Tempted Tigress (26 page)

March 3, 1882

I'm twelve! I'm twelve! I'm twelve years old today! Father came and took me out to dinner just like a real woman. We ate in the best restaurant in Shanghai and I wore my new dress and my pearl on a string. He said I was the most beautiful girl in the place.

And afterwards, he took me to his home. I'd never been there before. It was HUGE! Plenty of room for me!! But it smelled like the prostitute women, so I know Mother Francis is right about that. He's not a church-going, God-fearing man. But you know what? I don't care! Hear me, God? I DON'T CARE!!! He is my father and I love him. He comes to visit me when no one else does. He gives gifts to me and to all the other children. He brought food to the mission. I don't care that he doesn't go to church. He's my father and I love him!

And he gave me something else. Something that he said I shouldn't tell anyone about. He said since I was twelve, I was old enough. I told him I already knew all about opium. That I'd been taking it on and off since I was six.

I think he knew I was lying, but it didn't matter. He's like that. He just gives me this look to tell me that he knows I'm making up a story, but he lets me pretend anyway. Eventually I tell him the truth. I just have to work my way up to it.

So he let me have some. Boiled. It was WONDERFUL!!!! I've been trying to think of a way to describe it. It's like all the angry frightened pieces fall away. Everything that makes you mean when you don't want to be or makes you stupid because you don't understand—all that goes away. And all that's left is so clear and so happy.

I understood everything and everything understood me. I started to talk to my new father, really talk. And he listened and he understood because everything makes sense on opium. Then a lady came in—as a present to me—and she sang. It was so beautiful I cried. That too is different. I didn't hear her breathing or any of the notes she probably missed or the noise out in the streets. I just heard music the way God intended it—filled with feeling and such perfectness.

I wish I could take some before mass. Imagine hearing a hymn the way it should be, as a celebration to God, not as Sister Christine trying for notes she can't make. But Father said I can only have opium on my birthday. It's not for other times. It's too dangerous.

But oooooohhhhh, I can't wait!!! I can't wait until my next birthday when I can have more.

A war more unjust in its origin, a war calculated in its progress to cover this country with a permanent disgrace, I do not know and I have not read of... [Our] flag is become a pirate flag, to protect an infamous traffic.

—Opposition MP William Gladstone, 1840

Chapter 11

The morning came with wailing, and Zhi-Gang tried to bury his head against the sound. He ended up burrowing into soft female flesh—a breast? He smelled the familiar musk of a night spent in what he and Jing-Li called physical study. He felt the lift and lowering of the woman's sweet chest, heard the steady beat of her heart, erratic now that she too was waking, and the ever-present wailing from the other room.

It was the widows, making their show as was wholly traditional, proper—and exceedingly tedious. He could not wait to escape this mud pit, and yet he had no wish to cease his current studies.

He rubbed his face against the woman, noting the size and texture of her breast. It was large and full and especially delightful. He smiled and opened his eyes. Morning light shone full on her white skin, the faint rosy tint the effect of his morning beard on her tender flesh.

Anna. Sweet Anna.

He blinked, memory coming back with a flood of mixed delight and horror. The delight was obvious. His body was relaxed with satisfaction, his muscles even sore from their exertions. In truth, they had done nothing he had not experienced before, and yet she had been wonderfully open to everything he did, everything they tried.

What was different was the way she had spoken to him. He grew hard remembering her words: awkward and stuttering, but in time flowing stronger, more articulate. She'd told him what she wanted and how she felt when he touched her.

He had not minded when her speech had splintered into disassociated thoughts, bizarre images, and unusual associations. That made it all the more amazing, all the more erotic, since he knew he was the one who'd sent her mind flying into unforeseen directions. And where she went, he went too. He'd shared every moment of her experience and that made his own all the more explosive.

She was different from any woman he had ever touched, and that made her exceedingly special to him. Especially since he had no expectation that last night's explorations would be any different from tonight or the next night or the night after that. Her mind was a strange and amazing place. He could spend many long nights in exploration of her thoughts and never grow tired, even as he pumped himself into her over and over again.

The thought was so compelling, he found himself catching her rosy nipple in his lips, teasing it into a tight point. She responded immediately, her breath catching on a gasp. His hand had been on her belly. He slid it between her legs where she was wet and slick and ready.

He forgot the horror of the morning's equation. All was lost in the scent of a willing woman. Then she started speaking again, and he could not pretend this was just any woman; she was herself, her words unlike anyone else's, and he wanted to be inside her more than he wanted his next breath.

"Tell me more," he gasped as he shifted his weight between her thighs. It was an awkward movement since he was still stroking her yin pearl, but he managed while she began to arch into his hand.

"Your fingers spread me open," she said. "I can see it in my mind, you opening me up."

"Like spreading apart flower petals; I hunger for the pollen inside."

He felt her chest ripple with humor. "I was thinking more like parting the curtain into Venus's immortal pool."

He plunged himself into her. He had no idea who this Venus was, but he liked the image. "And now?" he pressed. "What do you see now?"

She opened her eyes, looking directly into his. "You," she whispered. "I see you, and I feel you inside."

He began pumping his buttocks, though leisurely, without any great power. Not yet. He wanted to hear more, to know what she felt. "As I slide in and out, I think of you squeezing me, pumping the vital essence of my organ into my blood, my heart, my mind."

"I think of you taking me with you—drawing into you, then being pushed back. Me into you. Then—"

"Then myself into you," he said.

"Yes."

He smiled. "I like that."

"Every time you thrust, you pull more of me around you. And every time you withdraw, more of me follows."

He shook his head. "I am the man who pours into you. My vital essence heats, it burns, it erupts..."
Not yet. Soon
,
but not yet.
"It will become part of you. I will become part—"

"You dive into Venus's pool." She arched, her inner muscles tightening in preparation. "I am the water that surrounds you."

"Take me." His rhythm was faster now, his body thrusting hard against her pelvis, grinding up and around when he could. "Squeeze me." She did, and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head from the exquisite sensation.

"Fill me," she gasped. Her quivering was beginning, starting at the base of his organ and flowing upward, over and over, each wave more intense, more demanding. "Take. Me."

"Where?" he gasped, trying to hold off. "Where will we go?"

"We'll. Fly!"

"Yes!" He erupted. His body, his mind, all his will poured into her. His vision went dark as it flew with her, and he felt completely weightless, completely empty. He knew nothing but the endless flow of power into her. It was as if she wiped him clean, and he gloried in his newness.

Until it was over. His mind slipped back inside his body, his vision returned, and he could hear his heartbeat as it pounded through his head. He returned to himself, and eventually, he forced himself to open his eyes.

His arms were straight, supporting his weight. She lay beneath him, her face flushed, her lips open, red, and wet. Below, he could still feel her contract weakly around him. Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up, a dazed expression complementing her soft smile. Her breasts shifted with her breath, and her belly still quivered. In his mind's eye, he saw her pulsing feminine flesh as it had been last night, smelled the womanly scent of her, and knew the absolute truth:

He had consorted with a white opium runner. She was a clear link in the chains of drugs and prostitution that bound his country. And rather than cut her out of his life and his homeland, he had taken his ease between her thighs. He was a vile hypocrite!

Anger began to well up inside him. As quickly as the rise of lust, this fury boiled, making his hands clench and his face twist.

He was familiar with this reaction. It often happened in the morning when he looked down at his women, whichever lay beneath him. But like everything else with Anna, his feelings were this time stronger, quicker, more raw. He could not stop them if his life depended on it. Nor how he would lash out at her, cutting her with words for no reason he understood.

"What are you thinking?" she asked, her words jarring the rhythm of his hatred. It threw him off his stride.

In anger—at himself, not at her—he began to roll off her, but she was faster. Her legs wrapped around his and she gripped him in place. He could not even pull out of her, she held him so tightly.

"Don't leave until you answer. What are you thinking?"

"That the widows' wailing is irritating." The sound had been a steady backdrop to last night's and this morning's exercise.

She shook her head. "Why are you lying?"

He had been looking at the sunlight on her white skin—so pale he could see the tracery of blue veins beneath. But now his vision snapped to her eyes, her round brown eyes.

"You are not who I thought you were." The words were confusing and not at all what he meant.

"I am not anyone to you. A white prisoner. A woman who wanted opium but got this instead." There was no anger in her voice, merely... confusion. "I have not thought about opium at all until this second." Her expression shifted into a stunned smile. "Not at all." Then she wrinkled her nose. "But I don't suppose Father Thomas would approve of the substitute."