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Sui Zhou thinks it sweat, at first. The last nights in the capital have started to gurgle humid, telltale for its summers, and she has been weathering a mild but aggrieved fever, asides. All matters unhelped by Tang Fan, who had rushed back from Tongzhou on horseback at first word of Sui Zhou's entirely unserious injury at such a dogged pace her fretted greeting was by weight more complaint as to the worked soreness of her own back, waist, legs. She had badgered Wuyun to haul too many of her books to Sui Zhou's study, where their glut still now serves to prop the screen open so that Tang Fan might see her from across her shoulder when she works from Sui Zhou's desk. In its practice, however, Tang Fan's vigil has served beside Sui Zhou in her bed at every graspable moment.
Sui Zhou had thought that proof enough for her wife that the wound undeserved her worry; that Tang Fan has been able to curl half-tipped to her lap like a palace cat, or a shroud hastily pulled-over. But Tang Fan refused swaying, and Sui Zhou lacked any true conviction to insist upon it. So she jars awake well into the spate of the morning the selfsame way she has the handful before: on her back as sleep placed her, cramped from sole to scalp, with Tang Fan's drool-damp mouth crushed to her neck.
She unsticks her thighs in the stopgap of give Tang Fan's cling has left her, meaning to loose the sog brimmed up flush along her cunt, only to sputter around a groan when she feels it drip free in a matting clot.
This stirs Tang Fan, of course, who would snore through a raid of lang bing but launch to her feet with a complaint on her lips if she heard a hairpin drop a tanzhi after er geng's gong. "Guangchuan?" she slurs. "What's wrong?" She fumbles a hand up blindly between them to test the backs of her fingers against Sui Zhou's forehead for fever, which lands akin to a limp-wristed slap. Sui Zhou is not overcome with fuddled fondness, but it may be a near thing.
"No," Sui Zhou assures her first, prising her voice from its droughted rasp. "I've soiled myself." It's true enough, and meant more as a means to get Tang Fan to move, asides.
And Tang Fan does move, albeit only in a kicking scramble that hoists her to her knees, the blanket sleeting from her back. "Lao Pei warned me of this," she babbles, hands flitting to fist on her knees as she looms over Sui Zhou, blinking herself wide-eyed. "Have you numbed any at the waist? I'll have Dong'er fetch him or Jie from the clinic."
Damn that doctor. Sui Zhou didn't look to be skewered on purpose; whipping up her wife with witless worry is extrajudicial punishment. "Tang Fan," she interjects, before Tang Fan is too far gone down a path that leads doubtlessly to involving their collected village with the perceived problem. "Runqing. It isn't my wound. I've bled."
"You've bled?" Tang Fan repeats, mouth lapping her head. Sui Zhou watches her expression for the moment her thoughts catch up, and is summarily undisappointed. "Well, I… does that hurt?"
"Not terribly," says Sui Zhou. To shallowly admit it here is better than to try for a dismissal that Tang Fan will only pick apart with voracious scrutiny. Sui Zhou has suffered worse, but even if she hadn't, it is a disconcerting pain more than anything else. A belligerent gnaw in the pit of her gut; a notching in the small of her spine. It will be gone in a few days' time, and with hope will keep sparse when she is healed enough to take her tinctures again. She'd settle, for now, for the spoil of a warm bath, and a cool meal to follow it.
"Oh," says Tang Fan, who does not move at all. Instead, "I could help that," she offers, explaining, "Lao Pei taught me how."
Did he, now. The thought must speak itself aloud on Sui Zhou's face; Tang Fan scrunches her nose, lips pouting.
"Genius gynaecologist wasn't only a clepe to send the Capital into tittering," she defends, tone hot enough to suggest it may be her grievant perception of personal attack than borne of her principle to stand up for a friend.
Sui Zhou knows she is right; more, what the spirit of Tang Fan's help will entail, past pretence and application of curative purpose. It brings a leching, sticky heat to broil beneath her skin, throbbing its prick through her groin. "I'd dirty you," she says, mouth dried again. A flimsy protest, and they each know it.
"I'd wash clean," says Tang Fan. "I always do." She leans in, her eyelids hooding; victory already seized. "Guangchuan," she murmurs, "won't you let me? At least to try?"
What has Sui Zhou ever refused her? Nothing worth her wanting. "Not inside," is all she asks, this time, of her in return.
Tang Fan's smile stays soft, even as something toothed and hungry alights her gaze. "I'll be gentle with you," she promises. But, "You have to tell me if I'm not."
They ease Sui Zhou's trousers to her knees, between the two of them, though it takes more time than it would with only one for the needful way their hands keep brushing; tangling; losing their trajection. When Tang Fan straddles her at the shins, her weight settles only into her kneel, deliberate. Sui Zhou feels the refrain as its own pressure, directioness, undecided between her throat, lap, chest. Like the expectation before a blow; the silence after prayer. Towering, with the sun bronzing her skin, Tang Fan almost looks a god. The kind Sui Zhou has seen across Ming, felt hinted beyond its borders— foreign to her faith yet familiar to her fear. So incomprehensible as to cast disbelief on its beneficence, that something of its make and magnitude would ever then choose succour and servitude.
"Let me see you," says Tang Fan, and Sui Zhou parts her thighs just a relent wider, as though it was commanded. It must offer nothing new by way or means of observation, but how Tang Fan's stare narrows as her lips slacken around her breath assays it as gratuitous.
"Aren't you good," she tells her. Less praise than remark, yet Sui Zhou shivers with it anyway, easy. When her toes curl, their nails blunting over the fabric bounding her feet, the sound of it rings out so loudly between them, abstractly deafening. Tang Fan's laugh is husky, her, "How impatient. I thought you learned," fruitless for chiding.
"Learned enough to tell the hour without the xiangzhong," Sui Zhou retorts, to the proof of Tang Fan's point. The wetness welling against her folds is leaden, now, invoking some nerved unbalance astride humiliation and its suspense.
"I could take all morning with you," Tang Fan asserts quickly, in all her overconfidence. "Isn't it mine to do?"
So much for having one foot already in her coffin. It seems Tang Fan is less concerned with Sui Zhou's sapped stamina than she is with her Heavens-sent right to be the only one to put any end to her own wife. But Sui Zhou doubts she'll see much pity if she begs reminder of the frailty she's assiduously denied to every party since she was first limped to Pei Huai's clinic, so, "Will you be cooking breakfast, then, as well?" is what she tries in lieu.
That does get through. "Yes, yes, I won't starve you," Tang Fan acquiesces, ever-merciful. She brings her fingertips to her lips and blows on them, as if to warm them— a silly and needless gesture that makes Sui Zhou's lips twitch against a disparate smile. Then Tang Fan is reaching between her legs, nails scratching feather-lightly at the wiry hair thatching her folds, and Sui Zhou loses the thread and track of it, breath whistling out on a sigh.
"Is it that good, just this?" Tang Fan rambles out, voice fluttery and rushed, chin dipped to her clavicle so she can better watch her own hand at its work. "I've barely done one thing to you."
Sui Zhou can feel the yields of that work in how Tang Fan's nails keep stroking over her, teasing apart where the strands have matted with dried blood. So they won't pull, perhaps, when she does finally spread Sui Zhou open. From her own vantage, Sui Zhou is treated only to the sight of Tang Fan's features stilled in concentration, the little furrow in her brow that has always been most characteristic to when she is trying to be careful.
"Yes," Sui Zhou tells her. An embellishment on the fact, true, but Sui Zhou doesn't say it only to play to Tang Fan's vanity, her construction of a self that's an implausibly-versed ingénue. She says it to see how Tang Fan licks out shyly at her own bottom lip as her nostrils flare around her tugged inhale, to picture the pink that would soon paint her cheeks if she persisted with it.
"Well." Tang Fan stumbles, stopping to swallow; steel. "You will have to endure it," she concludes.
"I will," says Sui Zhou.
Tang Fan laughs again, beneath her own breath, a bell she can barely curl on her tongue into a hum. She flats her long slim fingers along Sui Zhou's slit, and presses, so but not in, until Sui Zhou bares open around her, making room for it.
"Oh," she gasps, "you're so warm. Did you not think of me once, while I was gone?"
"Not once," Sui Zhou rejoins, breath shallowing. "Often." The ends of Tang Fan's fingers are at rest against her hole like a threat— Sui Zhou clenches down around nothing with a jolting flinch, a ragged pant shaking free. She's burning already, stinging and swollen.
Tang Fan licks out again at the swell of her lip, then chases its crest with the scrape of her teeth. "You should act on it more," she opines, simple. "As I do." Her touch flits from the easement of Sui Zhou's cunt but a sliver, shoulder drawing back like a bowstring in pluck, her chin lofting. "It's— like molasses," she notes.
"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou hisses, unthinking, throat quartering taut and thick. She does not— she does not want those each twined together in her head, she thinks. Blood and eating, the giving in either— crassness given commonality with Tang Fan as constant in its crossroads.
Tang Fan's lips moue. "All right," she cedes. "So unkind, you know. What is a husband to do." It is a question of rhetoric only — Tang Fan seems to know its answer for herself already. Showing no hesitance, she brings it to apparent actuality, smoothing the pad of her thumb over Sui Zhou's fattening clit, from the root of its shaft to the pearl of its tip.
The tinctures she's taken since young to give for her family their wanted second son — as banal in miracle as a milken wash making a boy's feet soft enough to fold to a woman's soles — have summed Sui Zhou of both to leave her unwhole as neither. With Tang Fan — who first imposed on Sui Zhou's secret in much the manner she entitled herself to everything, meriting absent aforethought that Sui Zhou bear her own in exchange, equal of its weight and guilt — Sui Zhou's indifference to her flesh has grown, gradual, from resentful discontent to something more alike absolved acceptance. The stubble that flecks her jaw and upper lip, the narrow waist that Sui Zhou can pleat her hands around until her fingers meet, the cock that nests soft between her legs as often as not when tasking Sui Zhou with her pleasure— they complete Tang Fan as the woman Sui Zhou wants; knows; treasures.
It has come to stand to her reason, then, in turn, that Tang Fan hungers for her just as purely, profanely, past all flighted fancy and to bowed and witnessed eternal commitment. There is much of her for Tang Fan to touch, like this, with the jut of her clit from her folds more like an impotent cock, and she can feel herself pulsing against the spindling splint of her digit. Helplessly, she recalls like a vision, a haunting, the madness that had briefly seized Tang Fan the night before she had departed southeast, where she had palmed at Sui Zhou's clit in a fumbling grip and confessed her certainty — and its lifetime hours of deliberation preceding — that Sui Zhou could fill her with it. Then, Sui Zhou had snatched at Tang Fan's hand to pin it as she fucked the sleeve of her fist until she spent, animal and unthinking and so selfishly persistent that Tang Fan had complained, delightedly, of her brutishness and the soreness of her wrist come morning, stalling her awaiting carriage. Now, Sui Zhou must grit her jaw to stopper her whimper, the urge to rut up trembling so thoroughly through her hips that Tang Fan must feel it, as baring as Sui Zhou's slick drooling down her fingers.
"You're so sensitive," Tang Fan murmurs, enraptured. "It is as if you hurt." It doesn't sound meant, as she often does, prising with her ever-precise intent beneath Sui Zhou's skin to stoke her blood. Stolen, then, by the same ravage of rapture that thieves Sui Zhou's every whining gasp and shake.
"Please," Sui Zhou begs, the edges of her vision blurring wet. She sees Tang Fan's lips part, but does not hear the breath she sucks in to cave her chest. Then she is scrambling, her spared hand bracing astride Sui Zhou's face as she bears overhead, thumbnail clipping at the shell of her ear.
"I have you," she swears. "Haven't you done well? You can give in now, I'm here, I'll allow it." She barely gets her fingers around Sui Zhou, half for her fumbling as for how Sui Zhou takes her permission as grant to fuck up into the slack furl of her hand for friction. She's close, all but there, she needs— she only needs—
"Tang Fan," she pants out, weak, the string of it straining with pain when her next thrust yanks at the wound on her belly. Tang Fan's brow crumples, chastising, before it softens to momentary wonder as Sui Zhou pushes her hands across her own chest, palming clumsily for her nipples through her sleep shirt.
"Oh, my poor wife," Tang Fan croons. "You only have two hands, don't you. Let me—" She turns the hand at Sui Zhou's face, clawing for her braid, and Sui Zhou is coming before she even feels the sting at her scalp from when Tang Fan has scraped enough of a grip together to pull. "That's it," she's praised. "How good."
It takes Sui Zhou some long moments to pull herself back to place. She closes her eyes throughout it, staving the dizzying swim of her head. Tang Fan's weight across her legs remains an anchor, as do her hands. When Sui Zhou can again open her eyes, Tang Fan's gaze is there to meet hers, peering.
"Sui Zhou," is all she says, voice thick, watery. Sui Zhou cranes her chin, and feels Tang Fan's breath lash out against it as she drags her mouth in for a kiss. Only one of her hands flutters to Sui Zhou's face, fingers tracing her cheek; the other, judged from the glimpse of her curved shoulder, must be fisted in her trousers so she refrains from dirtying Sui Zhou with it. It is to Sui Zhou, then, to curl a palm across Tang Fan's nape; to right the chart of their mouths and gentle their pace.
"What do you need?" she breathes out, and Tang Fan scoffs around the nick of her own tongue between Sui Zhou's lips, hitchy.
"A bath," she mumbles back, reluctant to part their lips for even the moment to allow it. "But I can do at least that," she adds, leaning back. Sui Zhou feels the desire to follow pull across her shoulders like they've been caned. "Stay where you are," she tasks, wobbling to rise from the bed. "You aren't decent."
"All right," Sui Zhou submits. At least as long and far as it takes for Tang Fan to toe her way out into the courtyard. Then she is pulling her trousers back up and finding her own legs to put beneath her, feet slipping hazily over the floorboards. It will be worth all the chiding when Tang Fan does finally catch on to the disobedience.