Her Mother's Secret

Inside, Cao Ying licked one last stripe up the underside of Elder Chang's cock, and it twitched back toward full hardness under her tongue. Elder Chang looked down at her with calm greed.

"Again," he murmured, his voice too low for the window to catch every word. "Show me how much you missed this while he was home."

Elder Chang lay back across the bed with his head on her pillow and pulled her astride him, one knee on each side of his hips.

His cock stood up between them like a spear, flushed dark and still shiny with her spit and the last traces of his cum. She reached down and wrapped her hand around it, lined the head up with her pussy, and sank onto him in one smooth drop.

All of that thickness disappeared into her with a wet, sucking sound that made Cao Ning's knees go weak against the wall. Her mother's head fell back. Her mouth opened in a long, silent cry. Then she braced her palms on his chest and started to ride him.

From the window Cao Ning could no longer see their faces well, only the profile of her mother's throat arched toward the ceiling and the tangle of white hair swinging behind her. But she could see the cock.

The angle showed her everything below her mother's waist: the way her ass rose and fell, the way Elder Chang's shaft slid out of her pussy slick and glossy and then vanished again as she slammed down, the way her lips stretched pink and thin around him as if the hole devouring him were too small for what it was taking.

Every drop of her hips made her large breasts leap and bounce, heavy and full, until Elder Chang reached up and caught them and squeezed, kneading the mature flesh, rolling her dark nipples between his fingers until her rhythm broke and stuttered and found itself again faster. The bedframe creaked. Skin slapped on skin.

And she could hear them. The window glass was thin, and the closer they came to the end, the less either of them cared about the walls. Her mother's moans had stopped being muffled; they rose and broke and rose again, ragged and wet, and between them came words that Cao Ning had never imagined could leave that mouth.

Elder Chang gave a low laugh and a hard upward thrust that made Cao Ying shriek and fall forward onto his chest, and he caught her hips and held her there and fucked up into her from below, fast and brutal, his heels braced on the mattress, until the wet slap of their bodies sounded like applause.

Plap. Plap. Plap.

The smell drifted to her faintly through the curtain gap, musk and lamp oil and heated skin, and Cao Ning breathed it in and felt it go straight between her legs.

Her underwear was a ruined rag by now. She hooked her fingers into the string with a clumsiness that embarrassed her and pulled it aside, and the night air touched her bare, swollen pussy and made her shudder. She had touched herself before, alone in her bed, quick and guilty and always through cloth.

She had never done this. She slid two fingers between her lips and found herself so wet they slipped through her folds without any resistance at all, and she circled her clit and then pressed lower, just inside her entrance, only to the first knuckle, because the tight virgin ring there clenched against even that much intrusion and she was afraid of what going deeper might break.

Even so shallow, the pressure made her eyes roll. She imagined it was him. She imagined that thick, glossy shaft forcing her open the way it was forcing her mother open, and she rubbed her clit with her thumb while her fingers worked in that shallow, desperate rhythm, and right and wrong dissolved into a single itch she could not stop scratching.

She was moaning. She realized it only when she heard herself and clapped her other hand over her mouth. Her knees trembled. Her silver hair stuck to the sweat on her neck. Her slick ran down her wrist and dripped from her knuckles onto the stone under the window in a small, spreading puddle.

A patrol guard could have rounded the corner at any moment and found the Cao daughter fingering herself at her master's window while her mother rode him inside, and she had forgotten that the world outside that stripe of lamplight existed.

Inside, Cao Ying threw her head back and came with a choked cry. Cao Ning saw her mother's pussy clench around the buried cock, saw the muscles of her belly flutter, saw her thighs lock and shake against Elder Chang's hips while a fresh gush of wetness ran down his shaft and soaked the sheets beneath them.

The sight tipped Cao Ning over the edge with her.

She came into her own palm with a muffled sob, her body folding against the wall, her fingers trapped in a pussy that spasmed and pulsed around them. Something hot sprayed from her in a short, shocking burst and splashed across the walkway stones between her bare feet, and her thighs shook so hard she nearly fell. For a few blank seconds she floated in filthy bliss, her forehead pressed to the window frame, her breath sawing through her fingers.

Then the risk slammed back into her skull like a slap.

She yanked her underwear back into place, pushed off the wall on legs that barely held her, and fled toward her rooms on silent, sticky feet.

She did not look back at the window. If she had, she might have seen Cao Ying still riding, slower now, white hair wild across her shoulders and Elder Chang's hands leaving red prints on her ass as he pulled her down onto him. She might have heard him laugh under his breath, a low, satisfied sound he never once made during lessons.

She ran instead, past the herb garden and its narcotic flowers, past the snoring servant's screen, past the shrine niche where the ancestors' incense had gone cold. Her thighs slid against each other with every step. The wet string dragged through her swollen lips and sent small aftershocks fluttering low in her belly, a second heartbeat she could not quiet.

Father. Father is away. Father trusts them both.

Guilt and heat had braided together so tightly that she could not tell which strand made her shake.

---

She reached her room, slid the door shut behind her, and threw herself face-first onto the bed.

The pillow smelled of the lavender sachet her mother tucked into the linen chest every spring, and the scent made her want to scream into it. She buried her face deeper instead. She had seen something forbidden.

Now that she was away from the window, the embarrassment arrived like thunder after lightning, a long, rolling, crushing weight, and under it lay the sick knowledge that what she had done at that window had felt too good. She was sorry for her father.

She loved him — his deep laugh, his calloused hands, the way he still called her his little sword even though she was taller than half his guards. Her mother had always seemed so warm, so gentle, so loyal.

Tonight Cao Ning had watched a different woman altogether: swallowing another man's seed and riding his cock.

I will keep quiet. For now. I have to.

If she told her father, the Cao family would split down the middle. Elder Chang was their strongest elder after her father; he was the reason the Yan branch respected the Cao name at all. And her mother — she could not even finish the thought. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling beams and tried to breathe slowly, the way Elder Chang had taught her to breathe before a duel.

It did not help, because Elder Chang had taught her, and now every lesson came back wearing a new face.

Her pussy still throbbed. It was hot and uncomfortable and empty in a way she had never felt before tonight, an ache with a shape to it, and the shape was the thing she had watched slide in and out of her mother. She turned her head and looked around the dark room with wet eyes.

Her gaze landed on the dagger lying on her side table, the short blade her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday, its hilt wrapped in smooth black ray-skin and capped with a rounded pommel. She stared at the handle. It was smooth. It was thick enough.

It was shaped enough like what she had seen that her face went scarlet all over again. It was much smaller than Elder Chang's real cock, obviously, but it was the only thing in the room that came close.

She reached for it before she could talk herself out of it.

She spread her legs on the sheets, pushed her ruined underwear down her thighs and kicked it away, and set the cool, rounded pommel against her soaked lips. The touch made her gasp. It was cold and hard and nothing like living flesh, but she had no living flesh to compare it with, only the memory of that dark spear vanishing into her mother over and over.

She dragged the pommel up through her folds and pressed it against her clit, and her hips jumped off the bed. She dragged it down again and let it rest against her entrance and pushed, just a little, and the tight ring of muscle there stretched around the rounded tip and stung and burned and made her clench.

She stopped there, breathing hard, and did not push deeper. Some careful part of her that still belonged to the child who had once braided ribbons into her hair knew there was a line inside her she did not want to cross with a knife handle.

So she rocked it there instead, shallow and slow, letting the stretch of that first ring build into heat while her other hand found her clit and rubbed.

In her mind the window gap widened and she was the one on that bed, her silver-white hair fanned across Elder Chang's sheets, her mouth full, her pussy full, swallowing when he told her to swallow. The fantasy horrified her. It also made her move the handle faster.

"Ah — nnh —"

The sounds escaped her no matter how hard she bit the pillow. Her free hand left her clit and found her breast through the dusk-blue silk and squeezed the way Elder Chang had squeezed her mother's, and her thumb scraped across a stiff nipple until sparks ran down to the place where the pommel was pressing and rocking.

Wet noises filled the quiet room, small and obscene, the kiss and suck of her juices around ray-skin and steel. She came with her back arched off the bed and her toes pointed toward the far wall, her pussy spasming around the rounded tip in rhythmic pulls that milked nothing, slick flooding out beneath her ass and soaking into the sheets.

A second wave hit before the first had fully faded. She kept rocking through it, chasing the ghost of a cock she had only seen.

When exhaustion finally dragged her under, the dagger lay beside her sticky fingers on the wet sheet. Shame lay thick on her tongue. Sleep took her anyway.

She woke once in the deepest hour of the night, cold where the wet sheet had cooled against her thighs, and lay still for a long moment listening to the compound breathe. A night bird called twice in the herb garden. Somewhere far off a gate guard coughed.

She got up in the dark, stripped the sheet from the bed, balled it up, and pushed it to the bottom of her laundry basket under two practice robes, her face burning in the empty room as if someone were watching. Then she picked up the dagger.

The ray-skin hilt was tacky with her dried slick, and the smell of it rose to her nose — her own musk, sharp and sweet and unmistakable. She carried it to the washbasin and scrubbed the handle with cold water and a scrap of cloth until her fingers ached, and then dried it and laid it back on the side table exactly where it had been, straight and innocent, a birthday gift from her father.

She got back into the bare bed and pulled the quilt up to her chin. It took her a long time to fall asleep again, and when she did, she dreamed of lamplight.

---

Morning found her in the bath.

The bathhouse attached to her rooms was small and old, its cedar walls darkened by decades of steam, and the morning light came through a high lattice window in thin gold bars that striped the water. Steam curled around her shoulders.

Her breasts floated in the hot water, buoyant and heavy, droplets beading on their upper slopes and sliding down into the valley between them; her nipples rose just above the surface, pink and tight and so sensitive from dreams she could never confess that even the movement of the water made them ache.

She scrubbed her arms and shoulders as if soap could scrub out images. It could not. Even asleep she had seen that cock in different shapes — filling a mouth, splitting a pussy, bobbing wet and heavy in lamplight, rising wet from between her mother's reddened cheeks and sliding into her again.

She washed between her legs and felt herself grow slick again from memory alone. Her fingers lingered on her swollen lips a heartbeat too long, circling, and she snatched them away as if the water had scalded her.

I am not like that. I am not —

She rinsed faster. She stood and dried herself with rough strokes of the towel that left her skin pink. She avoided the bronze mirror until the last moment and then caught her reflection anyway: silver hair dark and dripping, a goddess's face flushed from the steam, the body that her whole generation called unmatched.

It looked the same as it had yesterday. It did not feel the same. It felt hungrier, as though last night had cracked a seal she had not known was there, and something behind the seal was pressing its palm against the crack.

In the mirror she found the evidence of the night written on her in small marks. Her lower lip was swollen where she had bitten it, a tiny dark crescent in the pink. There was a faint redness on the inside of one thigh where her own nails had dug in when she came.

Her nipples were still puffy and darker than usual, as if they had been rubbed raw. She touched the bitten lip and thought of her mother's lips stretched around that cock, and then she turned away from the mirror so fast that her wet hair slapped her shoulder.

She dressed in her practice robe. It was her usual cut, another dusk-blue silk like last night's, the neckline carved long and deep so that the inner curves of her breasts almost spilled free when she leaned, the side slits racing up both thighs to the waist.

She tucked the black string underwear carefully so the rear view would not look completely vulgar when she moved, then stood with her hand on the knot and thought about it. In the Cao house she usually trained alone in clothes like this, in her private yard where no one but Elder Chang ever watched.

Today the thought of the private yard made her stomach knot. He might come to correct her stance. He might put his hands on her waist to fix her hips the way he always did, and she would feel those hands on her mother's waist, and she would not be able to look at him.

So she decided she would go where the guards practiced, in the open halls near the east gate. There would be bodies there, contact and sweat, honest exhaustion. Something to burn the itch out of her blood with legitimate effort.

She was crossing the inner courtyard toward the east path when her mother called her name.

Cao Ying stood on the veranda of the main hall with a teacup in her hands, wearing a modest gray robe buttoned to the throat, her white hair pinned up in the neat coil she always wore for daylight. The morning sun lay gently on her face.

She looked rested and kind and entirely ordinary, a respectable wife waiting for her husband to come home, and only someone who had stood at a window last night would have noticed the faint pink at the corners of her mouth or the way she shifted her weight carefully when she stepped forward, as if she were a little sore.

"Ning'er. You're up early." Cao Ying smiled the smile that had greeted Cao Ning every morning of her life. "Have you eaten? The kitchen made the red-bean buns you like."

"I ate," Cao Ning lied. Her voice came out too high. She cleared her throat. "I'm going to train with the guards today. In the east hall."

Her mother's eyebrows rose a fraction. "With the guards? You always say they stare."

"They can stare." Cao Ning heard how it sounded only after she said it, and her ears went hot. "I mean — I need real opponents. Not forms. The exam is close."

"Mm." Cao Ying took a sip of her tea and studied her daughter over the rim with fond, unsuspecting eyes. "You look flushed. Did you sleep badly?"

The question landed like a hand on a bruise. For one wild moment Cao Ning wanted to say it — I saw you, I heard you, I watched you swallow him — and see what that kind face would do. Instead she looked at the teacup, at her mother's slender fingers wrapped around the porcelain, the same fingers that had cupped Elder Chang's balls in the lamplight, and her throat closed.

"The bath was hot," she said.

"Don't push yourself too hard." Cao Ying reached out and tucked a damp strand of silver hair behind her daughter's ear, a gesture so tender and familiar that Cao Ning had to lock her knees to keep from flinching. "Your master says you have a great future. He was praising you only last night."

Cao Ning bowed, too deep and too fast, and fled down the east path before her face could betray her.

Last night. He was praising me last night.

She walked the whole way to the guards' hall with that sentence circling in her head like a hawk, and somewhere under the anger and the grief and the bewilderment, her pussy pulsed once against the black string at the thought of what else her master had been doing while he praised her.

The east path ran between the stables and the outer wall, and at this hour it was busy with the compound's morning business. Two grooms leading a pair of spirit horses to water stopped mid-step to watch her pass, and one of the horses stamped and tossed its head as if it, too, objected to the interruption.

A kitchen maid carrying a basket of greens flattened herself against the wall with a quick bow and then turned to stare after her with her mouth open. At the small gate where the path met the guards' quarter, the two sentries on duty straightened so fast their spear butts knocked together.

Cao Ning felt every one of those looks crawl over the deep neckline and the high slits of her robe, and for the first time in her life she did not pull the silk tighter or walk faster. The not-hurrying felt like stepping off a ledge.