Lian arrived at the Golden Slumbers and asked the Madam if Mei was working again that night.
"Yes," she smiled, examining Lian with a knowing look. "I believe she is."
Lian's heart was in her throat as she rushed to wait outside Mei's door. When the prostitute emerged into the hallway, Lian's heart jumped further, rushing straight out of her skull and into the open air. She forced herself to breathe before confirming that she could have another full night with the woman.
"One gold?" She asked.
Mei smiled and invited her inside. The room was the same as the night before, everything soft and rich and warm. Lian's eyes fell upon the bed and the first set of regrets she'd experienced from the night before came back to her mind.
"Should I call up for some water?" Mei asked as she closed the door and brushed by Lian towards the wooden center of the room.
"Yes," Lian said, before grabbing the edge of Mei's robes and stopping the other woman in her tracks. Mei turned to face her, surprised. "But first, I have to fix a mistake I made last night."
Lian stepped forward and took Mei's hands in her own, then leaned gently in and kissed the woman on the lips. Mei was taken by surprise, but eventually squeezed Lian's hands and pressed into the kiss. When they parted, Lian was smiling.
"I can't believe I didn't do that last night."
Mei smiled and suppressed a chuckle. "Let me get you that water."
Lian walked over to the dining table and began to pick at the fruit on the table. She wasn't hungry, but the taste of Mei's lips on her own had left a lingering desire for sweetness. As Mei lifted another tall glass of water from a tray beneath the floor and brought it over to her, Lian was suddenly not satisfied with mere food. She took the glass from Mei, put it on the table, and then embraced her again, this kiss passionate and hungry. Mei responded in kind, and when their tongues darted across one another for the first time, Lian's desire grew back to the same dimensions as the night before.
Her body urged her to repeat the delights of the previous night, but she held back. Because the greatest regret she had was not the lack of words exchanged, or the way she had used Mei as an archetype of Zhezhun beauty. Instead it was that she had not given one moment's thought to Mei's own pleasure. Lian had had her share of lovers over the years, and the worst were the selfish and the demanding. Lian had been both the night before, and even more than speaking to the beautiful woman, she wanted to pay her back for a night of release Lian hadn't even realized she'd wanted.
Their kissing continued, then escalated – soft groans passing back and forth along with their tongues and hot breath – and Lian decided to take charge, stripping the other woman down to her thin underclothes, wrapping her arms around Mei, then lifting her up into the air. Mei's eyes went wide for a moment before she remembered she was with a Shuli Go, then she giggled as Lian carried her to the bed, and set her down gently on the edge of it.
Mei tried pulling Lian close for more kisses, but Lian dropped to her knees in front of the bed, and slowly traced a line of kisses up the legs of the other woman instead. Lian's cheeks and tongue slid across Mei's legs, inching higher, and Lian luxuriated in the softness and suppleness of the woman's skin. Just as the previous night had made her aware of her stench though, Lian realized she was not, herself, quite so soft as Mei. Putting the concern aside, she inched her kisses closer and closer until she was buried in Mei's sex, eliciting a slow groan from the other woman, and a slighter, weaker version from Lian herself.
She tried to work slowly, deliberately, the way Mei had the night before, but her own desire elicited a faster pace, as the sensations of her partners' most private parts drove her wild. When she did draw out an orgasm from Mei, it was not as earth-shattering as Lian's had been the night before, but she did watch with delight as Mei's body reacted to her touch, shivering into the ecstasy of loose limbs and bucking hips.
Lian continued, eventually drawing another orgasm out of Mei, after which the other woman asked her to stop. "Wait," Mei whispered, "I… I need a moment."
Lian smiled and rose up, flopping on to the bed beside Mei and admiring the woman's beauty in profile. Mei's breathing was hard and her eyes were shut as she tried to collect herself. When she opened them again, she smiled.
"You're quite good at that," Mei said. Lian assumed she was lying, just as the prostitute had for years to people far more important and powerful than Lian. But when she really focused, and used all her Shuli Go senses to detect the slight facial contortions that gave away even the most practiced of liars, she couldn't see any hint of it in Mei's face.
"I had a lot of practice," Lian said, rolling on to her back and looking up to the roof with Mei. "They keep Shuli Go separate after the age of fourteen. Girls on one side of the school. Boys in the other. So no one gets pregnant, you know. That's four long years before you see a cock, and the girls got pretty… inventive."
Mei laughed. The first true, strong laugh Lian had heard from the other woman. Lian knew it was yet another cliché, but she couldn't remember a more sonorous, more musical laugh in all her life. She kept her eyes closed, enjoying the sound but also experiencing the first seeds of the same doubt that Jiang had experienced for her earlier that day.
She knew she was falling in love with a woman she should absolutely not fall in love with. And too quickly on top of it.
You deserve this, she told herself before immediately also telling herself, but you didn't think that'd be the mantra for your life as a rich woman.
"Let's eat," Lian announced, getting up from the bed and tossing Mei's discarded clothes back onto the bed.
"Ok," Mei said, "I… I just still need a minute."
Lian removed the top robes she still wore, placing them on a dining chair, and then took a drink from her glass of water. She sat down at the table and watched as Mei gingerly got up from the bed and made her way to the table, sitting across from Lian.
"What was that like?" Mei asked, as she took an assortment of the food on the table and began to pick through it in small bites.
"What?"
"Becoming a Shuli Go. I've heard it's quite difficult."
Lian looked at Mei with a wary eye. The woman was perhaps in her mid-twenties, and the Shuli Go had been disbanded sixteen years earlier. She would hardly have met a Shuli Go as an adult, and couldn't imagine there were many Shuli Go rich enough to visit the Golden Slumbers. "Who told you that?"
"Oh," Mei hadn't expected to be questioned, her face a bit shocked. "You know. Men, mostly. The types that come through here aren't scared of much, but they're scared of Shuli Go. Some of them love to talk all about your kind."
"My kind?" Lian smirked, "I guess we are a distinct kind."
"Oh, I didn't mean any insult," Mei's face distorted in apology.
"You didn't deliver any. I'd just never considered it that way."
Mei ate slowly, pivoting the conversation slightly. "You must be one of the last ones then?"
"Yeah, I suppose so. Only two more years graduated after I did."
Mei smiled. "Is that what they call it? Graduation? I thought it had a fancy title. Like the Trials of Heaven and Hell… or something."
Lian also smiled. Had been smiling the whole time. "Close. The Gamut of Heaven and Hell. That's one of the names, yeah. Each school usually had its own name too…" She paused a second, looking at Mei with newfound respect. "You really do listen to them when they blab on, don't you?"
"They pay me to listen."
"I always thought you could get away with just hearing them talk. Listening is more… intimate, I guess."
Mei finished her food and looked Lian in the eye. "I'm listening now."
Lian fought the urge to turn away, Mei's beauty and directness burning a hole through her resilience. "I don't have much to say, I'm afraid."
"You could answer my question."
"Which one was that?"
"Was it hard? Becoming a Shuli Go?"
Lian broke Mei's gaze and stared down at her glass of water. She took another large drink, leaving the ice cubes half-melted in the bottom of the glass. Ice. This far north. Wealth certainly had its advantages.
"Let's put it this way," she said, suddenly finding a way to articulate something she'd long thought about but never had to answer a question about. "I've met people who had much harder lives growing up, and I've met people who had it much easier. But if I had the choice between growing up an orphan brought to a Shuli Go school at five and trained my whole life to serve people, or taking my chances with a regular family – rich, poor, doesn't matter – I'd choose the Shuli Go school every time."
"…Why?"
"Because the school was an institution. There were rules there. And they chose me. They wanted me there. With a family you're lucky if that's the case. And they can beat you. Abuse you. Rape you. Even kill you. And there's no one to help, no one to say 'No, that's wrong.' And then even if they treated you like shit and hated your every moment of existence, you're expected to honor them every day of your life until you've had your kids and treated them like shit. I didn't choose the Shuli Go family – nobody chooses their family – but at least they chose me. And that's something."
Lian could see Mei fighting the urge to put on the face she reserved for men and women who complained of rough childhoods: the very ones Lian mentioned who had been beaten and taunted and misused their whole lives. It would be a face of real sympathy too, because it was an injustice that didn't matter if you were visiting a brothel that cost a solid gold piece for a night of luxury, or one that cost three copper for ten minutes on a soiled mattress. Family was a singular torture that everyone experienced to varying degrees, and Mei truly did listen when they told their stories of woe and neglect. So it would be a very caring, very empathetic face Mei wanted to make. But Lian didn't want to see it. So instead she eased into a joke of an anecdote.
"Not that I didn't get some pretty good beatings in my day. I'm a pretty good swordswoman, even by Shuli Go standards, but I did not start out that way."
"No?" Mei put a thin grin back on her face, much to Lian's appreciation.
"No. I remember the first six months we worked with practice swords, more of my body was covered in bruises than wasn't. And then there were all the times we had to act as each other's testing dummies for our magic spells."
"Oooh, that can't have been pleasant."
"No. No it was not."
And so Lian told her more of the joyous aspects of life in a Shuli Go school: the pranks two dozen penis-starved sixteen-year-old girls would pull on their teachers, the home-made alcohol the students took to fermenting in old store-room casks, the way they would tease and encourage one another in equal measure for their most recent exam failings. As Lian told it, becoming a Shuli Go was a never-ending parade of lighthearted moments. But she knew Mei had already heard all about the twenty-hour days of physical exhaustion, the students who lost limbs or even their lives before they reached the Gamut, and the physical effects of the Shuli Go magics themselves. Lian didn't want to drown the night out that way. She wanted to hear Mei laugh.
And laugh she did. And when Lian worried she would become addicted to that laugh, she picked Mei back up off the ground, carried her to the bed, and for the first time, made love to her. Not purely sexual like their previous experiences, this was tender and slow – no urgency or intense need pressed them into action. Lian explored every corner of Mei's body, feasting on the softness of her skin and the firmness of her body, even as she prevented Mei from exploring too far into hers: in comparison to Mei, Lian was self-conscious about how unkempt and rough her body felt. Mei did not push too hard, and as the night faded into its height, they fell asleep in one another's arms, satiated and flush with a lavish joy.
The next morning they bathed together and ate a meal prepared by the house, before a bell chimed the hour and Mei confirmed their time was up.
Lian stood in the doorway, ready to leave. "Are you working again tonight?"
Mei knew what was coming, but did not know how she would respond. "Yes."
"I want to come back tonight." Lian said. "Do you want me to come back?"
"…Yes. Of course. Yes."
Lian smiled. "One gold, right?"
Mei held her arm in her hand, pulling her body tight. "That's right."