lick the wick

Jin San stays on top of things.

That's their whole deal: cavalier devil-may-care attitude belying control freak artifice. They know enough about themselves and how they tick to strike their very careful balance between letting things go and taking them in a chokehold. And, for the most part, they've been doing just fine toeing that tightrope. Then like three compartmentalisations of their life implode at once, as they're wont to do in your turbulent twenties, and by the time Jin San is done putting out fires, they've triaged out some essentials to the wayside.

So. Needless to say, they're not exactly flush with the forbearance required, at present aftermath, to bathtub DIY their HRT over the grey market. They're also likely to peel out of their own skin if they don't do something about it, so they settle for their scenario's most agreeable compromise.

Aren't you something, is Cui-mama's reply. Prompt down to an hour from when Jin San fished out her profile from the bowels of their WeChat and put their vulnerability on the line. She doesn't clarify, but she does send an address along with a window of time, which, really, is the ideal outcome, all considered.

And, well. If Cui-mama wanted her number to stay decorative, she wouldn't have plugged it into Jin San's phone the moment she decided they had earned the dubious honour of being one of Huanyi's chosen regulars. Nor would she have constructed a reputation as ostentatious nightlife host-cum-den mother for every cracking egg hitting Changping's pavement. Turns out sometimes the chicken that comes home to roost is the cock that's already fucked their way through half your coop.

So Jin San drops a quick emoji to their roommates, pulls on the first pair of jeans that passes the sniff test, and heads out. It's a short enough walk to a bus stop that will drop them off in front of Nanshao station, where it is then a not-so-short trip on the Changping line to Zhuxinzhuang for the 8 interchange. Jin San has done a few deliveries in the area before, so they've got familiarity enough to hop off at Huilongguan Dongdajie and come at the complex from its north. By the time they get where they need to be for Cui-mama to let them up, sweat has stuck everything from their hair to their temples to their shirt under their armpits, and they feel about as impressed as Cui-mama seems when she cracks open her door and gives them a catty once-over.

It'd be something if Jin San was turned away now. But that's not what happens, even if Cui-mama's mouth is pursed in a believable sell of the lie that she's weighing it up in her mind. "In," she says after a beat, haught, and swings her door open wide. Then, "Jeans?" she remarks, cut-dry, once it is pulled shut behind them.

"Didn't realise I was getting a full service," Jin San replies. Which is true. Now they're considering it, though, they're glad the option not to courier a vial back to their houseshare on public transport is on the table. With the week they've had, and then some, their luck would have it one of two ways: either it'd smash in their bag or last the distance only to end up in a needle Jin San puts through a blood vessel and calls it quits about.

"Hm," says Cui-mama. She doesn't clarify that, either.

Jin San sticks their thumbs in their pockets and waits, ever-patiently, to be led. And lead them Cui-mama does, taking point in her little low-cut ride-up boy shorts and sloppy lounge shirt. Her apartment is economically labyrinthine, like most every other mass development that's sprung up and been subsequently overpaid for in the last decade. More space than a selectively single woman needs, which might just be the opulence of the modern age.

They know a bit of Cui-mama's old business, before she picked herself up out of her past life and took flight to Beijing. They didn't come into it entirely by design or desire, sure, but that's often the way with things in their scene. Still. She's a deadfall trap of secrets and surprises, it turns out, made all the more mysterious by any scrap of context possibly given.

Jin San is just taking in the decor, of course. Eyes completely on the level.

Cui-mama introduces her shoebox bathroom — and its comprehensively complementary continuation of her home's wood accents — with a little flick of her hand. Jin San figures that's the dried-up last of the invitations they'll get, and sets about getting as comfortable as anyone can get in an undignified perch on a closed-lid toilet with their jeans rucked to their knees. Cui-mama is gone and back again in that seized opportunity, utilising the haste and efficiency of a woman who knows the dollar value of her time and finds her present preoccupation wanting.

"When's the last time you saw your levels?" Cui-mama asks, splitting the seal of a disposable syringe box with her thumbnail. Jin San is hardly squeamish, but there's always been something about someone else prepping a needle that makes them want to look aside.

"This a check-up now?" they counter, half-serious, but mostly just smoothing their own sudden aversion over, if they're honest.

Cui-mama's scoff is disdainfully nasal. "Who do you take me for? Hm?"

"A woman who doesn't like problems," Jin San says, hands raised in surrender. "They're fine, mama." They can still see Cui-mama, if in glances — illicit silkscreen blurs in their periphery as she fits the needle cap to the syringe, fills the barrel. Jin San probably should have checked the label, even if cutting distinctions between esters for them is functionally arbitrary.

"Don't tense," warns Cui-mama, dropping into a kneel at their side. And before Jin San even reflexively can, because who the fuck says that, Cui-mama — with a veteran ED nurse's adroit indifference — plunges the needle into the muscle of their thigh. By the time Jin San feels the prick, it's washed out by the drag of the tip as Cui-mama slides it free, then the lick of the sting.

"Huh," says Jin San. Somewhere in the immediate rush of their blood back through their body, the dizziness that clenches between their temples, they feel Cui-mama push a cotton pad into their fingers, then fit them tight over where their skin's starting to throb.

"Be more responsible," she tells them. It takes Jin San a moment to turn it over, but by then Cui-mama is already showing her sentiment's belly anyway. "You've been around long enough to know who you can talk to."

"Yes, mama," Jin San says. They do, and they're sure some faux offence will be taken over their routing down this avenue instead of one with said who when it eventually and inevitably filters through. By then they'll actually be in the mood for it.

It is, maybe, too quick a dismissal. Jin San still jittering back down to baseline, nerves amped in an almost nostalgic homage to the first few times they ever dosed something, more desperate than discerning. Then Cui-mama is feeding her fingers through their cropped short hair, long nails scratching gently against their scalp, and— well. Never let it be said Jin San is naive, though they can concede to being slow on this uptake. Just this once.

And look: Jin San has understood for a while, now, just why all of Huanyi's queens share a style throughline — Cui-mama makes performance art. She's captured Chen Sizhen's contemptuous elegance, a real old Shanghai vogue command of presence, and she's done it all with an enviable lack of apparent effort. Her girls want to be her, her guests want to fuck her, the exceptions to each are a non-discriminating either, and somewhere in the blur of expensive drinks and thudding beats they'll all adjust their expectations and settle for going home together.

They wouldn't be so much a liar as they would an idiot if they tried to admit they'd never thought about it. That, maybe, even, sometimes, it lays claim to the appeal of taking one of those girls home. But they never stick the landing. The facade always ends up falling away to give face to something more unique. You can't fake authentic, and Jin San would be disappointed, really, if any of them managed it.

So: it's a belated, bemused realisation that all of this has been Cui-mama's overture. They've been lazily circling each other for so long, without real focus or expectation, that Jin San grew complacent in a presumed status quo. They've got some lost ground to make up for.

"You reek," Cui-mama remarks. Flatterer.

"Is that what this is." Jin San goes back too fast into their lean, and they have to close their eyes for a moment against the spin. When they open them again, there's a little crease lining Cui-mama's brow, her gaze hooded.

"Cocky." Her lip curls, the full line of it as sharp and stinging as her tone. "That works on girls." Who don't know and haven't had better is the unspoken derision.

Jin San isn't big on ceding ground, is the thing. They like a bit of back and forth, when a girl has fight in her and will push back on the daddydom slant of the schtick, but there's a point for them where bratting's fun returns start diminishing. Cui-mama is well outside the realm of their type, in that respect — wilful, exertive. Yet there's something about how she's deigning to submit, almost, that makes Jin San— anyway. So maybe they're more than a little eager to impress that they're worth the faith in the effort.

"I walk all the talk," says Jin San. It's as much a promise as it is the truth: they're not in the business of dealing out disappointment. And yet, but still, "I'll show you," barely comes out better than a beg. It's embarrassing. They're so hard about it, little dick stiff and throbbing between their legs.

"Impress me," Cui-mama accedes, swinging up a leg to hem them in. The whole motion of it is effortless, erotic spellcraft, the sole of her foot barely squeaking over the plastic as she steps down. If she can tell Jin San is already wet, she's not making it apparent. At least not yet.

Cui-mama is tall, and she imposes throughout her every inch. They're well matched, like this, each placed just right to fit where they're wanted, how they should be. In the times Jin San has entertained some dirtbag thoughts about getting their mouth on Cui-mama's designer pussy, she was always glammed up to some cloud nine — usually something nice and choke-tight that Jin San would have to fight to get their hands under enough to push up over her ass. Expensive enough to be a real waste if Jin San got a little rough or impatient or goaded and made some tears to ease their access.

But they suppose even the little shorts barely keeping Cui-mama modest at their eye level must have a brand tag stitched into their hemline. She probably wouldn't be enchanted by a field modification to the integrity of the fabric. So Jin San expresses their impatience a little more altruistically by leaning in and dragging their mouth over the seam, riding it up nice and tight against her slit.

Cui-mama gasps and scrabbles for their neck, press-on nails scratching all up soft hairs and softer skin. Jin San jerks, body following the curl of the whipcrack cold of their shiver.

"You can hold on, if you need it," Jin San tells her, nosing over her mound, their voice clotting thick.

"I had better," is her answer. Which— yeah. Between that and the way she feeds her fingers into their short hair, Jin San is feeling all sorts of caught and seen and way too eager.

"Got you," Jin San husks, and leans all the more impossibly in. Throb in their thigh and wetness of their cunt all forgotten under the haze of competitive need to prove and please. They've been getting so much wetter on T, and while they're not entirely sure if they like it, yet, they do know it still feels just as good as it always did to… sit with it. Just drop into the backstage role of making a pretty girl feel so good she opens up around it all, weak.

They're not sure they can even manage that, with someone like Cui-mama, but it's just the kind of daunting that makes them want to try harder. And Cui-mama isn't ungenerous with her pleasure, doesn't get reticent in her little moaning pants as Jin San licks between her folds, pressing the flat of their tongue over her hole.

She comes quick. Almost shockingly so, even given Jin San laying out all their stops and tricks. Punches the air clean of their ribs when she suddenly fists at their hair hard enough to hurt and squeezes her thighs around their head as best as she can leverage to ride through it. Jin San is left with little choice but to fall in and follow through.

She eases back after a breath, or two, or three. "Do that again," she demands, her sigh hitching.

"Like that, yeah?" Jin San croaks up at her, ears still ringing a bit, like they just took a hit.

"You know you're good," Cui-mama snaps back. So Jin San sucks her swollen clit back into their mouth, sloppy, and makes her come again, short and sweet and whining, her legs trembling like water beneath their hands. Because they do, and they are, but there's nothing wrong with chasing the high of getting acknowledged.

Cui-mama decides that second is enough. Just as soon as Jin San is feeling that little sodden, sticky wetness smudge up their chin, smearing with their spit, Cui-mama is slipping out to give herself a wider, wobbly berth. Jin San sways after her, just slightly, and so, face burning hot before their head can even register the embarrassment. They're stopped short, anyway, by the hand that slides from their hair, the heel of it kneading over their jaw absently as it passes.

She peels out of her shorts just there, as unfussed as she is unfazed. Jin San is reeling a bit, sure, but they're also such a gentleman about the cunt they've just had on their mouth that they don't even sneak a peek. They've got other things to get busy with, anyway, instead, like tugging their jeans back up and zipping their fly once their hands are working.

"You know the way out," is Cui-mama's parting shot farewell, tossed out and aside in the same breath she pulls her shirt over her head and climbs into her huge shower.

Well. Jin San does, yeah. But they wash their face over the sink, first, just a little splash of water to wipe off the worst of the stickiness. Then they make off to be good and scarce. And if they end up stood on the platform at Huilongguan Dongdajie, waiting impatiently for the next train to replace one they must've just missed, cheeks sucked in while they work their tongue over the grooves of their teeth as if looking for the last of the taste of something stuck between them, you know... that's their business.