Oil and Needles

Elder Chang turned around and looked at her.

She lay naked on his table with her face flushed red from embarrassment, eyes fixed on the ceiling beams. Her beautiful breasts stood high on her chest, gleaming faintly with sweat from the arena, tipped with stiff pink nipples. Her belly was flat and taut, rising and falling quickly.

Her shaved pussy shone between her thighs, the plump lips swollen and slightly parted, slick with the arena's leftover wetness and fresh nervous arousal braided together into a glistening film. He looked his fill under the pretext of assessment. He walked the length of the table slowly, from her head to her feet, and back again, and she felt every inch of that look on her skin like the warmth from a brazier.

"Close your eyes," he said. "Focus only on the flow of qi within your body. Guide it along the path I set, and do not let it wander. One mistake could be very harmful to your well-being."

She closed her eyes.

She had prepared herself in her mind. She still found it hard to relax with him standing over her naked body. Behind her eyelids she could feel his gaze moving. It lingered on her erect nipples. It slid down her belly.

It settled between her legs, on the shining wetness there, and stayed there long enough that she felt her lips throb under it. She heard the scrape of the wax seal being cut, the soft pop of the stopper. She smelled the oil — something like cinnamon and ginseng and crushed pine needles, warm and green and sharp.

"I will apply this oil to your body before beginning the acupressure," he said. "It will open your pores and carry my qi deeper."

Uneasy and obedient, she stayed perfectly still.

The first drops fell on her chest from above. They were cold — so cold after the warmth of the room that she gasped — and then they bloomed into heat as the herbs touched her skin. He poured slowly.

The oil landed between her breasts and ran in thin rivulets down into the valley between them and across her ribs and over her belly, pooling in her navel and spilling out of it to trickle down toward the crease of her hip.

He poured more over each breast, circling the bottle so the oil drizzled across the upper slopes and slid down their curves and gathered around her nipples before dripping off onto the wood. Her skin shone everywhere it touched. The fragrance rose around her in a warm cloud.

He set the bottle aside, and his hands came down on her stomach.

They were warm and dry and larger than she remembered. He spread the oil over her belly in slow circles, his palms gliding across her skin, then began to press along the meridian lines beneath it with his thumbs — up from her navel toward her sternum, out along her lowest ribs, down toward the crests of her hips — with exactly enough force to feel like real medicine.

She knew those lines. She had memorized the charts of them. She could feel him tracing the Conception Vessel and the paths of the stomach channel with expert precision, and a thread of warmth followed his thumbs under her skin, waking the energy there.

She felt a tangle of nerves. She resisted opening her eyes. She focused on the massage and told herself, firmly, that it was training.

Gradually his hands worked upward from her waist toward her breasts.

At first his palms only skimmed the undersides, spreading the oil there in long strokes. Then they rose and covered her breasts fully, one hand on each, and began to massage them. Gently at first. Then less gently. His palms pressed down and rolled in slow circles, rubbing against her erect nipples on every pass, the slick friction dragging across the sensitive peaks until she had to lock her jaw.

He lifted the full weight of each breast from underneath and let it fall back against her chest, lifted it and let it fall, as though measuring. He squeezed, sinking his fingers into the oiled flesh until it bulged between them, and the oil made small wet sucking sounds as his hands slid and gripped and slid again.

Cao Ning's arousal rose so sharply it frightened her. She gripped the edges of the table with both hands, knuckles whitening, trying to hold herself still against the pleasure crawling through her.

She could feel him exploring every curve of her — the heavy undersides where her breasts met her ribs, the sensitive outer slopes near her arms, the rings of her areolae, the hard peaks of her nipples, which he caught between oiled fingers and rolled until her breath stuttered and broke into something perilously close to a moan.

Behind her closed eyelids she saw last night's window: her mother's breasts swinging above him, his hands rising to catch them and squeeze exactly like this. The two images slid over each other and fused, and her cunt clenched in helpless recognition, and a fresh pulse of wetness slid out of her onto the wood.

"The heart channel and the stomach channel both pass through the breast," he said, as though lecturing on a chart, while his fingers sank deep into her flesh and squeezed.

"Women carry a great deal of yin here. It must be loosened before the widening, or it will clot and block the upper flow." His thumbs circled her nipples, slow and slippery. "You are very full. That is good. It means there is much to work with."

She could not answer. She could barely breathe.

She heard him breathe in through his nose, slow and deep.

He took his hands from her breasts at last, and she breathed out in a long shaky rush as if surfacing from deep water.

She heard the bottle again. Then oil spilled across her thighs, cool and then hot, running down the insides of them toward the table. His palms came down on her knees and began to work upward along her legs in long, firm strokes, kneading the muscles of her thighs that still ached from the arena, pressing his thumbs into the channels that ran along her inner legs.

It felt good. It felt genuinely, bone-deep good, the knots of the morning loosening under his hands, and she let out a small sigh of relief before she realized where those strokes were heading.

Each pass climbed higher. His thumbs slid along the tender skin of her inner thighs, closer and closer to the crease where her legs met her body, and she felt him notice her pussy waiting there, wet and swollen and parted like a flower that had opened in the night. His hands moved faster.

His fingers brushed the outer edges of her lips, once, twice, as if by accident. Then they stopped pretending. He set a thumb on each side of her pussy and pressed her outer lips gently apart, spreading her open, and tipped the bottle over her so that a thin stream of oil ran down over her mound and into her open folds.

It was cool. Then it was hot. It mixed with her own slickness until she felt obscenely open and obscenely wet, glistening and exposed to the lamplight and to his eyes, and the heat of the herbs soaked into her most tender skin and set it tingling.

A small sound escaped her throat despite her locked teeth.

He held her spread for a long moment, his thumbs resting on either side of her opening, and she lay with her eyes squeezed shut and felt herself pulse against nothing. Her thighs trembled.

Then he took his hands away and said, in the same calm teacher's voice, "Turn over."

She rolled onto her stomach. The oil on her front smeared against the wood and squelched faintly beneath her, and her breasts flattened under her weight, slippery and warm. She folded her arms under her cheek and turned her face toward the wall.

He poured oil down the length of her spine and spread it over her back with broad sweeping strokes, his palms gliding from her shoulders to the small of her back and up again, pressing his thumbs along the channels on either side of her spine.

Before he went lower, he spent a long time on her back, and here, at least, his touch was entirely honest. He found the knots the arena had tied into her shoulders and worked them loose one by one with the heels of his hands.

He pressed his thumbs into the points beside her spine from her neck down to her tailbone, and at each point a little pulse of his qi went into her and spread out under her skin like warm ink in water, until her whole back felt molten and heavy and she sank into the wood with a groan of pure relief.

For a few dozen breaths she forgot to be embarrassed at all. She forgot the window. She was only a tired young woman under a skilled master's hands, and her eyes drifted half shut and her breathing slowed.

That was when his hands moved lower. The oil followed them, spilling over the swell of her ass, running down into the crease between her cheeks and between her thighs. Her round cheeks shone in the lamplight.

He kneaded them slowly, one in each hand, his fingers sinking deep into the firm flesh and squeezing, then spreading them apart so far that she felt the cool air rush into her crack. He held them open. He looked.

And then, with the deliberate care of a man who knew exactly what he was doing, he slid his thumb into the cleft between them and drew it slowly downward from the top of her crack, smearing the oil along the whole length of it — over the tight pink ring of her anus, where his thumb lingered and circled once with a slow, slippery pressure, and lower, to the rear of her pussy, where it dipped between her lips and came away wet.

She flinched, her whole body jerking against the table.

He did not apologize. He spread the oil one more time, from top to bottom, thoroughly, as if making sure the coverage was even, and his thumb pressed against her asshole on the way past with just enough weight to make the ring flutter and clench. Then his hands left her.

"Good," he said. "Turn back. We will begin the next step."

She turned onto her back again and settled herself, shaking. Oil coated her from her neck to her ankles now; she could feel it pooling in the hollow of her throat and between her breasts and in the crease of her thighs, warm and slick and fragrant. She tried to calm her mind.

She tried to find the still center she reached for before every duel, the inner quiet that let a sword move without thought. It refused to come. How could it, with her nipples aching and her cunt throbbing and the memory of his oiled thumb on her asshole lingering like a brand?

First he washed his hands. She heard him step to the copper basin and the small splash of water, the wet rasp of his palms rubbing together, the snap of a cloth being shaken out.

Then a pause, and the faint chime of glass: he was passing the needles one by one through the flame of a small spirit lamp she had not noticed before, and the smell of hot steel joined the herbs and sandalwood.

Elder Chang took a needle from the silk roll. She heard the faint whisper of steel on silk. Then he took her chin and tilted it a fraction toward the light.

"Be still," he said.

The first needle went in between her eyebrows. There was a tiny bright sting, like the bite of an ant, and then a strange cool clarity spread out from it across her forehead and behind her eyes, and her thoughts began to float a little, loosening from each other like leaves on a slow river.

His hand moved down to her chest.

He took her right nipple delicately between two fingers. He pinched it, rolled it once, and drew it upward, stretching the stiff pink tip away from her breast until the skin around it pulled taut, and she gasped and arched without meaning to. With his other hand he set a needle at the very peak of it and slid it in.

The pain was sharp and sweet and astonishingly brief. What came after it was worse. Heat flooded from the tip of her nipple out through her whole breast in a slow, spreading wave, and her nipple seemed to swell around the steel until it throbbed with every heartbeat, three times as sensitive as it had been a moment before. When the air in the room stirred against it she felt it like a tongue.

He did the same to her left nipple — the pinch, the stretch, the bright quick bite of the needle — and she moaned, quietly, before she could swallow it. He placed the next needle beside her navel, in the little pool of oil that had gathered there, and she felt a warm loosening deep in her belly as it went in.

Moving lower, he set more needles along the gates of her lower body that she knew from the charts and had never once felt lit like this: one on each hip, at the points where the leg channels began; two along each thigh.

Each one was a tiny star of sensation. Each star burned and then glowed, and the glow spread and joined the others, until it felt as though a constellation had been drawn across her skin in lines of warm light.

Above her, she heard his breathing change.

He was struggling to control himself. She could not see it with her eyes closed, but she could hear it in the rough edge of each breath, and when she cracked one eyelid open by the barest sliver she saw the thick ridge tenting the front of his robe, long and hard, pointing toward the table. She shut her eye again quickly. Her heart pounded.

He spread her legs.

His hands closed on her knees and pushed them apart, wide, until her thighs lay open on the table and her heels nearly reached its edges. She felt his gaze settle on her pussy. She knew what he was seeing: her lips puffy and shaved and shining with oil and her own milky juices, the inner folds flushed dark pink, her clit swollen out of its hood and standing up like a tiny pearl.

He looked for a long time. Then his fingers closed on her outer lips and pulled them apart, slowly, feeling the slippery heat of her, opening her wide, until the cool air of the room touched places on her body that had never felt air before.

"This point is the most difficult," he murmured. "It is the gate where yin gathers. Do not move."

She felt the needle's tip touch her clit.

It rested there for a heartbeat, a pinprick of cold on the most sensitive flesh she owned. Then he slid it in.

Lightning tore through her. It shot from her clit up through her belly and out along every channel he had lit, to her nipples, to the needle between her brows, down the insides of her legs to the soles of her feet, and every star on her body flared white at once.

Her hips jerked off the table. A moan ripped out of her before she could catch it, loud and raw, and her pussy clenched so hard around nothing that she felt a gush of wetness spill out of her and run down over her asshole onto the wood.

"Still," he said, and his hand pressed flat on her lower belly, holding her hips down. "Breathe. Breathe through it."

She breathed. It came in ragged, shuddering pulls. He placed two more needles in each of her legs, below the knees, quick and precise, and she barely felt them through the roaring at her center.

When every needle was in place, he stepped back and regarded her. She could feel him looking at the whole of her: oiled and naked and spread on his table, steel glinting at her brow and her nipples and her navel and her clit and down the lines of her legs, her chest heaving, her pussy open and shining and twitching around the needle in its hood.

She opened her eyes. She had not meant to; they opened on their own, the way a hand pulls back from a flame.

Looking down the length of her own body, she saw it as he must be seeing it — her breasts shining with oil, each crowned by a stiff dark nipple with a sliver of steel standing straight up from its tip and trembling faintly with her heartbeat; her belly gleaming, a needle quivering beside her navel; her thighs splayed wide on the dark wood; and between them, half-hidden by the swell of her own mound, the tiny bright glint where the last needle stood out of her swollen clit.

It looked like a painting from one of the forbidden manuals. It looked like someone else. Her pussy clenched at the sight, and the needle in her clit dipped and rose with the clench, and she shut her eyes again quickly with a whimper.

"Now," he said quietly, "we guide the flow."