Chapter 43 Luk Yee and his Fair Wife
After making his farewells to Li Chang at the house of Wen-chi earlier that
evening, Luk Yee, Li's trusted aide and confidante, had stopped by the house of
Ming-tsu at Li's request, to alert her that his friend had had to leave the city
suddenly. He was careful not to say anything about the trap into which Li had
apparently fallen and which was the cause of his flight. Ming-tsu knew Li only
as a lieutenant of the Black Scorpions, and at this point it was undoubtedly
safest not to disabuse her of that notion.
As he slowly made his way homeward after their brief encounter, with a
brisk wind and a light rain at his back, Luk remembered the strange brightness
in Ming-tsu's flashing brown eyes. Although it was doubtless only concern for
Li Chang, her reaction had given him a peculiar twinge of uneasiness. His
friend's exotic lover had thanked him courteously for his news and had asked him
with a dazzling smile to come in and give her more details. Anxious to get home
to his new bride, he had declined politely. As he was descending the walk to
the street, she called after him softly, with more than a hint of invitation in
her seductive voice, beseeching him to let her know the minute he had any news
of Li's whereabouts, and inviting him to return again when he had more time.
Had he not been so in love with Qieu, his wife of ten days, he would gladly
have taken Ming-tsu up on her offer to discuss Li Chang -- or anything else! --
at greater length inside her home. He had met Ming-tsu once or twice before,
briefly, but tonight her beauty was truly radiant, and she had exuded an aura of
sensuality unlike that of any woman he had ever known.
As she stood in the doorway listening to his brief explanation of Li's
departure, the scent of orange blossom had seemed to billow out of her clinging,
low-cut, black silk blouse and filter through his nostrils to pass directly into
his blood-stream, firing it with unexpected excitement. He had wavered,
briefly, at her door, but his sense of loyalty to his friend and his wife had
won out over his animal instincts, and he had made good his departure.
As he began his journey homeward a brief moment of spitefulness caused Luk
to envy Li Chang his seductive mistress, and the untold sexual pleasures that
they had surely shared. His own wife, Qieu, while as fair a wife as a man could
wish for, remained timid and reluctant when he had tried to take her into his
arms. Timidity and reluctance, he smiled covetously to himself, were not likely
to be obstacles that Li Chang had to contend with very often with a tigress like
Ming-tsu.
In his mind's eye Luk pictured Ming-tsu's lovely body sprawled sensuously
across a bed clad only in a brief, low-cut black chemise. Her lustrous raven
hair spilled across a pillow of virginal white. Her red lips parted in frank
invitation, her amorous, heavy-lidded brown eyes drawing him closer and closer,
as she slid one silky golden thigh languorously against the other. Her breasts,
half-revealed by her skimpy garment, firm-crested and heaving with desire, while
her left hand slowly, teasingly, lifted the hem of the chemise higher, higher,
higher...
Luk Yee shook his head to clear it, embarrassed by the erection that was
swelling within his trousers. He turned to face the wind-blown rain as if
feeling nature's elements on his face might cool the ardor that nature had
stirred up below.
After feeling the cool rain on his face for a moment the better angels of
Luk's own nature prevailed and he began to ponder the fate of Li Chang and their
comrades who had joined together to oppose the Black Scorpions. Since the
strange death of Professor Leung he had dropped his classes at the University
and had scraped a living together teaching students in secondary schools. But
most of his time and energies had gone into the conflict with the Scorpions.
Now that events had taken a decided turn for the worse, Luk Yee was glad that he
had told his wife nothing of his membership in the secret society. Qieu had met
Li Chang at the wedding, but she knew him only as a friend -- not as the leader
of a crusade against the cabal of gangsters who ruled Shanghai.
As he continued homeward in the misting rain, Luk Yee's thoughts turned to
the wedding itself, which as for many men, had been the happiest day of his
life. His wife had been beautiful, and her father, usually so sombre, had once
or twice flashed the smile typical of the father of a bride. His friends -- Li
Chang, Liu and the others -- had all been in high spirits.
********
Luk Yee had no family of his own to speak of; his father, like countless
other Chinese of the generation of the Taiping Rebellion, anxious for a better
life, had sailed to San Francisco in the railroad-building years after the
American Civil War, hoping to send for his wife and only son one day. But there
was no place for a family in the difficult and dangerous life of a migrant
railroad-worker.
Luk Yee still treasured a letter that his mother had received from faraway
America many years earlier. In part of the letter his father had written with
great pride of being on the crew that built the Central Pacific's railroad line
east out of Sacramento California through the treacherous ridges of the Sierra
Madre and across the vast arid stretches of Nevada before linking up with the
westward-stretching Union Pacific in the Promontory Mountains of northern Utah.
He had been, his father had written proudly, part of one of the greatest
engineering accomplishments since the building of the Great Wall itself. His
father had speculated, in that letter, as to how many of his honored ancestors
from northern China might have taken part in the building of the "Wall of Ten
Thousand Li" {Five Thousand Kilometers} as the Chinese called it, which had
taken scores of generations to complete. And today, he had written, when that
Golden Spike had been driven into the ground, he had felt the hands of his
elders reaching out to congratulate him across the great sea of space and the
eternity of time that had always separated them before.
Luk Yee had been but a young boy when his mother had read that part of the
letter to him for the first time, with tears of longing and tears of pride. But
it had been the last letter they were ever to receive from America. His father
had perished in a detonation-caused landslide only two days thereafter, as they
later learned from the family of a friend who had worked on the same crew.
Luk's father had been only one of thousands of his countrymen who died
building the railroads that stretched across North America. His mother had been
crushed by his death, but even in her grief, gave prayers of thanks to her own
ancestors. For it had been the spirits of her own ancestors, she felt sure, who
had made certain that Luk's father had post that last precious letter on the
morning after he had written it, and had somehow guided it safely across the
dangerous wilderness of the American west, and then across the vast Pacific, to
her tiny hand.
After his mother had died a dozen years later after a long illness, Luk Yee
found the rest of that letter among her meager belongings. The yellowed pages
looked as if they had been unfolded and re-folded into a tiny rectangle a
hundred times.
When he unfolded the brittle scraps of paper, he read of a husband's love
for a fair but faraway young wife, and how his father lay at his campsite each
night, looking up at the galaxy of stars high in the desert sky, longing for the
time when they could be together again. So that he could hear her gentle voice,
and smell her silky hair and feel the touch of her small hand on his and taste
the sweetness of her lips once more. How he longed to take her in his arms and
... Luk Yee had blushed when he had read the more intimate passages of the love
letter for the first time. Who ever thinks of his or her parents as having
passions equal to one's own?
********
So, there had been no family of his own at the wedding, but it had been a
joyous day nonetheless. As he walked homeward in the gentle rain, Luk relived
that festive day -- the pledges of love, the music, the toasts, the dinner, the
dancing. So swept up was he in his pleasant memories that he relaxed his usual
vigilance.
And took no notice of the shadowy figure that followed him in the rain...
********
When he arrived home, Qieu was sighing gently in her sleep in their simple
bed. Luk lit a pair of slender ivory-colored candles and placed them in
candle-holders on the floor on either side of their bed as he admired his wife's
beauty just as he had every day since they had met. Even in the near-darkness
of the twin candles' gleam, the silky softness of her long hair, the beautiful
features of her face, and the womanly curve of her hip as she lay curled on one
side, gladdened his heart.
He undressed slowly, wondering whether tonight was the proper night to
assert his marital rights. Though they had been married ten days, he had yet to
see his wife naked. Qieu had blamed her unusual shyness on female
indisposition, but even one so young as Luk was aware that it was extremely
improbable that a woman's 'curse' should last this long. As he slipped out of
his rain-dampened trousers, one of Qieu's legs stirred nervously in her sleep
and she kicked the blanket away, revealing one smooth amber-gold leg, bare to
the hem of her celadon green chemise. Celadon, the sea-green shade of much
Chinese pottery and porcelain, was Qieu's favorite color.
Luk Yee, naked now, blew out the candles and slid into the bed alongside
his wife and moved closer to her. Facing away from him, Qieu could not feel the
warmth of his breath nor hear what seemed to him the deafening pounding of his
heart. He pressed his body gently against hers, spoon fashion, luxuriating in
the radiant warmth of her sleeping body. He felt his manhood stiffen, quivering
with the anticipation of long-deferred love-making. He half sat up in bed so
that his lips could touch the soft of flesh of Qieu's upper arm as his right
hand reached for her bare leg.
He touched her with the gentlest of touches, half-fearful that she would
waken, half-fearful that she would not. Slowly he slid his hand up along the
silky-smooth flesh of her thigh, lingering, stroking, caressing, while he
pressed his body a little more closely against hers.
The touch of her thigh-flesh sent ripples of erotic electricity through his
maleness. Luk felt his testicles tighten within his sensitive scrotum, while his
cock pulsed with desire. His hand crept higher, under the chemise now, gently
stroking, exploring her upper thighs in the near-total darkness of the room as
he drew closer and closer to his goal.
The one small corner of his brain that was still capable of rational
thought registered the fact that there was something odd about the feel of her
velvety thighs. For a moment her flesh would feel invitingly soft and then
there would be something else ... something ... but, even though it was his
fingers doing the exploring, he could not put quite put his metaphorical finger
on the sensation.
No matter; he pressed still more closely against her, his cock, now swollen
to full erection, pressed flush against the delicious roundness of her buttocks.
The hem of the chemise was up around her waist now, and a brief wisp of gossamer
silk was the only obstruction between his concupiscent yearnings and paradise.
Luk Yee moved his head higher and planted a soft kiss on the cheek of his
sleeping beauty.
"Mmmm," Qieu smiled drowsily.
Then, as his right hand crept across the front the of flimsy undergarment
she turned toward him, still more asleep then awake, and her right hand fell
squarely on his throbbing erection.
"Ah! Aahh!!" Qieu cried, as she recoiled as if she had been given an
electric shock. Her voice was fearful, and her eyes were instantly wide with
panic as she sat up in the darkness.
"Qieu! Qieu! It is only I. Luk Yee, your husband." Luk tried to comfort
his trembling wife. He covered himself with the blanket, so as not to frighten
her further, but there wasn't much to left to frighten her with; her alarmed
reaction had drained the excitement from his body.
Qieu clung to him, her breasts beneath the chemise warm and round and full
against his bare chest. Her voice was shaking, "I'm sorry, Luk. I... I must
have been having a nightmare... I dreamed that ... that I ... that they..." but
she could not continue.
"It is all right, my love. I am here. There is nothing to frighten you."
But it was not all right, thought Luk Yee, as he cradled his wife in his
arms, and wondered at her strange nightmare. A husband could not live without
affection forever. And as the breathing of his lovely wife slowed as she
drifted back into a troubled sleep, Luk's thoughts returned to the seductive
Ming-tsu, and it was of breasts that tasted of orange blossom and thighs that
squirmed with passion at his touch that he dreamt that night.
