Carriage Home

The afternoon light outside the Heavenly Gambling House was so bright after the lamplit dark of the second floor that Yan Mei had to narrow her bare eyes against it.

The clean air of the street smelled of dust and roasting meat and river water. It struck her flushed skin like cool water and made her aware all over again of how little she was wearing, every breeze finding the wet places on her thighs and the damp silk over her nipples, and she drew a breath and held it as though she could hide inside it.

Elder Xuan Wu walked ahead of them down the steps of the house, his posture loose with the satisfaction of a man who had eaten well.

He had enjoyed every one of the filthy things Yan Mei had been made to do that morning: her mouth stretched around Elder Li's thick cock, her ass spanked and spread downstairs, the silk stuck between her thighs while strangers stared and bet.

He wanted to bring that version of her fully into the light.

He had already planted the seed in both their minds. Yan Tian had tasted the forbidden fruit now, watching his wife used and being sucked himself in public, and Xuan Wu could see the exhibitionist hunger putting down deeper roots into the soil of their marriage with every hour.

He glanced back once over his shoulder as they reached the foot of the steps. Yan Mei was coming down behind him with one hand on her husband's arm, her mask gone and her bare face flushed in the sunlight, her lips still faintly swollen from Elder Li's cock. She saw him looking and dropped her eyes at once, and a fresh wave of colour climbed her throat.

Xuan Wu smiled and turned forward again.

Two mansion guards were waiting near the carriage line in neat demonic-clan uniforms, their eyes carefully blank in the manner of men who were paid not to see.

Even so, they noticed at once that the two women came out carrying a far sexier air than they had gone in with. Their skin was flushed and the cloth between their thighs was dark with wetness. They walked with the loose, unsteady grace of women who had been played with by rules all morning, and they still smelled of spit and cum and arousal, a warm animal sweetness that drifted behind them through the dusty street air.

Yan Mei's heavy breasts still strained the thin front strips. A faint sticky shine lingered near her collarbone where she had wiped away Elder Li's semen too late, and it caught the sunlight each time she breathed.

Xuan Wei looked as though she had been born walking out of gambling houses.

The two women walked close beside their husbands with the others following, and the guards fell in behind at a polite distance, as though shame were contagious and professionalism required room.

The younger of the two guards could not quite manage the blankness.

He was perhaps twenty, broad and earnest, a Yan branch outer disciple who had stood duty at the inner gate for two years and had bowed to his clan leader's wife a hundred times without once daring to lift his eyes above her chin.

Now his eyes went to her breasts and stuck there.

His face turned the colour of a boiled crab. He walked the entire way home three paces behind her with his spear held at a stiff angle in front of his trousers, staring fixedly at the back of her head whenever she turned, and the moment she faced forward again his gaze slid straight back down to the slow heavy roll of her ass.

Yan Mei felt it there the whole length of the market street, warm and clumsy and constant, like a hand that did not quite dare to land.

The older guard noticed too. He did not stare the way the boy did, but every so often his eyes slid sideways in a long careful glance that began at her bare shoulder and travelled down the line of her body to the backs of her knees, and each time she caught it from the corner of her eye, it landed on her skin with its own small heat. Between the two of them she felt watched from every side, the way a lamp feels moths.

Her nipples tightened against the thin strips. The silk between her thighs, which had begun to dry in the sun, grew warm and damp again.

Elder Li led them through a little more of the city on the way home. They went along market streets loud with talisman hawkers, where paper charms fluttered on strings above the stalls and old men shouted prices for protection against curses no one had ever heard of.

They passed a stall where spirit-beast meat roasted over black flames, the fat hissing and spitting and the smoke rising thick and sweet, and crossed a bridge where the river smelled of lotus and old blood.

Elder Li chatted the whole way as though nothing filthier than shopping had happened beneath their masks, naming the families who owned each shop and the debts each family owed.

Yan Mei walked with her thighs sticking together at every step. Once Yan Tian's hand brushed the small of her back and stayed there longer than it needed to, and she did not know whether it was meant as comfort or claim, and was not sure he knew either.

At the mouth of the bridge, a flower seller called out to Yan Tian to buy a lotus for his beautiful wife, and then saw what his beautiful wife was wearing and lost the rest of his patter halfway through a word, his mouth hanging open over his baskets while his hand went on holding out the flower to nobody.

Xuan Wei took it from him for free, with a smile that made him forget to ask for the coin, and tucked it behind Yan Mei's ear before Yan Mei could stop her.

"There," she said, stepping back to admire her work. "Now you look like a bride."

"A bride," Yan Mei repeated faintly. A pair of young cultivators in academy robes had stopped dead on the far side of the bridge to stare at her breasts, and one of them walked straight into a lantern post and did not seem to notice.

"Every woman is a bride the first time she learns what she likes," Xuan Wei said, and linked her arm through Yan Mei's again and walked her on across the bridge, swaying her hips, while the two young men stared after them both and the one who had hit the post rubbed his forehead with a dazed, grateful expression.

Yan Tian walked a step behind them and watched the academy boys watching his wife, and said nothing, and felt his cock stir again, and was no longer even surprised by it.

When they reached the Yan residence at last, the gates swung open on familiar carved wood and the courtyard stones rang under their boots, and the servants bowed and did not ask why their lady's eyes were so bright or why her clothes were damp. They went through to the discussion hall with their faces bare in the supposed safety of home walls that did not feel nearly as safe as they had yesterday.

Before they sat, Yan Mei had tried to slip away to her own rooms to change. She had got as far as the inner corridor before Xuan Wei caught up with her, light-footed and smiling, and laid a hand on her wrist.

"Where are you going, Sister Yan?"

"To change," Yan Mei said. "To bathe. I can't sit in the discussion hall like this. The servants..."

"The servants have seen you all day," Xuan Wei said reasonably. "And my husband has not finished enjoying the outfit. It would be a little rude to take it off before the guests have gone to bed, don't you think?"

She tilted her head, and her smile did not change at all, but something in her eyes made Yan Mei remember with perfect clarity whose wife she was speaking to, and what the main clan could do to a branch family that had been rude. "Come and sit with us. Pour the wine. You pour so prettily."

So Yan Mei had come back, and sat, and poured.

"The entrance lists will go up at the end of the month," Elder Li was saying when she took her place. "My Jing'er has been preparing for two years. If the main sect looks favourably on the branch, perhaps the examiners will look favourably on the branch's sons as well." He said it to Xuan Wu, but he looked at Yan Tian as he said it, and the meaning was not hard to read.

"Perhaps," Xuan Wu agreed amiably. "The examiners listen to my senior brother, and my senior brother listens to me, when I have been well entertained." He held out his cup to Yan Mei without looking at her, and she filled it, and he smiled into it. "So far I have been very well entertained."

Yan Tian's jaw tightened at the mention of Yan Jing. He thought of his own son, Yan Chi, who had been crippled and mocked and poisoned for most of his life, and whose name no one at this table had spoken all day, and he said nothing.

There they sat and spoke of the main sect and the academy entrance exam, of schedules and politics and which elders to flatter and which rivals to watch, and of how Yan Jing's faction might move once the entrance lists were posted. The talk ran long. Xuan Wu told a story about an examiner who had failed a duke's son for bowing too low, and Elder Li laughed too loudly at it, and Yan Tian laughed a moment late.

Servants lit the oil lamps as the afternoon thinned toward evening, moving along the walls with long tapers, and the windows went from white to amber to the deep blue of dusk. Wine arrived in heavy jugs that smelled of fermented spirit fruit with something sharper underneath, and before long the talk had softened into drinking, the cups filling and emptying while Yan Mei served.

They sat on cushions on the floor around a round table of dark polished wood that held the lamplight in pale gold ovals.

Each time Yan Mei knelt and leaned forward to fill a cup, her breasts looked even larger as they hung against the small cloth. Their weight pulled the thin strips forward, her stiff nipples brushed the edges of the silk, and her cleavage deepened into a shadowed valley that Elder Li and Han Fei stared into without apology.

The heavy flesh swung with each careful tilt of the jug.

Glug. Glug.

A faint sheen of sweat from the heat of the day and her lingering arousal gathered between her breasts and slid down in a single slow bead toward her navel.

Her ass made a full round curve behind her each time she bent. The motion pulled the small underwear deeper into the crease of her pussy, rubbing wet silk against wet lips, so that with every cup she poured she grew a little more aroused. By the fourth cup her face was red from the sensation. By the sixth her thighs trembled when she rose.

Elder Li and Han Fei watched her breasts over the rims of their cups and barely tasted what they swallowed. Yan Tian watched his wife's hanging breasts and felt himself thicken under his robes.

Xuan Wei watched everyone watching and smiled into her wine like a woman who had written this script before. Elder Xuan Wu drank slowly and said nothing until the silence between swallows had grown ripe.

Then he set his cup down with a small click.

When she leaned across to fill Elder Li's cup, his hand rose from his knee as if by accident.

The backs of his fingers brushed the underside of her hanging breast. They travelled slowly, from the side of the heavy curve along its warm lower slope to the nipple, and stayed there for a heartbeat against the thin silk, the knuckle pressing lightly into the stiff peak.

She froze with the jug tilted.

Wine overflowed the rim of his cup and ran across the polished wood in a dark spreading tongue.

"Careful, Lady Yan," Elder Li said mildly, and took his hand away, and dabbed the spill with his sleeve. "You'll waste the good wine."

He said it the way he had said a thousand courteous things to her across a thousand banquet tables, and his eyes did not leave her breast while he said it. The wet silk had clung to the stiff nipple where his knuckle had pressed, and it stood out darker and sharper than the other, as if he had left a mark there that everyone could read.

Old dog.

She straightened with her face burning and her nipple throbbing where he had touched it, a small hot ache that refused to fade, and moved on to Han Fei, who at least had the decency to keep his hands in his lap, though his eyes were not decent at all.

"It's boring only to drink," Xuan Wu said. "Why don't we have some fun while we do it?"

Everyone grew curious, and everyone present knew it would be something lewd. It was the same mild voice that had invited them onto gambling stages and into bedroom games, and they listened carefully with wine still warm on their tongues while the discussion hall seemed to shrink around the round table.

"How about a drinking game?" he went on, with the easy certainty of a man remarking on the weather. "All of us start drinking at the same time. Whoever finishes last loses the round, and the loser picks a card from the pack for a punishment."

He gestured toward two packs of cards that had been sitting on the table for some time, one for men and one for women, set down earlier as if by accident, their edges neat and the paper faintly scented with something floral and wrong. "Fair rules. The same wine and the same timing, and the cards decide the rest."

It was not fair at all to Yan Mei and Xuan Wei, who had nowhere near the drinking habit of four demonic men who could empty a jug without blinking, and cultivation helped the men far more than manners helped the women. They joined anyway. After the gambling house, refusing felt smaller than losing. Yan Mei's fingers tightened on her cup until her knuckles whitened.

Elder Xuan Wu watched their faces as the rules sank in, and was content. He had played this game in a dozen great houses across three provinces, and he had learned long ago that the cards were the least important part of it.

What mattered was the wine, which loosened the knots, and the circle of cushions, which made every punishment a public one, and above all the illusion of fairness, which let the people at the table pretend they were simply unlucky.