute before, was already beginning to stir again.

At the counter they collected their winnings, gold taels and spirit stones sliding into Elder Xuan Wu's space ring with a soft clink after the house had skimmed its share. The clerk behind the counter counted it out without looking up, his abacus beads clicking, a man who had paid out a thousand such pots and could not have described a single face that had earned them.

Then they moved away from the game into the slightly cooler air between the tables, where waitresses still walked about with bare breasts and buried underwear and no one looked twice at a woman with dried seed at the corner of her mouth. Behind them, the next couples were already climbing onto the stage, and the attendant was already lifting the sandglass.

Elder Xuan Wu was satisfied by the show and the money both, his posture loose and his eyes half-lidded with pleasure. Elder Li walked with the glow of a man who had just received an extraordinary blowjob from Lady Yan Mei and had been paid for it as well, and the memory of her lips around his balls carried him like a second spine.

Yan Tian's jaw was tight beneath his mask, but his eyes kept flicking to the faint shine still at the corner of his wife's mouth as though the sight were a wound and a trophy at once. Han Fei grinned like a boy who had bet correctly.

Xuan Wei slid her arm through her husband's as though they were leaving a tea house rather than a stage where wives had traded their mouths for coin.

They left the challenge area and made for the exits that led back down and out toward daylight and the city streets and the long walk home to the Yan residence. The noise of the second floor followed them for a while and then began to fade behind carved doors.

Yan Mei's thighs were still wet, and her lips still tasted of Elder Li, and the winnings sat heavy in Xuan Wu's ring while the morning's games walked with them into the street like a scent that soap would not easily wash away.

At the great doors of the house, an attendant bowed and held out a lacquered tray, and one by one they laid their masks on it. Yan Mei's hands shook as she untied hers.

Without it, the air felt cold on the upper half of her face, and she was suddenly certain that everyone in the street outside would be able to see in her eyes everything she had done that morning, the strangers' hands on her ass and Xuan Wei's blind mouth on the stage and Elder Li's cock in her throat.

Elder Li set his mask down beside hers and looked at her bare face for the first time since the stage, and smiled at her with a fatherly kindness that turned her stomach, because it was the same smile he had always given her across banquet tables, and she understood now what had always been behind it.

She turned away from him and stepped out through the doors after her husband, into the noise and dust of the street, and did not look back at the house, though she could feel it behind her the whole way down the steps, like a hand still resting on the small of her back.

Behind her, Xuan Wei paused on the threshold to stretch like a cat in the sunlight, her arms high over her head so that the strips across her breasts pulled taut and one nipple slipped free, and she did not bother to tuck it back. She was entirely unconcerned that half the street had stopped to stare at her, and followed with Han Fei at her heels, laughing at something he said.

On the way down, they passed the blindfold stage again. Another woman knelt on it now, younger than Xuan Wei and plainly new to the game, her bound hands trembling and her lips moving from cock to cock with frantic uncertainty while the crowd laughed at every mistake.

Yan Mei slowed without meaning to and watched her for the space of three breaths, and felt Xuan Wu's eyes on her as she did, and walked on before he could say anything.

The first floor seemed louder and cruder after the second, and the light from the doorway at the far end of the hall was so bright that it hurt to look at.