Squeezed Into Surrender

And the idea arrived.

She stopped fighting against his grip on her wrists. Instead, she rolled her shoulders inward and squeezed her breasts together around his cock, deliberately, pressing them in on both sides of his shaft until he was buried in warm, yielding flesh from root to tip, and held him there.

The sudden tight squeeze of warm breast around his shaft blanked Old Gu's mind. A long, shuddering groan tore out of him. His hips jerked forward once on their own, sliding his cock through the snug channel of her cleavage. And for one heartbeat his grip on her wrists went loose.

She felt it all through the silk: the hard length of him throbbing between her breasts, the way his cock jumped when she pressed in, the sudden spreading warmth where the head of it leaked a bead of wetness through his trousers onto the cloth above her heart.

Her breasts were so full and tight around him that she could feel his pulse in them, fast and heavy, beating against the inner curves. The heat of him soaked into her skin. For that one heartbeat it was not a wrestling hold at all.

It was the thing she had watched through the window, translated into her own body, and her pussy clenched so hard in answer that she nearly forgot why she was doing it.

Cao Ning exploded into the opening.

She tore her wrists free, surged up with her legs, twisted her hips, and cinched the thigh lock viciously tight around his neck as she rolled him off her body and down onto the boards. Her thighs clamped his face toward the floor.

As her hips twisted over him, her wet crotch came within inches of his cheek, and the scent of her flooded his nose and made his trapped cock jerk helplessly against the wood. She hauled his legs up against her chest with both arms, completing the pin, her breasts pressed flat against his shins.

He was done. He was immobile and resigned, and traitorously, he was still enjoying it — her smooth inner thighs pressed to his ears, the heat of her pussy so close to his face that he could have turned his head and kissed the soaked black cloth, if the lock had allowed him to move at all.

He slapped the boards with his palm. Once, twice, three times.

Even as he tapped, he did not try to pull his face away. He lay with his cheek crushed against the wood and her thigh crushed against his other cheek, breathing her in through his broken nose in long, slow, deliberate breaths. She felt him doing it.

She felt the warm gust of each exhale against the soaked cloth between her legs, and her pussy fluttered in answer against her will.

The cheer that went up was a physical force. Men slammed their fists on the rail. A man in the second rank screamed that he would take Old Gu's place for free, any day, any hour. Another came openly, shuddering with his eyes on her spread ass as she held the last of the lock, and leaned his forehead against the post while a dark stain spread across his gray trousers.

The judge got up off his stool for the first time all morning and raised his hand toward her.

"Victory to Miss Cao!"

For a moment after the call, the hall was strangely quiet, as if everyone had used up their voices at once. Cao Ning lay on her side on the boards with Old Gu's legs still loosely held against her chest, breathing hard, and in the hush she could hear things she had not noticed before: the creak of the rafters, the drip of a ladle somewhere at the water barrels, a sparrow scolding in the eaves, the ragged breathing of a hundred men.

Her own heartbeat drummed in her ears and between her legs in the same rhythm. She could feel the boards under her hip, warm and gritty and damp. She could feel a strand of silver hair stuck across her mouth.

She could feel, very precisely, every place on her body where the old man's weight had pressed, as if he had left fingerprints in the air around her.

Cao Ning held the lock a heartbeat longer than she needed to, part dominance and part disbelief, feeling the old man's breath shudder against her inner thigh. Then she released him and let him crawl to the edge of the stage. He went on his hands and knees with a dazed, happy humiliation written across his lined face, and when he reached the steps he sat down on the top one and simply stayed there, rubbing his throat where her thighs had branded red marks into his skin.

Three consecutive wins. Sweat shone along her collarbones and in the deep line of her cleavage, and a single bead of it ran down between her breasts and soaked into the silk where Old Gu's cock had lain. Her robe clung to her everywhere. Her string underwear was a soaked confession. Her ass still tingled with the ghost of a hundred stares.

She tugged the fallen panels of her robe back into place over her hips and stood, and the movement made the wet string slide between her swollen lips with a tiny sound she prayed no one heard. Her legs trembled under her. She locked her knees.

She rolled her wrists and felt bruises beginning to bloom under the pale skin where Old Gu's fingers had pinned her, and finally she allowed herself one long, full breath — which made her breasts rise and fall in a way that earned another round of poorly hidden groans from the rail.

She glanced down at herself once. Only once.

Her nipples stood out shamelessly against the blue silk, puffy and dark, one of them still damp from where it had pressed against the old man's sweat-soaked trousers. The crotch of her robe had darkened in an unmistakable map of her arousal, a deep wet stain that spread from between her legs down the inside of one thigh.

And there was another mark on the silk, between her breasts — a faint damp streak, slightly sticky, where the head of his cock had rested and leaked through his trousers onto her robe.

Shame flared in her chest. Pride flared harder. She had subdued three men without touching a blade. She had also given fifty others enough material to last the season.

Underneath both, quieter and more frightening, was the memory of the weight. Old Gu's body pressing her into the boards. His hands holding her wrists. The heat of his cock lying between her breasts like it belonged there, and the moment when she had squeezed them around it — the way he had groaned, the way his whole body had gone helpless for one heartbeat because of what she had done to it with her flesh.

She had felt powerful in that heartbeat. She had felt something else, too, something that had nothing to do with winning: a sharp, starving curiosity about what it would have felt like if the cloth had not been there.

Father would not approve of this stage, she thought, and then, unbidden and traitorous: Master might.

The thought of Elder Chang watching her like this — seeing her ass raised in the air with the string pulled aside, seeing a cock nestled between her breasts while she squeezed them around it — sent a confused bolt of heat straight through her womb.

She saw his face as she had seen it in the lamplight last night, the calm greed in it, and imagined that face turned toward her instead. She crushed the thought before it could grow. She would not examine it. Not here. Not with wet string still kissing her clit every time she breathed.

Below the platform, Captain Hou had come forward to the rail. He looked up at her with that same unreadable expression, and then his eyes flicked once to the stain on her robe and away again, and a dull red crept up under his gray mustache.

"You didn't let them pin you," he said gruffly.

"Old Gu pinned me," she said. Her voice was hoarse. "For a while."

"For a while doesn't count." He hesitated, then cleared his throat. "That last escape. Where did you learn that?"

She thought of the window, of her mother's mouth, of what she had done with her own breasts, and her face went scarlet to the hairline.

"I improvised," she said.

Captain Hou looked at her a moment longer. Then he grunted, nodded once, and turned away, and as he walked back toward the weapon racks she heard him bark at two staring guards to get back to their drills before he found them latrine duty. They did not move. He did not seem to expect them to.

At the steps, Old Gu had finally gathered himself enough to stand. He turned back and gave her a bow — a real one, deep and slow, an old soldier's bow to an opponent who had beaten him fairly — and then spoiled it completely by grinning up at her with a gap where one of his side teeth used to be.

"Twenty years at the fourth stage," he said. "Thought I'd die there. Now I know I'll die happy, Miss. If those thighs ever want another neck to squeeze, this old one volunteers."

The crowd roared with laughter. Cao Ning should have been insulted. She found she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling, and the smile that wanted to come was not entirely a decent one.

The hall did not empty. Men lingered as though the boards still held the ghost of her spread ass and soaked string, and some of them stared at the place where she had been pinned as though it were a shrine. Lu Feng had not moved from his bench.

He was still looking at his hands as if they remembered the feel of her, though they had never touched her at all; it was his face that remembered. Bao Kun had stopped telling his story and was simply watching her now with open, patient hunger, rewrapping a strip of cloth around his wrist without looking at it.

Near the open wall the two outer disciples from the neighboring courtyard were whispering to each other with their heads close together, and one of them was already walking quickly away — to spread the word, she realized, to every courtyard between here and the Yan mansion.

Her stomach dropped. She thought of Yan Chi hearing about this. Of someone telling him, with gestures, about the Cao daughter's ass in the air and her breasts wrapped around an old guard's cock. Of his face. She did not know what his face would do.

Standing near the edge of the platform, she was close enough to the rail to hear what the men were saying to each other, low and urgent, the way soldiers traded news after a battle. Her asshole, did you see it? Pink as a plum blossom. I swear to the ancestors, her lips came out around the string, both sides.

She squeezed him. With her tits. On purpose. She was smiling. At the end. Did you see her smile? Both of the first two were close enough to true that her ears burned crimson. The last one she had not known about. She touched her own mouth and found that it was, in fact, curved.

The lamps had not been lit; the light through the open walls had turned from the pale gold of early morning to the harder white of late morning, and it lay across the boards in long bright stripes.

In one of those stripes, where her lifted ass had hung during the final lock, there was a small dark spot on the wood. It was a few drops wide, glistening faintly. She stared at it for a long moment before she understood what it was, and then her ears went so hot they rang.

No one else seemed to have noticed it.

Another guard was edging toward the steps — a young, heavily muscled man from the night watch whom she did not know, at the third stage by the feel of his qi, who had been arguing with his friends for the last few minutes and had apparently lost the argument or won it.

Beyond him, a fourth-stage veteran was eyeing the rail and stretching his neck from side to side. Her arms ached. Her wrists throbbed. Her knees felt as if the bones had softened to warm wax.

Between her legs she was so wet and swollen that every step would be a confession, and she was no longer sure what she would do if a stronger man pinned her and the robe finally gave way.

That was what frightened her. Not that it might happen. That she was not sure she would stop it.

Enough. Step down before someone stronger comes. Before you do something stupid.

She pushed a damp strand of silver hair off her forehead and found her fingers trembling. She smoothed the front of her robe with both palms, a useless gesture that only pressed the wet silk flatter against her nipples and drew another low sound from the rail.

She bent and picked up the ribbon that had fallen from her hair during the last fight, and felt the hall hold its breath as she bent, and straightened slowly, and did not tug her robe down over her thighs. The eyes followed her. The heat followed the eyes.

She lifted her chin, turned toward the platform steps, and gathered herself to leave the arena.