Master's Trousers

When it was over, her eyes had closed and she lay slumped across his chest with her cheek against his collarbone, asleep before she finished falling. Her body was limp and heavy and slick with oil and sweat. Her lips were swollen. Her breath, warm against his throat, smelled of salt.

He lay still beneath her for a while and looked at the ceiling. His heart was slow to settle. Her silver hair spread across his chest and arm like spilled water, and her breasts pressed warm against his ribs with every slow breath she took, and between her thighs, where she straddled his leg, she was still wet.

He let out a long breath through his nose. Then he cursed softly, without much heat.

Her virginity was intact. A breath longer, one pull of his hands on her hips, and it would not have been; he had felt the ring of her clinging around the head of him, and he had held still, and then she had fallen.

Lying there, he could not have said whether he was relieved or furious. He had decided long ago when and how it would be spent. Today had come very close to deciding for him. He was exhausted, too.

Two hours of controlling his own qi inside another body had worn him thinner than he liked to admit, and a deep ache sat behind his eyes.

He slid out from under her carefully, eased himself off the table, and gathered her up in his arms. Her naked body hung loose against his chest, one arm trailing, her head lolling against his shoulder. He felt the weight of her breasts against his forearm and the slick warmth of her thighs where his other arm hooked beneath them, and he stood for a moment holding her and looking down at her sleeping face.

It was a beautiful face. Even slack with exhaustion, smeared with oil, her lips parted and a strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth, it was the most beautiful face in Jinling, and today he had seen every expression it owned.

He carried her to the bed and laid her on her side on the dark green quilt, the same quilt her mother had knelt on the night before. He brushed the silver hair back from her face with something that was almost fondness. Then he drew the quilt's edge over her hips and left her there.

He went to the bathing room behind the screen and washed himself thoroughly: the oil, the sweat, the scent of her on his hands and his skin and elsewhere. He took his time. He dressed in a fresh robe from the chest.

His soiled trousers he left hanging on the peg beside the bath, by forgetfulness or design; he did not examine which. Then he walked out of the chamber and slid the door shut behind him and went out into the compound looking exactly like a responsible master who had just finished an advanced training session with his favorite disciple.

On the walkway he passed a servant carrying a tray, and nodded to her pleasantly. At the corner of the main hall he met the steward, who bowed and asked whether the young miss's training had gone well, and he answered that she had done better than any disciple he had ever guided, that she was resting now, and that she should not be disturbed until she woke on her own.

The steward bowed again and hurried off to tell the kitchen to keep something warm for her. Elder Chang watched him go with a small, satisfied smile. In the garden he paused to admire the spirit flowers.

---

Cao Ning opened her eyes several hours later.

She did not know where she was. Then she saw the scroll rack and the serpent-shaped incense burner, cold now, and the green quilt under her cheek, and she knew, and her heart lurched. The lamps had burned low. The light leaking around the curtain had turned from gold to the deep orange of late afternoon. The room was empty. She lay still and listened and heard nothing but the faint tick of the cooling lamp oil and, far away, the sounds of the compound winding toward evening.

She pushed herself up on one elbow and her head spun.

The quilt slid off her shoulder, and she realized she was naked under it. Her skin was tacky everywhere with half-dried oil, and the quilt had stuck to her hip and peeled away with a faint sticky sound.

Across the room, her dusk-blue robe and the black string lay folded on the floor beside the long table, exactly where she had dropped them that morning.

The table itself had been left as it was. The needles were gone from it, put back in their silk roll on the stand, but the wood still bore the marks of her body — a dark, glossy smear of oil the length of a woman, wider at the shoulders and the hips, and near its lower end a deeper, darker patch where the wood had soaked up something other than oil.

She stared at it for a long moment. Then she looked down at herself, at her own thighs, and pulled the quilt back up to her chin.

She tried to recall what had happened. She remembered everything up to a point with perfect clarity — the oil, his hands on her breasts, the needles in her nipples and her clit, the burst of the old block in her thigh, kneeling with her ass in the air, his finger sliding inside her, the gates opening, the flood.

She remembered the last needle coming out. After that, her memory broke into pieces that would not fit together. Dark silk knotted in her fist. Her own voice, low and strange, saying let me. A heat filling her mouth, salt on her tongue, a hand in her hair.

Something blunt and burning pressing between her legs, and a heartbeat under her cheek. The pieces floated loose, without order, without edges, the way the images of a fever dream drift up for a moment after waking and then refuse to come when called.

She could not tell which of them had happened and which she had dreamed while she slept in his bed. If she had been certain they were real, she would never have been able to look her master in the eye again. She was not certain.

She could still walk the compound without wanting to die, but her body seemed far surer than her mind. Her jaw ached faintly, as though she had been chewing something tough.

Her belly felt warm and full in a way that had nothing to do with food. Her pussy lips were tender and a little swollen, as if something blunt had pressed against them. She lifted her fingers to her mouth and found a small dried flake at one corner of her lips, and when her tongue touched it, it tasted of salt.

Confusion flickered through her. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and told herself it was oil. She did not ask herself why her throat felt the way it did.

Her body still carried the oil and a lingering smell of herbs and sweat and something muskier underneath. She got up off the bed on unsteady legs, wrapped the quilt around herself out of reflex though there was no one to see, and went behind the screen into his bathing room.

It was larger than hers, with a deep sunken tub of gray stone fed by a bamboo pipe from the hot spring that ran beneath the compound's east side. The water was still warm. She let the quilt fall, stepped down into the tub, and pulled the cord that opened the pipe, and a steady stream of hot water poured down over her head and shoulders.

As the oil sheeted off her skin, she began to notice the changes.

Her skin felt smoother than it had ever been, smooth as polished jade, and it seemed to glow faintly under the water, as if lit from within. When she reached inward for her qi, it came to her at once, eager and abundant, flowing through her channels with an ease she had never known — wide rivers where there had been narrow streams.

Her body felt stronger, lighter, every muscle humming with fresh energy. She flexed her fingers and felt the power in them. It was real. The widening had worked. Whatever else had happened in this room, Elder Chang had given her exactly what he promised, and more.

She stood under the pouring water and watched it run down over her breasts, over her belly, down through the cleft of her pussy, and she thought — with a startling lack of panic — about how thoroughly he had touched her.

Her breasts, her ass, her anus, her clit, the inside of her — there was not an inch of her body that her master's hands had not claimed in the name of medicine, and her body, traitorous and glowing, seemed to like the inventory. It seemed almost proud of it.

The water had pooled around her ankles in the tub, and in its rippling surface she caught a glimpse of herself, broken into wavering pieces by the falling stream. She stepped out of the stream and let the water go still, and looked down.

Her body looked the same and not the same. Her breasts seemed fuller, riding higher on her chest, the skin of them so smooth that the water beaded and rolled off without clinging. Her waist seemed narrower and the flare of her hips more pronounced.

Even her face, swimming up at her from the dark water, seemed brighter, her lips redder, her eyes clearer. She told herself it was the steam and the lamplight. She did not quite believe it.

There was something else, too. Something strange in the energy itself. When she turned her attention inward and let it rest on her qi, she felt a warm, pink purr running beneath it, like a cat curled up in the deepest channels, contented and patient and awake. It did not feel dangerous. It felt pleasant. It felt like her own body's warmth with a little more weight to it. She did not think about it.

She was still wet between her legs. Not from the bath water — she could feel the difference, the slick heat of her own arousal welling up and slipping out of her even as the water washed it away. Without quite deciding to, she let her hand drift down over her belly and between her thighs and began to rub.

The sensation was incredible. She had touched herself last night through cloth and with the dagger, and it had felt good, desperately good, but this was something else entirely. Her pussy was more sensitive than it had ever been, hot and swollen and tingling under her fingertips as if every nerve had been taken out, sharpened, and put back.

She circled her clit and her knees buckled. She caught herself on the edge of the tub with her other hand. She remembered last night at the window, and the dagger handle in her own bed, and then the whole long afternoon here — every inch of her Elder Chang had touched, including the inside of her pussy.

She could still feel his hands. Ghost fingers on her breasts. Ghost oil in her crack. A ghost knuckle pressing at her entrance, sliding inside her.

Looking down through the steam she saw a tiny red point at the very tip of each one, no bigger than a grain of millet, where the needles had gone in. When she brushed one with her fingertip, a jolt went through her so sharp that she gasped and her pussy clenched.

She brushed it again. The same jolt. She cupped her breast and pressed her thumb lightly over the little red mark, and felt the purr in her meridians rise to meet the touch like a cat pushing its head into a hand.

Lower down, she knew without looking, there would be another such mark on her clit, and another just above her asshole. Her master had left his signature on every gate of her body.

Then she noticed his trousers.

They hung on a wooden peg beside the tub, where he must have left them after his own wash: thin gray cotton, wrinkled, the waist cord trailing. She stared at them through the steam. Her fingers had gone still between her legs. She knew she should look away. She knew exactly what she would be if she did not.

She could not resist.

She stepped out of the stream of water, reached for the peg, and pulled the trousers down. The cotton was cool and slightly damp. She turned them over in her hands until she found the front, and the crotch, and then — slowly, with her heart pounding so hard her vision pulsed — she lifted the cloth to her face, pressed it against her nose, and breathed in.

The smell filled her skull. It was thick and heavy and unmistakably male: sweat and skin, the sharp tang of dried precum, the deep, dark musk of his cock that had soaked into the cotton through two hours of arousal. It was the scent she had caught faintly in this room when she walked in that morning. It was the scent of the window. Her knees almost gave way.

The perversion of it bloomed in her fully then. If anyone had walked in and seen the sight — Cao Ning, the great beauty of her generation, the pride of the Cao family, standing naked and dripping in her master's bathing room with his dirty trousers mashed against her face — they would never have believed it.

She believed it. She could not stop. The scent was the missing piece of everything — of the window and the table and the arena — male, heavy, specific, real. She sank down onto the stone edge of the tub with her thighs spread and the cotton pressed over her nose and mouth, and her fingers plunged into her pussy with none of last night's hesitation around the dagger.

Two fingers slid in, slick and easy, and then three, stretching her, and she curled them toward the swollen spongy place on her front wall that his finger had taught her existed, and pressed.

"Master — ah — Master —"

She whispered it into the cloth without knowing she was going to. Her hips jerked against her own hand. Her breasts bounced with every thrust. The strange new energy roared approval along her meridians, flaring pink and hot in every channel, as she fucked herself on fantasy and scent.

She breathed into his trousers in deep, ragged gasps, and each breath pulled more of him into her, and each breath made her move faster. She imagined his cock. She imagined it as she had seen it in the lamplight, dark and thick and glistening, and she imagined it pressing against her entrance, splitting her open, filling her the way it had filled her mother, and her fingers pumped harder and deeper until the wet sounds of them echoed off the stone walls.

Squelch. Squelch.

She came with a muffled cry into the fabric, hard, her back bowing and her thighs clamping around her own wrist, her pussy spasming around her fingers in long rolling waves while the pink purr in her meridians swelled into a roar and then, slowly, settled back into a contented hum.