Hanging From Her Thigh

For Wang Xuan, the last stretch of the lake was the longest and most beautiful journey of his life.

He hung from Cao Ning's right thigh with both arms, his cheek almost resting against the cold, firm flesh of it, and let her drag him through the water like a barge behind a swan. His brocade robe had filled with lake water and ballooned around him, and every stroke she pulled dragged him forward in a long, smooth surge that left a wake of bubbles behind his heels.

He could have kicked. He could have helped. It did not occur to him. All of his attention, every scrap of it, was fixed on what floated a hand's breadth in front of his face.

The rear panel of her skirt had lost all interest in its duties. It drifted on the surface of the water like a pale blue leaf, lifting and settling with each kick, and beneath it the lake was clear enough near the shallows that he could see everything the panel had been made to hide.

Her ass was full and very white in the green light, two smooth cheeks that tightened and rolled as her legs worked, and each time her free leg swept back they parted, and he saw the small pink pucker of her anus between them, tight and dainty, and below it the plump bare lips of her pussy, pressed together and then opening a little with every kick before closing again.

A thin silver thread of bubbles slid along her crack and burst at the surface. Wang Xuan watched it go with the reverence of a pilgrim watching incense rise.

No underwear, he thought, for perhaps the twentieth time. She came out today with no underwear.

He had known Cao Ning for years, the way every young man of good family in Jinling knew her: the silver-haired daughter of the Cao family head, cold and graceful at banquets, untouchable, the sort of beauty men composed poems about and then burned the poems in embarrassment. He had imagined her in a hundred ways, alone in his bed at night.

Not one of those hundred had come close to this. His cock had gone hard the moment he went under and had not softened since, not even while he was drowning, and now it pressed against the back of her calf through his sodden trousers every time she kicked, and if she noticed she gave no sign. His thumbs had crept up to the tender inner face of her thigh.

He left them there. She did not tell him to move them. Her skin was cold everywhere except there, in the high, tender crease where her thigh met her body, which was warm as bathwater, and slick with something that was not the lake.

Her feet touched bottom. Wang Xuan felt the shock of it run through her leg, and the long gliding strokes turned into a stumbling, wading heave, and the water dropped from her shoulders to her chest to her waist as she climbed the sloping bed of the shallows.

His own knees struck pebbles. He let go of her thigh with enormous regret and floundered forward onto his hands and knees in water that came barely up to his elbows, coughing and gasping and streaming, and felt her stop beside him and turn.

---

Yan Chi had watched her come all the way in from his place in the reeds, and he was close enough now to see the gooseflesh on her arms.

She rose out of the lake in front of him like something from an old painting, except that no painter in Jinling would have dared to paint it. The water ran off her in sheets. Her silver hair hung dark and heavy to the small of her back and clung to her shoulders in dark ropes.

The two pale blue strips across her chest had gone completely transparent, so thin and so soaked that they might as well have been painted on, and her breasts showed through them as clearly as if she wore nothing at all: full and heavy and very white from the cold, beaded with drops, the pink nipples drawn up into tight, hard points that pushed out against the clinging cloth.

The jeweled waistband glittered at her hips. The skirt panels hung plastered to her thighs. She was breathing hard, and her breasts rose and fell with each breath, and a rivulet of lake water ran from the hollow of her throat down between them and vanished under the waistband.

[Ding! You watched a soaked beauty rise from the lake. +20 Pervert Points.]

Twenty. He barely noticed it. She was not looking at him at all. Her gray eyes were fixed on Wang Xuan, who was still on his hands and knees in the shallows like a beached seal, wheezing and spitting water, his robe spread around him on the surface in a sodden brocade pool. Her jaw was tight with fury. She took two splashing strides toward him, grabbed the back of his collar in both fists, and bent forward from the waist to haul him upright.

She bent with her back to Yan Chi.

She bent deep, because Wang Xuan was heavy and she was tired, legs braced wide apart in the knee-deep water, her whole body folding forward over him as she heaved, and the soaked rear panel of her skirt, which had been clinging to the backs of her thighs, peeled away from her skin with the movement and slid up over the curve of her hips and stayed there, stuck to the small of her back.

Yan Chi stopped breathing.

Her ass was right in front of him, a few paces away, bare and streaming and lifted toward him by the bend. It was more beautiful than anything he had let himself imagine. The two cheeks were round and full and high, pale as fresh milk, the skin still pebbled with cold and streaming with water that ran down over the curves in shining threads and dripped from the lower swell into the lake.

The bend had spread them apart, and the whole deep cleft between them lay open to his eyes in the bright afternoon light. At the center, her anus was a small, tight, rosy bud, perfectly pink, puckered shut against the cold, so neat and delicate it looked as though it had never been touched by anything but bathwater.

Below it, between the slick insides of her thighs, her pussy pouted out from behind: bare, smooth, plump outer lips pressed together into a plump swollen seam, flushed a deep pink from the cold and from something else, and glistening with a wetness that was too slick, too clinging, to be only lake water. A drop of it hung from the lowest point of her lips, swelled, and fell.

She heaved again. Wang Xuan rose halfway, slipped, and went down on one knee, and she shifted her feet wider and bent even lower to get a better grip on him, and everything she had spread further. Her cheeks parted until he could see the tender pink skin of her inner crack.

Her pussy lips eased open a fraction and showed a glimpse of the wet coral flesh inside. The muscles of her thighs stood out with the strain. Her silver hair spilled forward over her shoulders and trailed in the water around Wang Xuan's head.

Yan Chi stood in the reeds with his fists clenched and his cock straining against his sodden trousers and his heart hammering against his ribs, and looked, and looked, and the System opened in front of his eyes in a blaze of gold.

[Ding!] [Mission Complete: Look at Cao Ning's bare buttocks for the first time] [Reward: 400 Pervert Points] [Additional Condition Met: Another man is present] [Bonus Reward: 100 Pervert Points]

Five hundred. The number rang in his skull like a temple bell. Five hundred points, for a few heartbeats of standing in a lake and looking at his childhood friend's naked backside while his best friend floundered under her. He had bled for less. He had nearly died for less.

He had gone through the whole of the guests' stay, Han Fei and the twins and his mother's exhibition in the gambling house, and none of it had paid like this. He did not know whether to laugh or to be sick, and in the end he did neither. He only kept looking.

[Status Window] [Name: Yan Chi] [Status: Weak] [Cultivation: Qi Refining — 4th Stage] [Pervert Points: 1160]

One thousand one hundred and sixty. He dismissed the window with a thought, because it was blocking his view.

Cao Ning finally dragged Wang Xuan to his feet. He swayed, streaming, and she let go of his collar and straightened, and the sodden panel peeled off the small of her back and fell, and slapped wetly against the backs of her thighs, and the most valuable view in Jinling vanished as if a curtain had dropped across a stage.

She stood in the shallows with her shoulders heaving, and she pushed her soaked hair back from her face with both hands, and then she turned around and saw where Yan Chi was standing.

For a long, silent moment she simply looked at him.

He saw her work it out. He saw her look at where he stood, directly behind where she had been bending, and look down at the panel clinging to her thighs, and look back up at his face, and he knew exactly what his face looked like, because he could feel the heat in it. Her cheeks went from pale to pink to scarlet. Her lips parted. Her hands came down and pressed flat against the panels at her hips, much too late.

Then she turned on Wang Xuan, who was the safer target.

"You idiot fatty!" Her voice cracked across the water and sent a heron flapping up out of the reeds on the far side. "If you don't know how to run on water and you can't swim, why would you suggest this idea?"

Wang Xuan, swaying on his feet in the shallows with lake water pouring out of his sleeves, opened his mouth to answer and coughed up a mouthful of lake instead. He bent double, hacking, his belly heaving under the sodden brocade, and when he could breathe again he straightened with the dignity of a drowned emperor and said, "I can swim. A little. In a bath."

"In a bath!"

"A large bath," Wang Xuan said. "My father's bath is very large."

She made a sound that was not a word, and waded past both of them up onto the bank, and the boys followed her out of the water like two chastened dogs. All three of them stood dripping on the grass in the warm sunlight.

A frog, apparently satisfied that the danger had passed, began to croak again somewhere in the reeds. Cao Ning crossed her arms over her transparent chest, which helped very little, and glared at Wang Xuan as though she could set him on fire with her eyes.

"You nearly drowned," she said. "You nearly drowned on me. You grabbed—" She stopped. Her face went even redder. "You grabbed me like a sack of rice and nearly took me down with you, and then you hung on my leg the whole way back and didn't kick once. Not once! I felt it! You were just hanging there!"

"I was conserving my strength," Wang Xuan said weakly.

"You were looking!"

That silenced him. He looked at the grass. He looked at the sky. His round face went slowly pink beneath the lake water, which was answer enough.

Yan Chi decided it was time to save his friend's life. He drew his qi up from his dantian, the way the Divine Cultivation Method had taught him, and sent it outward through his skin in a slow, even wave, and steam rose from his robes in a thick white cloud. When it cleared his clothes were dry and warm and smelled faintly of hot linen.

Wang Xuan, catching on, did the same, though his qi was less refined and it took him three tries, and in the end his robe was dry but his hair stood up from his head in a wild steaming crest like a startled cockatoo.

"Let's forgive him," Yan Chi said to Cao Ning, in his most reasonable voice. "He has already learned his lesson."

"Learned his lesson," she repeated flatly.

"He nearly died. That's a very big lesson." Yan Chi put a hand on Wang Xuan's shoulder. "Look at him. He's a broken man."

Wang Xuan tried to look like a broken man. He was not very good at it. His eyes kept drifting to Cao Ning's chest and back to the sky, and on one of those drifts they met Yan Chi's, and the two young men looked at each other for exactly one heartbeat too long.

It was a small look. It was the look of two brothers who have both seen the same treasure and know it, a look full of shared guilt and shared awe and a ridiculous, helpless, rising laughter that both of them were trying with all their strength to swallow. Wang Xuan's lips twitched. Yan Chi bit the inside of his cheek. Neither of them said a word, and neither of them needed to.

Cao Ning saw it.

She looked from one of them to the other, and the last of the color drained from her face and then came rushing back, twice as hot. She understood. She understood that it had not been only Wang Xuan, and that the sight she had unknowingly given from the moment she bent over in the shallows had been seen from both sides at once, front and back, by the fattest lecher in the merchant quarter and by her oldest friend.

Her hands balled into fists at her sides. Her breasts rose and fell with each furious breath under the transparent strips.

Then she closed her eyes, drew her qi up in a single fierce flare, and burst into steam like a kettle boiling over. The cloud rolled off her in a hot white billow that made both boys step back, and when it cleared her clothes were dry and opaque again, the pale blue strips crisp over her breasts, the skirt panels hanging straight and modest at her hips, her silver hair falling loose and shining down her back. She opened her eyes. They were wet.

"You idiots!" she said. "I don't want to play anymore. I'm leaving."

She turned and walked away up the path into the forest without looking back, her back very straight and her panels swinging with every angry stride, and her silver hair caught the light once between the trees and then was gone.

The two young men stood alone on the bank in the warm afternoon sun and listened to the frog.

"Should we go after her?" Wang Xuan asked eventually.

"No," Yan Chi said. "Not if you want to keep your legs."

"She'll forgive us."

"She'll forgive me," Yan Chi said. "Eventually. You, she'll probably drown in that lake."

Wang Xuan considered this, nodded as though it were fair, and sat down heavily on a flat rock at the water's edge. For a while he only sat there and breathed. His wild steamed hair settled slowly back onto his skull. Out on the lake, the ripples of the race had long since smoothed away, and the surface lay calm and silver and innocent, giving no sign at all that it had just been the site of the greatest event in either young man's life.

"I saw heaven," Wang Xuan said at last, in a hushed voice, to the water, "and then I sank." He paused. "Worth it."

Yan Chi said nothing, which was its own kind of confession.

Wang Xuan heaved himself up off the rock and brushed the grass from his backside with great ceremony. "Brother Yan Chi," he said, "I have been through an ordeal. I have nearly died. I have been shouted at by a goddess. My heart is very troubled, and my mind needs rest." He drew himself up to his full height, which was not much, and announced, "I am going to visit the brothel to relax my mind. Are you coming?"

Yan Chi did not even pretend to hesitate. "Lead the way."