Needle in the Clit

Elder Chang felt the whole of her pussy under his palm as he sent his energy into it — the warm, slick folds, the fluttering entrance, the needle in her clit trembling with each tiny spasm of her hips. He held his hand there for a long moment after the qi had sunk in, cupping her, feeling her pulse against the heel of his palm. Then he lifted it away, and she made a small sound at the loss that she did not seem to hear herself make.

He shifted forward on the table, still kneeling between her thighs, and moved up to work on her belly.

His palms pressed down on either side of her navel, careful of the needle there, and began to knead the oiled skin in slow, deep circles. Each press sent a pulse of warmth down into the gates beneath, and each pulse rippled outward through her body like a stone dropped into still water.

He watched her breasts move as he worked. Every time he pressed, they shifted on her chest — full and heavy, sliding slightly toward her arms and back again, the pierced nipples pointing up at the ceiling like two accusing pink stars.

Oil had collected in the crease beneath each one and glistened there. He finished the belly gates one by one, counting them under his breath, and when the last was done he moved up to her breasts and began massaging the flesh around the needles with a focused greed that he did not bother to disguise.

With needles standing in both nipples, he could not simply knead them. He had to support each breast from underneath and squeeze gently toward the tip, driving the qi along the flesh toward the steel. Her breasts were large enough that he needed both hands for each one, so he worked them one at a time.

He started with the right. He spread his fingers wide around its base, cradling the heavy weight of it, and squeezed slowly upward. The oiled flesh bulged between his fingers and rose in his grip, and the nipple at its peak swelled darker and stood taller around its needle, the skin around the steel stretching tight and shiny.

He held the squeeze. He sent a thread of qi up through his palms into her breast, and she felt it travel through her like warm honey poured into a mold, filling every channel, pooling at the tip where the needle was, until her nipple throbbed so hard she thought it would burst.

She bit her lip until it hurt.

The extra sensitivity of his touch and the qi pouring into her together were almost more than she could bear, and she enjoyed it despite herself — enjoyed it so much that her back arched off the table to push her breast deeper into his hands.

While he worked the right breast she found herself counting the heartbeats in her nipple, a helpless, absurd counting, and every squeeze sent a pulse down an invisible thread to the needle in her clit, until the two points felt braided together, until she could not tell which one was throbbing.

Oil ran down into her armpits and pooled in the hollow of her throat. Her breath came in short, shallow pants.

He let the right breast go and moved to the left, and she made a sound that was almost his name and bit it off into a gasp.

He repeated the process there, skillfully, torturously — the spread fingers, the slow upward squeeze, the swelling nipple, the warm qi flooding up through her flesh toward the steel. For him it was a torture of a different kind.

He wanted to bend his head and take those pierced nipples into his mouth and suck until she screamed. He could imagine the taste of the oil and her skin, the cold of the steel against his tongue, the way she would buck under him.

He did not do it. His own arousal had become almost unbearable; the ridge in his robe ached with every movement of his hips. He made himself release her breast.

When he finally let her go, he did not take his hands away at once. He let his palms rest lightly on both breasts, not squeezing, just holding, and bent his head close until she felt his breath on her left nipple — warm, slow, a hand's breadth away from the needle.

He breathed out across it. The sensation went through her like a lightning strike: the warm air on the swollen, pierced tip, the steel humming, her whole breast tightening in a single shiver that ran down into her belly and between her legs.

Her hips lifted off the table. He breathed across the right nipple the same way, and she cried out. Then he straightened, and his face was calm again, and he said, "Good. The heart channel is clear," as if he had only been checking it.

In four years of calling him Master, she had never once imagined this grammar: her master's hands making her breasts ache with pleasure while steel pinned her nipples open for his qi. Through the haze in her mind a stray thought floated up — had her mother's nipples looked like this under his mouth last night, swollen and dark and wet?

The thought should have killed her arousal stone dead. It fed it instead. A fresh wave of wetness welled from her pussy and slid down between her cheeks. Elder Chang saw it, and he smiled without showing his teeth.

He moved up to her head and massaged her forehead and temples around the needle between her brows, his thumbs pressing in small slow circles that made her thoughts drift even further apart, and that completed the front portion of the process.

He removed the needles from her front one at a time: the brow first, then the navel, then the nipples. Each withdrawal was careful and slow, a gentle twist and a steady pull, and each one still made her whimper.

When the needle slid out of her right nipple, the empty point where it had been throbbed with a bright, aching emptiness, as if her body missed the steel. When the left came out she arched and gasped.

He left the needles in her legs and the one in her clit. Those gates, he said, were not finished.

The afternoon light had crept across the floorboards by the time the breast work was done. Dust motes turned slowly in the slanting gold that leaked in around the edge of the curtain. Somewhere far off a practice bell rang in another hall, where ordinary disciples were counting ordinary forms, while Cao Ning lay on her master's table counting moans she was failing to swallow.

Elder Chang wiped the sweat from his brow with a clean cloth and left her juices shining on his other hand like a badge. He took her wrist between two fingers and checked her pulse, and his face was briefly, genuinely the face of a physician — attentive, measuring, a small crease of concern between his brows that smoothed away as he counted.

He nodded at the strong, rapid rhythm.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

She searched for words and found only fragments. "Full," she said finally. "Hot. Like my channels are too big for my body."

"They will be, for a day or two. Your body will grow into them." His fingers stayed on her wrist a moment longer than they needed to, his thumb moving once across the delicate skin over her pulse. "The hardest part is still ahead. The lower gates are the oldest and the tightest. Can you bear a little more?"

She nodded, her hair whispering against the wood.

"Your body accepts the widening faster than most," he said. "Talent. And receptivity."

Receptivity. She heard the word through the fog of lust and blushed deeper without knowing why it sounded so filthy. Her opened meridians hummed in answer to it. Her empty pussy ached and clenched around the memory of his fingertip.

"Turn around," he said. "Get on your knees, and lift your buttocks into the air."

She rolled onto her stomach, drew her knees up under her, and pushed herself up until she knelt on the wooden table with her ass raised high and her cheek pressed to the oiled wood.

Her knees slid a little on the oiled wood as she settled, and she spread them wider for balance. The movement opened her further. She felt the air move between her thighs and across her wet, exposed folds, and she felt his gaze follow it.

The pose was exactly the shape of her mother's position in the window — ass up, face down, waiting for a man's attention — and the recognition struck her like a slap even through the fog. Shame and heat knotted together in her chest.

Her silver hair spilled over one shoulder onto the wood. Her heavy breasts hung beneath her, and her nipples brushed the oil-slick tabletop with every breath she took, sending fresh sparks through the points where the needles had been.

Cool air licked along her spread crack. She had never knowingly shown her asshole to anyone in her life. Now her master had a clear view of it, and of everything beneath it, and her pussy was leaking a thin, shining thread that hung down from her lips and swayed whenever she trembled.

Elder Chang looked at what she had given him.

From behind he could see everything: her round cheeks gleaming with oil and spread apart by her kneeling stance, the tight pink pucker of her asshole winking nervously in the cleft, her pussy lips swollen and parted beneath it with that glistening string of juice stretching toward the table.

The needle still stood in her clit, peeking out from between her folds, and it twitched every time she clenched. He took fresh needles from the roll. He placed one at the nape of her neck, beneath the fall of her silver hair, and one in the center of her back between her shoulder blades.

Then he set two fingers on her cheeks and spread them wider, and placed the last needle on the narrow strip of skin just above her anus, precisely at the gate.

The cold kiss of the steel so close to her asshole made her jolt. She moaned into the wood. With the rear needles in place, he began with her neck and back, and for a few breaths his touch was purely professional.

His thumbs pressed into the knots at the base of her skull and worked down along her spine, sending small pulses of qi into the needle between her shoulder blades until a warm line ran from her nape to her tailbone like a drawn thread. She sighed into the wood. Her shoulders loosened.

Then, as inevitably as water running downhill, his hands moved to her buttocks.

They were full and firm and glistening with oil, flushed a faint pink from all the handling. He took one in each palm and kneaded, slowly, deeply, his fingers sinking into the flesh and squeezing until it swelled up between them, then letting it go and watching it settle back into its round shape with a small, heavy shiver.

He spread her cheeks wide and held them open and looked, and pushed them together again, and spread them again. He knew that uncontrolled lust could disrupt energy work. He knew that a master's desire, leaking into his qi, could twist what it touched.

He felt himself growing more aroused with every pass anyway, and he could not stop it, and after a while he stopped trying. He kneaded and spread, and his thumbs slid down into her crack and circled her anus, slow and slippery, around and around the tight pink ring, under the pretext of guiding qi to the lower gates through the needle just above it.

Both of them were drowning in it now.

The energy inside Cao Ning had passed through arousal into something hotter and more desperate. Her whole body had become hypersensitive, every inch of skin as tender as the inside of her lip, and moans leaked out of her on every stroke of his hands whether she wanted them to or not.

Her pussy leaked steadily, a thin, constant trickle down the insides of her thighs. Her asshole was being touched over and over, his thumb circling it and pressing it and circling it again, until the ring began to relax under the attention and loosen and flutter against the pad of his thumb like a small mouth.

The sensation was so strange and so intimate that she did not know what to do with it. She pressed her burning face into the wood and pushed back against his hand.

He spent a long time there. He pressed the pad of his thumb flat against her ring and held it, letting the warmth of his qi seep in through the needle above, and she felt the tight muscle soften under the steady pressure the way wax softens near a flame.

He drew small circles. He tapped, lightly, a slow rhythm like a finger drumming on a table, and with each tap she felt a pulse run up her spine.

Once he pressed just hard enough that the very tip of his oiled thumb slipped inside her, no deeper than a fingernail, and held there; and she froze with her mouth open against the wood and every muscle in her body locked, a sound caught in her throat, until he withdrew it again and went back to circling. Her pussy gushed when he did it.

He reached beneath her, between her legs, and found the needle in her clit with two fingertips. He turned it, gently, a quarter turn, and drove a fine thread of qi down its length.

She moaned out loud, raw and broken, her whole body clenching from her toes to her scalp. It was too much on top of everything else. She was already exhausted from controlling the qi for so long; her arms were shaking where they braced her, and the edges of her vision had begun to darken and swim.

She felt herself hovering on the edge of fainting. The process was nearly complete — she could feel it, her channels stretched wide and humming and full, only the lowest gates still tight and stubborn — and he kept playing with her asshole and her pussy, his fingertips and the oil and the pressure moving between them, before the last step.

Then he stopped. His breathing was harsh behind her. His cock was screaming inside his robe.

"Cao Ning," he said. "I need to guide the energy into your lower gates from the inside. For that I must insert my finger. Please bear with me for a little while."

She lay with her cheek on the wood and her ass in the air and her heartbeat roaring in her ears. The lust-qi purred and pressed at every gate in her body, and her pussy clenched around nothing, empty, aching, so empty she could hardly stand it. Her fingers curled against the wood.

She heard the bottle one more time, and the faint slick sound of oil being worked over skin. Then his fingertip settled against her entrance and simply rested there, warm and slippery, not pushing. He waited. She felt him waiting.

She felt her own body throbbing against the pad of his finger, her entrance clenching and loosening, clenching and loosening, as though it were trying to draw him in by itself. "Breathe out," he said, and she breathed out, a long shuddering breath that emptied her lungs, and on the very end of it, when her whole body had gone loose and soft with the exhale, he began to press.