Red-Edged Cards

In the next round Yan Tian lost on purpose. After watching the women's cards strip his wife piece by piece, he wanted to know what a punishment for a man looked like, and he drew from the men's pack with fingers that still wanted to touch her.

Don't touch a woman for the next two rounds.

It was a decent punishment compared to the women's cards, no mouth required and no ass offered, only a collar of restraint. He almost laughed. He set the card down and felt the restriction settle on him like a hand closing around his wrist, two rounds of not touching while the women went on drawing knives.

"Two rounds," he said aloud, holding up the card, and tried to make it sound like a joke. "I suppose I'll have to keep my hands in my sleeves like a scholar."

"You'll find it's harder than it sounds, Clan Leader," Xuan Wei said with a wicked smile. "Most men do. Especially when there's something they'd very much like to touch." She looked pointedly at Yan Mei's bare, glistening pussy on the cushion beside him, and then at his hands, and Yan Tian folded them firmly in his lap and kept them there.

They went ahead with the next round, the cups rising and the wine burning down throats that had long since loosened. Xuan Wei lost again, whether by chance or by design, her cup emptying last while Yan Mei somehow finished ahead of her with a desperate gulp. Xuan Wei drew from the women's pack and read the card aloud in a voice that did not shake.

Let the winner suck your pussy.

The winner was Yan Tian, whose cup had emptied first and whose eyes were already hungry, but his punishment forbade him from touching, so the chance passed to the second winner, Han Fei.

The disciple looked at Xuan Wei, who was already walking toward him with easy hips and wine-bright eyes. She lay down on the floor in front of him and spread her legs as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, opening her thighs so that the pale skin inside them caught the lamplight. She hooked her heels on the edge of the cushions to hold herself wide, and the red scrap of her underwear stretched tight across her mound, already dark in the middle.

Even though he was her husband's disciple, she was not nervous in the least, and it was plain to everyone watching that the two of them had played this kind of game countless times, the master watching from a cushion while the disciple ate and the wife moaned without shame and politics waited outside the door.

"A pity, Clan Leader," Xuan Wei said as she passed him, trailing her fingertips along his shoulder where he could not touch her back. "I would have liked your mouth. Another time." Yan Tian's hands clenched in his lap until his knuckles cracked, and Elder Li, still wiping at his belly, chuckled at the sound.

On the boards between the cushions her hair had spread out around her head like spilled ink, and she propped herself on her elbows to watch Han Fei kneel between her thighs. Yan Mei could smell her from where she sat, a heavy sweet musk that rose over the wine and the oil and made the whole hall smell like a bedchamber.

Han Fei pulled her underwear aside without wasting another moment and bared her to the hall. Her pussy was already wet and twitching, dark pink and glistening, the lips parted and the clit swollen from the earlier blowjob and from watching Yan Mei's show. A thread of her slick clung to the silk as he drew it away, stretched, and broke.

He looked at it once. Then he held her thighs open with both hands and began to suck.

He started at the bottom with one long, flat-tongued lick from her entrance up through her folds to her clit, slow enough that the whole hall could follow it, and Xuan Wei's belly jumped and she let out a low moan. He did it again, and again, and then he closed his lips around her clit and drew on it, and the moan climbed into a cry.

For five minutes the only sounds in the hall were Xuan Wei's moans and the wet noise of her pussy being eaten, cries that rose and broke and rose again. There was the lapping of his tongue and the occasional wet smack when he pulled away to breathe and then dove back in with his chin shining, and the dull knock of her heels on the floor when her hips jerked.

Her fingers found his hair and her hips rolled against his mouth, grinding her pussy over his lips and nose as though she were riding him.

Elder Li watched with his cock already half-hard again and his belly still sticky. Yan Tian watched and could not touch, the punishment burning like a brand while his wife sat beside him with her pussy bare. Yan Mei watched with her own bare pussy cooling on the cushion, and felt dread crawling up her spine like cold fingers.

Slrrp. Slrrp.

"Fei'er," Xuan Wei moaned, arching off the floor with her fingers twisted in his hair, "deeper, you lazy boy, use your tongue the way I taught you..." and Han Fei obediently pushed his tongue inside her and curled it, and her heels drummed the floor and her moan broke into a high cry. Elder Xuan Wu watched his disciple eat his wife with the fond, critical eye of a man inspecting the work of an apprentice carpenter.

"His left hand is idle," he remarked to the table. "A good student would be using it."

Han Fei's left hand immediately rose and found Xuan Wei's breast. He rolled the nipple between finger and thumb until it stood up hard and dark, and then pinched it hard at the same instant his tongue curled inside her.

She came on his tongue with a long shuddering wail. Her back lifted clear of the floor and her thighs clamped around his head, and her pussy pulsed against his mouth in quick wet spasms that he licked straight through, easing his tongue only when her heels finally slid back down to the boards. The wail made Yan Mei flinch on her cushion and press her thighs together until they ached.

When it was over, the two of them went back to their seats. Xuan Wei walked loose-hipped and unhurried, flushed from her throat to her breasts, and sat down with a long contented sigh like a woman settling after a massage. Her inner thighs shone with spit and her own juices, and Han Fei's mouth shone as well, and he licked his lips once without any shame.

The air smelled of wine and pussy and the sweet oil on Yan Mei's throat and wrists. Empty cups and full jugs waited on the table, and the two packs of cards waited between them like mouths.

The door at the far end of the hall slid open, and a young maid came in with a fresh jug of wine on a tray, her eyes fixed dutifully on the floor as she had been trained. She had taken three steps across the boards before she lifted them.

She saw Xuan Wei lying on the floor with her legs still open and her pussy shining, and Elder Li sprawled on his cushion with his belly smeared white, and her own mistress sitting at the table with her underwear lying on the floor beside her and her bare pussy on full display, and she stopped so suddenly that the jug rocked on the tray and wine slopped over its lip.

For a long moment nobody moved. Yan Mei felt the blood drain out of her face. She'll talk. They all talk. By morning the whole kitchen will know.

"Set it down, girl," Elder Xuan Wu said pleasantly, without turning his head. "Then go. And remember that you saw nothing, or the next time I visit this house, I'll ask for you to pour."

The maid set the jug down on the edge of the table with shaking hands, bowed so low that her forehead almost touched the floor, and fled. The door slid shut behind her.

Yan Tian let out a breath he had not known he was holding, and then, to his own astonishment, laughed, a short, strained, helpless sound, and after a moment Xuan Wei laughed with him, and then Han Fei, and Yan Mei sat with her face in her hands and could not tell whether she was going to weep or laugh along with them.

The round table had become a wreck of wine cups and damp cloth and the wreckage of dignity, and the lamplight painted gold across flushed faces and bare thighs.

Beyond the heavy doors, night insects had begun to sing in the mansion gardens, a thin endless shimmer of sound like silver wire. Inside the hall the only music left was the wet click of throats swallowing the last of the wine and the rustle of clothing that barely deserved the name.

Yan Mei could still feel the ghost of Elder Li's thick shaft sliding between her pussy lips, hot and slippery. The memory lived in the swollen tenderness of her folds and the faint ache in her clit, and every time she shifted on her cushion, the cool air kissed her bare skin and reminded her that she had walked back to her seat without underwear while four men watched.

Across the table, Xuan Wei sat with spit still drying on her inner thighs, one knee drawn up and the other leg stretched out long across the cushions, looking comfortable in a way that Yan Mei envied and feared at once.

The difference between a woman who had played these games for years and one who was still learning how deep the water went showed in every line of their postures.

Everyone had noticed that the punishments were growing more insane with each round.

The cards had begun with a spanking. They had already moved on to a public blowjob, to Yan Mei rubbing her pussy along an old rival's cock while her husband watched from behind, and to a disciple eating his master's wife's dripping pussy on the floor of the discussion hall for five wet minutes.

Yan Mei grew more nervous with every passing moment.

There were only two women at the table with poor drinking habits against four men who could empty cups like rain, and the women's pack sat in front of her like a mouth waiting to open wider. Its red-edged cards lay in a neat stack, the top one slightly askew where Xuan Wei had squared it with a careless fingertip.

The jugs were still half full.

Elder Xuan Wu's eyes shone with the patience of a hunter who has already heard the next branch snap. Elder Li wiped the semen from his belly with a cloth, slowly, folding it over and wiping again, and smiled at nothing. Han Fei still had the taste of Xuan Wei on his tongue and kept touching his lower lip as if to make sure it was there.

Yan Tian sat under his collar of restraint and was hungry anyway, his cock aching while his eyes flicked between his wife's bare pink pussy and the next card no one had drawn.

Yan Tian felt the restriction of his card more sharply with every breath.

One round of it remained. His wife sat close enough beside him that he could feel the heat of her bare thigh a finger's width from his own, and smell the wine and the sweat and the faint sharp trace of Elder Li on her skin, salt and musk laid over her jasmine.

He wanted to put his hand between her legs and feel how wet the old man had left her. He wanted to pull her into his lap and push into her in front of all of them and claim back what the cards had taken.

At the same time he wanted, with a shame so deep it made him dizzy, to watch the next card take more.

He did not know which wanting was stronger.

He kept his hands folded in his lap like a scholar at his lessons. He felt his wife glance at them, and then at his face, and then away, and he could not tell whether what he had seen in her eyes was reproach or relief or something else entirely, something that had only been born today, in a gambling house, under the lamps.

Yan Mei pressed her bare thighs together and felt the wetness smear between them, cool and sticky.

Her underwear lay forgotten beside her cushion like a white flag of surrender. Her breasts rose hard with each breath beneath the thin cloth, the strips clinging damply to her nipples where her own spit had soaked them hours ago and never quite dried.

Somewhere beneath the dread, her pussy throbbed in time with her pulse, hungry and ashamed.

Elder Xuan Wu lifted the jug and began to pour the next round.

Glug. Glug. Glug.

The wine splashed gold into six waiting cups, one after another, and its sweet heavy smell rose over the table.

Across the table, Elder Xuan Wu caught her eye and held it, and smiled at her as gently as an uncle at a family dinner.

She understood that he knew exactly what she was feeling, the dread, and that he had planned for it.

He did not say anything. He did not need to.

He simply looked down at the red-edged pack lying between the cups, and then back up at her, and raised his eyebrows a fraction, as if to ask whether she was ready.

She was not ready. She did not think she would ever be ready.

And yet when she looked at the pack, her pussy clenched again, harder, a deep slow squeeze that she felt all the way up under her navel, and she knew that he had seen that too.

Her eyes went to Tian'er. He was already looking at her, his hands still folded in his lap, his face flushed to the ears.

She reached for her cup anyway.

It was warm from the lamplight and heavy with the wine Xuan Wu had just poured, and the porcelain trembled faintly against her fingertips. Across the ruined table four men and one smiling woman lifted their own cups and waited for her, the way a room full of people waits for the last guest to sit before the meal can begin.

Somewhere out in the gardens a night bird called once and fell silent.

Yan Mei closed her fingers around the cup. She felt the cool air of the hall on her bare pussy and the sticky trace of Elder Li drying on her lips below, and she raised it to her mouth with the others.