Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 10: Curry and Knives
Sunday was Hina’s, and Hina had not set an alarm.
She didn’t need one.
She woke Lena at six-ten with the sun already slanting gold through the curtains, by doing nothing more than lying on her side and looking at her, so intensely that Lena felt it through her eyelids.
“Morning,” Hina whispered.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m memorizing.” Hina’s hand was resting on her own stomach, the way it always was now, even in sleep.
The sunflower key lay on its chain between her breasts.
On Lena’s left, Yuki was a small warm lump under the duvet.
Rei was gone from her place at Lena’s hip; Lena could hear, faintly, from two floors below, the stamp and clack of someone fencing alone against the wall target.
“She went to train without you,” Hina said.
“Out of respect.
Because it’s my day.” She smiled.
“I’m starting to like her.
Don’t tell her.”
“I won’t.”
Hina’s smile softened into something else.
She leaned in and kissed Lena, slow, tasting her, and when she pulled back, her eyes were serious.
“Can I?”
“You never have to ask on your own day.”
“I always have to ask,” Hina said.
“Always.
That’s the rule I made for myself.
Because if I stop asking, I’ll stop being able to stop.” She said it lightly, but she meant every word.
“So.
Can I?”
Lena cupped her face.
“Yes.
Always yes.
Ask me anyway.”
“I will,” Hina said, and disappeared under the sheet.
Hina did not tease.
Hina had never in her life seen the point of teasing.
She took Lena into her mouth like she was coming home after a long trip, with a deep, satisfied sound, both hands on Lena’s hips, holding her down to the mattress with an athlete’s casual strength.
She went deep at once and stayed there, and then began to move with a steady, rolling rhythm that didn’t change, didn’t hurry, didn’t let up, like a tide.
Lena twisted her fingers into the sheet.
Beside her, Yuki stirred, rolled over, and slept on.
Hina came up once for air, flushed and grinning, her lips glistening.
“You’re so loud on Sundays,” she whispered.
“I love Sundays.”
Then she went back down, and this time she used her tongue on the way, and her hand, and something low and wordless in her Osaka dialect that Lena felt more than heard, *mine, mine, mine*, a vibration against the most sensitive part of her.
Lena’s hips jerked against Hina’s hands.
Hina held her still and didn’t stop.
She came so hard she saw sparks, gasping Hina’s name into the bright morning, and Hina drank it all down with her eyes closed as if it were a prize she’d won in a final.
Afterward Hina crawled back up and laid her head on the right side of Lena’s chest, her place, and pulled Lena’s hand down onto her stomach.
“Say hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Lena whispered to the sesame seed.
“She says hi back,” Hina said, very sure, and closed her eyes.
*Ding.*
[Hina Takeda | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Pregnancy status: Day 5 — All normal.]
[System Note: The fetus cannot say hi yet.
The Host has decided not to mention this.]
The General Library on a Sunday was enormous and silent, and Lena loved it the way she had loved the public library in Piraeus at sixteen, the only air-conditioned room she could afford.
Rei had gone to the Student Council office, two buildings over, to chair an emergency meeting about the November festival budget (“someone has budgeted four hundred thousand yen for a takoyaki stand; I will find them”).
Hina was at home, banned by everyone from the gym.
Yuki was at a reading-room table with a stack of Meiji-era novels, writing her first essay.
Lena had Accounting homework, a problem set on depreciation, and she was halfway through when a chair scraped beside her.
“S-sorry,” said Nanami Okamoto.
“Is this seat…
is it…”
“It’s free.”
Nanami sat, placed her single pen on the desk, and held it down with her elbow.
Her problem set was the same as Lena’s.
Problem one was solved.
Problems two through eight were a field of crossed-out numbers.
“I’ve been here since nine,” Nanami whispered.
“It’s one o’clock.
I did one.”
“Show me where you’re stuck.”
Nanami showed her.
It was the declining-balance method, and Nanami was doing it right but applying the rate to the original cost every year instead of the remaining book value.
Lena explained it once.
Nanami nodded too fast.
Lena explained it again with drawings, a little cartoon machine losing a slice of itself every year, and on the third slice Nanami’s face changed.
“Oh,” she said.
“Oh!
It gets smaller.
The thing you multiply.
Because the machine is already older.”
“Exactly.”
Nanami did problems two through five in twenty minutes, without dropping her pen once.
On problem six, she stopped, looked up, and said, in a rush, “Why are you nice to me?”
Lena blinked.
“What?”
“Everyone is nice to you.
Because you’re…” Nanami waved her hand at the whole of Lena.
“You.
But you don’t have to be nice back.
You have the Ice Queen.
You have the volleyball captain.
People say you have a house with a pond.
You could just…
not.” She went red.
That was rude.”
Lena thought about the old men at the café in Piraeus, and the waitress nobody remembered.
“Because somebody once spent twenty minutes helping me with my homework in a library,” she said, “and I’ve never forgotten her face.
And because you’re smart, Nanami.
You just think you’re not.”
Nanami stared at her.
Her lip trembled.
Then she put her head down on her problem set and stayed there.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” came the muffled voice.
“Give me a minute.
I’m being complimented.”
[Nanami Okamoto | Attraction: 83% → 86%]
Ayaka arrived at six exactly, in jeans, which none of them had expected.
She stood at the front gate of the villa under the pines, holding a ceramic jar wrapped in a furoshiki, her hair loose, looking up at the four lit floors of the house as if it were a castle in a story she’d been told as a child.
When Lena opened the gate, she said, “I changed four times,” instead of hello.
“You look perfect.”
“I’m a stylist.
I know exactly how I look.” Ayaka smiled, nervous.
“I look like a woman who changed four times.”
Yuki met them in the hallway in her apron.
Ayaka was tall, elegant even in jeans, a woman who dressed actresses.
Yuki was barefoot, had curry on her cheek, and had to tilt her head back to meet her eyes.
And it was Ayaka who bowed first.
Deeply, formally, the way you bow to the head of a house.
“Sato-san,” she said.
“My name is Ayaka Mori.
Lena says you were first.
I’ve come to ask permission.”
Yuki went pink to her ears, and then, slowly, straightened her glasses and looked at Ayaka the way she looked at a difficult page: long, careful, reading between the lines.
“What’s in the jar?” she asked.
“Fukujinzuke.
Pickles for curry.” Ayaka held it out.
“My grandmother’s recipe.
I made it last night instead of sleeping.
It needs a week to be really good.
It’s had eighteen hours.”
Yuki took the jar.
She unwrapped the furoshiki and lifted the lid and smelled it, and something on her face relaxed.
“You made this yourself,” she said.
“You didn’t buy it in Ginza.”
“No.”
“Then you can come in,” Yuki said, “and you can stay.” She hesitated, and her voice got smaller.
“But Hina is in the kitchen.
I can’t help you there.”
Hina was in the kitchen.
She stood at the cutting board in an oversized volleyball hoodie, cutting onions with a very large, very sharp knife.
She did not look up when they came in.
She went on cutting, with a smooth, rhythmic *chok, chok, chok*, the slices falling perfectly even.
“Ayaka Mori,” she said pleasantly, to the onions.
“Twenty-nine.
Ginza.
You gave Lena your number on her first day in Japan.
On the back of a business card.” *Chok.* “You’ve been texting since last night.
Twelve messages.” *Chok.* “One of them asked what you should say if I had a knife.”
Ayaka went very still.
Lena opened her mouth.
Hina lifted one finger without looking up, and Lena closed it.
“So,” Hina said.
“Here’s the knife.
What do you say?”
The silence in the kitchen stretched.
Yuki was clutching the pickle jar.
Rei had appeared silently in the far doorway, arms folded, watching with interest.
Ayaka put her bag down on the counter.
She walked to the other side of the cutting board, so that she was facing Hina with only the onions and the knife between them, and she looked her in the eye.
“I say I’m terrified of you,” Ayaka said.
“And I came anyway.”
*Chok.*
“Why?”
“Because I’ve spent eight years making other women beautiful for other people,” Ayaka said, “and going home to an apartment with nothing in the fridge but white wine.
And then a girl walked in and said she doesn’t wear underwear, and I laughed for the first time in a year.” Her voice wavered, steadied.
“I’m not going to take her from you.
I couldn’t if I tried.
I’ve read her.
She’s yours.
I’m only asking if there’s room for one more chair at this table.”
Hina put the knife down.
She looked at Ayaka for a long time.
Then she wiped her hands on a towel, walked around the counter, and stood so close to her that Ayaka had to tilt her head up, just slightly, to hold her gaze.
Hina was taller.
Not by much.
“If you ever hurt one of us,” Hina said softly, “if you ever make Yuki cry, or make Rei feel like she’s back in her father’s house, or make Lena regret one single day, I will find you.
Anywhere in Japan.
I’m very good at finding people.
Ask Lena.”
“She’s very good,” Lena said weakly.
“I understand,” Ayaka said, and didn’t look away.
Hina held it for another second.
And then her whole face broke open into the widest, warmest Osaka grin in the world, and she grabbed Ayaka in a bone-crushing hug, lifting her off her feet.
“Okay!
Welcome!
You’re so tall, I love it, finally someone my height!
Do you like volleyball?
Yuki!
She passed!
Get the rice!”
In the doorway, Rei unfolded her arms and said to no one in particular, “I had money on her.”
Dinner was loud.
Ayaka’s pickles were, Yuki announced, “almost as good as my mother’s, which I’ll never tell my mother.” Rei interrogated Ayaka about fabric weights with the intensity of a prosecutor.
Hina sat next to her, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and refilled her plate three times without asking.
Afterward, Hina stood up, stretched, and said, “Okay.
Everyone out of the big bedroom tonight.
We sleep in the guest rooms.”
“Why?” Lena asked.
Hina looked at her as if she were very slow.
“Because her first time is hers.
Not ours.
Mine was a party.
Rei’s was a party.
That’s fine, that’s us.
But she’s been waiting nine days in an empty apartment.” She glanced at Ayaka, and her voice softened.
“Tomorrow you’re one of us.
Tonight you’re just hers.”
Ayaka’s eyes filled.
She didn’t say anything.
She didn’t have to.
The big bedroom was quiet, the windows open onto the garden, the pines black against the stars, the koi pond whispering below.
Ayaka undressed slowly, the way a woman who knows clothing undresses, every piece folded and set aside, until she stood there with nothing but her hair falling to her waist.
She was long-limbed and pale, with a dancer’s collarbones and soft, heavy breasts, and she was shaking.
“I’m not a virgin,” she said.
“I want you to know that.
Two boyfriends in college.
It was…
fine.” She laughed nervously.
“Fine.
That’s the word.
I’ve never had anything that wasn’t fine.”
Lena drew her down onto the bed.
“Tell me if anything is less than fine,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Tell me if anything is more.”
Ayaka laughed again, and then stopped laughing, because Lena had started kissing her neck.
They went slowly.
Lena used everything she had: Yuki’s patience, Hina’s stamina, Rei’s attention to every small breath.
She kissed every inch of Ayaka, from her collarbones to the inside of her knees, until Ayaka was arching off the sheets, gasping, her hands knotted in Lena’s hair.
She used her fingers until Ayaka came the first time, startled, her hand over her mouth, eyes wide, saying “Oh.
Oh.
That’s not fine.
That’s not fine at all.”
And then Ayaka pulled her up and wrapped those long legs around her and looked her in the eye and said, clear and steady, “Now.
Please.
I want you.”
Lena pushed into her slowly, and Ayaka’s head fell back on the pillow, and her mouth opened on a sound that had no word in it.
She was hot and tight and trembling, and Lena held still inside her until the trembling became something else, and then they moved together, slow at first, then deeper, Ayaka’s heels pressing into the small of Lena’s back, her nails dragging down her shoulders, her black hair spread like spilled ink across the white sheets.
“Lena,” she gasped.
“Lena, Lena, I’m going to…”
“Look at me.”
Ayaka looked at her.
And came, holding her gaze, her whole body clenching, her cry ringing out over the dark garden, and Lena followed her over with a moan, buried deep.
*Ding.*
[Ayaka Mori has given herself to you, by her own choice.]
[The bond is sealed.]
[Ayaka Mori | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Once Ayaka Mori moves into your home, you will acquire: “Eye of the Stylist.”]
They lay tangled together for a long time.
Ayaka traced patterns on Lena’s chest with one finger.
“I’m giving notice tomorrow,” she said.
“On my apartment.
Not the boutique.
I love the boutique.
But the apartment can go.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’m twenty-nine,” Ayaka said.
“I’ve wasted enough evenings.”
Lena’s phone lit up on the nightstand.
She reached for it, meaning to silence it.
It was a message from Mizuki Hayashi.
*”Ms.
Lena.
I’m sorry to write so late.
Mr.
Kurosawa’s detective photographed you yesterday evening on Namiki-dori, entering a boutique after closing.
He has the photographs on his desk now.
He asked me to find out the woman’s name.
I have not.
I will not.
But he will ask someone else.
— M.H.”*
Lena looked at the screen.
Then at Ayaka, half asleep on her chest, smiling.
She typed: *”Thank you, Mizuki.
Why are you still awake?”*
The answer came instantly.
*”Because I am in his office.
And so is he.”*
[End of Chapter 10]