Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 15: The Wrong Café
Yuki had read until two in the morning, and at four forty-five she was awake again, holding the book.
“I’m not going to read it to you now,” she whispered, when Lena opened her eyes.
“It’s Friday.
I have other plans.” She set the little tea-colored volume very carefully on the nightstand, on a folded handkerchief, as though it were a sleeping animal.
“But I want to tell you the first line.
Do you know it?”
“*The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.*”
Yuki’s eyes went wide behind her glasses.
“You read it.”
“You read it.
I just have it now.” Lena touched her cheek.
“It’s a beautiful line.”
“It’s the most beautiful line in Japanese,” Yuki said firmly.
Then she flushed.
“I was thinking about it all night.
About coming out of a long tunnel.
That’s what this is.
You.” She took off her glasses and folded them.
“So.
I’m asking.
May I?”
“You may.
Always.”
Yuki started by kissing her stomach, just below the navel, where Ayaka’s head usually lay; Ayaka had rolled off in the night and was now sprawled across the bottom half of the bed with Rei, the two of them tangled like abandoned scarves.
Then lower.
Then Yuki’s breath was warm on her, and her hand curled around the base, and she licked her once, slowly, from root to tip, and looked up.
“I want to go slow,” she whispered.
“Like the book.
Like snow falling.”
She did.
Each movement of her lips was so gentle and so deliberate that Lena felt every single one, separately, like flakes landing on skin.
She took her in a little at a time, then drew back, then a little deeper, her tongue swirling, her small hand moving in time.
There was no hurry anywhere in her.
Lena’s breathing slowed to match hers, and then, gradually, couldn’t, and broke into gasps that Yuki answered with a soft, pleased hum.
Lena’s hand found her hair.
Yuki pressed her cheek into Lena’s palm without stopping, like a cat.
It built and built, slow and white and silent, until Lena was trembling from her toes to her scalp.
Yuki looked up at her, nearsighted and flushed, and saw it, and did not speed up at all.
She just took her as deep as she could, and held there, and swallowed.
Lena came in a long, shaking wave, with her head pressed back into the pillow and Yuki’s name dissolving in her throat, and it went on, and on, and Yuki held her through all of it.
Afterward, Yuki climbed up to her place on the left, put her glasses on, and checked the clock.
“Five thirty-four,” she said, and then, horrified: “I’m late.
I’ve never been late.”
“Rei’s alarm didn’t go off.”
They both looked down the bed.
Rei was asleep on her stomach with her face in Ayaka’s hair, her phone in her slack hand.
She had turned the alarm off in her sleep.
“I’ll make a note,” said Yuki, with enormous satisfaction, “for the Committee.”
*Ding.*
[Yuki Sato | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “Snow Country” — A morning so slow it stopped the clock.]
[System Note: Rei Kurosawa overslept for the first time in eleven years.
She will deny it.]
Rei denied it.
“I didn’t oversleep,” she said at breakfast, with great dignity, in the red sweater.
“I gave Sato extra time out of respect for literature.”
“You had Ayaka’s hair in your mouth,” said Hina.
“I was examining the fabric.”
“It’s hair.”
“It’s Ginza hair,” said Ayaka, pouring coffee.
“It counts as fabric.”
But under the table, Rei’s foot was bouncing, and her toast was untouched, and when Lena reached over and covered her hand with her own, Rei turned her hand over and gripped it hard.
“Two o’clock,” Rei said quietly.
“The café on the hill in Yanaka.
The one with the jazz records.
Takamura doesn’t know where it is.
Neither does my father.”
“Mizuki gave your father a list this morning,” Lena said, showing her the phone.
“Seven cafés.
None of them in Yanaka.
The closest is in Kichijoji.”
Rei read the message.
Something in her face eased.
“She was always kind to me.
When I was sixteen and she was new, she used to leave sweets on my desk at the house when he was angry.
I never knew who it was until much later.” She handed the phone back.
“Who comes with me?”
“I do.”
“And me,” said Hina, without looking up from her rice.
“Hina, you’re pregnant.”
“I’m pregnant, not dead.” Hina picked a grain of rice off her chopsticks and ate it with deliberate calm.
“A man wrote a letter to Rei about her mother.
I want to look at his face.
That’s all.
I’ll just look.”
Rei regarded her across the table for a long moment.
“All right,” she said.
“You can look.”
Friday Microeconomics was a quiz.
Fifteen minutes, five questions on elasticity and consumer surplus.
Professor Fujiwara walked up and down the aisles while three hundred first-years wrote in silence, her heels clicking on the old wooden floor.
She did not stop at the fourth row.
But when Lena turned in her paper, there was a can of hot milk tea on her desk that had not been there before.
Just the can, warm in her hand, the kind you got from vending machines on cold mornings.
Lena looked up.
At the front of the hall, the professor was collecting papers with intense, total concentration, and her ears were red.
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 97%]
[System Note: Holding.
She is choosing to wait.]
Lena drank the tea slowly through the whole lecture.
It was very sweet.
It was the best thing she’d tasted all week.
The café in Yanaka was called *Kissa Blue Note*, and it had been run by the same man since 1971.
It had eleven seats, a wall of vinyl records, and coffee so strong it was practically a solid.
Rei sat with her back to the wall.
Lena sat beside her.
Hina sat at the counter, alone, three meters away, with a glass of milk, smiling pleasantly at the door.
Takamura Kaito arrived at two exactly.
He was twenty-four, tall and thin, in a navy coat that was too big for him, with soft dark hair and the anxious, gentle face of someone who would rather be in a library.
He bowed at the door.
He saw Rei, then Lena, and he smiled, a real smile, startled and relieved.
He did not look at Hina.
Hina looked at him the entire time.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, sitting across from them.
“I wasn’t sure you would.”
“You mentioned my mother,” Rei said.
Her voice was perfectly level.
“So.”
Kaito took a breath.
He wrapped his hands around his coffee cup and didn’t drink.
“I’ll say the first thing first,” he said.
“I’m not going to marry you.
I’ve told my father that.
He doesn’t listen.
He thinks I’ll change my mind.” He looked down.
“I won’t.
I have someone.
His name is Daichi.
We’ve been together four years.”
Rei blinked.
For a moment, the Ice Queen’s mask slipped, and what showed underneath was pure astonishment, and then something like laughter.
“Oh,” she said.
“Oh.
Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” Kaito smiled shakily.
“You’re the second person I’ve told.”
“Who was the first?”
“My mother.” His smile faded.
“That’s the second thing.
My mother and your mother were friends.
At university.
Before any of this.
When I was small, a letter came to our house every year, in October.
My mother would read it in the garden and then burn it.” He looked up at Rei.
“Last year, my mother got sick.
She’s better now.
But she told me, when she thought she might not be, that the letters were from Kurosawa Haruka.
And that she always asked the same question.”
Rei had gone very still.
“What question?”
“*Is Rei happy?*” Kaito said quietly.
“Every year.
That’s all.
*Is Rei happy.
Has she smiled yet.*” He swallowed.
“My mother never knew what to write back.
She’d seen you at the dinners.
She never saw you smile.”
The record on the turntable ended.
The needle clicked in the silent groove.
The old man behind the counter didn’t move to change it.
Rei sat with her hands folded on the table and looked at nothing.
Lena put her hand on her back, very lightly, and felt her trembling.
“Where are the letters sent from?” Rei asked.
Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Kamakura.” Kaito reached into his coat and set a small envelope on the table.
“I don’t have her address.
But I have this.
The last envelope.
My mother didn’t burn it.
I think she meant to give it to you.”
Rei looked at the envelope for a long, long time.
She didn’t touch it.
Then she said, “Lena.
Will you hold it for me?
Until I’m ready?”
Lena picked it up and put it in the inner pocket of her jacket, over her heart.
“Until you’re ready,” she said.
At the counter, Hina put down her glass of milk.
Her eyes, which had been fixed on Kaito for twenty minutes like a hawk’s, slowly softened.
She got up, walked over, and put her hand on Kaito’s shoulder.
He jumped a foot.
“You’re okay,” Hina told him.
“I decided.
Bring Daichi to dinner sometime.
Not at our house, nobody’s boyfriend gets past our gate, but somewhere.
“I…
thank you?”
“You’re welcome,” Hina said sweetly.
“I was going to follow you home.
Now I won’t.”
Kaito looked at Lena, very pale.
“She’s like this,” Lena said.
“You get used to it.”
At three-forty, while they walked back down the hill under the ginkgo trees, Lena’s phone buzzed.
*”Ms.
Lena.
Mr.
Kurosawa has been in a café in Kichijoji for an hour and a half.
He has ordered three slices of Mont Blanc.
He is very angry about the Mont Blanc.
I am sitting in the car.
I wanted you to know that I have never been so happy to do my job badly.
— M.H.”*
Lena laughed out loud on the sidewalk.
Hina, beside her, read it over her shoulder.
Her smile didn’t change, but her voice did.
“She’s next, isn’t she.”
“Hina.”
“I’m not mad.” Hina looped her arm through Lena’s.
“She’s protecting Rei.
She’s been protecting her since she was sixteen.
I can’t be mad at that.” She paused.
“I’m a little mad.
I’ll get over it.
Tonight.
You’ll help me.”
[Mizuki Hayashi | Attraction: 97% → 98%]
That evening, before dinner, Lena took Hina down to the basement.
The villa’s lowest level had been a wine cellar and a storage room and a large, empty, echoing space the agent had called “flexible.” Now it was full of construction tape and two women from the construction firm with tablets and a stack of drawings on a folding table.
“What is this?” Hina asked.
Lena unrolled the top drawing.
It was a court.
A full, regulation indoor volleyball court, with sprung wooden flooring, a net system, proper lights, and along one wall, a training gym: weights, a rowing machine, a physiotherapy table, a sauna.
“It’ll take two months,” Lena said.
“They have to dig out part of the garden for the ceiling height.
You won’t be able to jump on it until after the baby.
But when you can, you’ll have the best court in Tokyo.
And you can bring the whole team.
And yell at them in your own house.”
Hina stared at the drawing.
She traced the outline of the court with one finger.
“And this,” Lena said, and handed her a small box.
Inside, folded in tissue paper, was a baby onesie.
Pale yellow.
With a tiny volleyball embroidered on the chest, and below it, in Ayaka’s careful stitching, done last night while the others slept: *CAPTAIN (JR.)*
Hina made a sound Lena had never heard before.
She sat down on the dusty floor of the basement, holding the onesie against her face, and cried into it with her whole body, and the two construction women tactfully discovered something urgent to inspect on the other side of the room.
She found Lena again that night, at eleven, in the garage.
Lena had gone down to look at the Ducati.
She did this now.
Hina appeared in the doorway in a hoodie and nothing else, the sunflower key on her chest, and looked at the red bike and then at Lena.
“I’m banned from riding,” she said.
“You are.”
“Nobody said anything about sitting.” She walked over and swung one long, tanned leg over the seat, the hoodie riding up her thighs, and settled onto the Panigale backward, facing Lena, leaning back on the tank.
“Is this okay?
For the bike?”
“The bike’s never been happier.”
“Good.” Hina’s smile went slow and dark.
“Come here.
I’m still a little mad.
You promised to help.”
Lena came.
Hina pulled her close by the collar and kissed her, hungry, and slid forward on the leather seat until Lena was standing between her knees, and guided her in with one hand, and gasped at the ceiling.
“*Mine*,” she breathed, and wrapped her legs around Lena’s waist, and moved.
It was fast and fierce and a little bit ridiculous, the bike creaking on its stand, Hina’s laughter breaking into moans, her hands gripping Lena’s shoulders hard enough to bruise.
Lena held her steady, one hand at her back, careful, always careful of the stomach between them, and Hina came with a cry that echoed off the concrete walls and set off a car alarm in the street outside.
They clung to each other on the red Ducati, laughing breathlessly.
“I’m not mad anymore,” Hina whispered.
“Good.”
“She can come,” Hina said, into Lena’s neck.
“Mizuki.
When she asks.
I’ll say yes.” A beat.
“After I look at her face.”
At eleven-forty, a message arrived.
*”Ms.
Lena.
He is home.
He has gone to bed angry.
I am still in the office, finishing the minutes of the meeting he didn’t have.*
*I’d like to see you.
Not to give you information.
Not for him, and not for Rei-sama.*
*For me.*
*Tomorrow, if you’ll allow it.
Anywhere.
I’m not working on Saturday, for the first time in four months.
— M.H.”*
[End of Chapter 15]