Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 16: Five-Player Rock-Paper-Scissors
Five-player rock-paper-scissors, it turned out, was not mathematically impossible.
It was merely very, very long.
It took eleven rounds on Friday night in the kitchen.
Hina threw scissors every single time, as promised, and was eliminated in round two by Rei, who threw rock and said “I told you I knew.” Rei was eliminated in round six by Yuki, who closed her eyes and threw paper “because Kawabata would.” Yuki was eliminated in round nine by Ayaka, who had been watching everyone’s wrists the whole time with the Eye of the Stylist and had simply known, every single round, what was coming.
“That’s cheating,” said Hina.
“That’s professional observation,” said Ayaka.
“That,” said Rei, with deep respect, “is exactly what I do in fencing.”
So at five-fifteen on Saturday morning, it was Ayaka who woke Lena.
She did it by drawing one long, cool fingertip slowly down the center of Lena’s chest, from her collarbone to her navel, and stopping there.
“I won,” she whispered.
“Fair and square.
Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“I may have watched Hina warm up her wrist before round two.” Ayaka smiled in the grey light.
Her hair was loose and enormous and smelled of the hotel shampoo Hina loved.
“May I?”
Lena caught the hand on her stomach and pressed a kiss into the palm.
“You may.”
Ayaka took her time, as always, as if there were no clock in the world, as if Rei weren’t asleep at Lena’s hip and Hina weren’t snoring softly against her right side and Yuki weren’t breathing slowly on her left, holding a cherry-blossom key in her fist even in sleep.
She knelt and lowered her head and let her hair fall over Lena’s thighs, a curtain of black silk, and from inside it, unseen, her mouth was everywhere.
Slow, wet, open-mouthed kisses along the length of her.
The flat of her tongue, unhurried.
The tip of it, circling, teasing, then gone.
Lena’s hips lifted helplessly, and Ayaka pressed them back down with one hand and laughed, very softly, against her skin.
“Patience,” she murmured.
“You make everyone wait for you.
Now you can wait for me.”
And she made her wait.
She took her in deep, and then barely at all, and then deep again, varying the pressure, the rhythm, the angle, reading every tremor of Lena’s thighs, until Lena was half-sitting up on her elbows, gasping, her face burning, whispering *please, please, Ayaka* in three languages.
Ayaka lifted her head, swept her hair back over one shoulder, and looked at her with dark, glittering eyes.
“Say it in Greek again.”
“*Se parakaló*.”
“Mm,” said Ayaka.
“I like that one best,” and she took her all the way and didn’t stop.
Lena came with a cry she couldn’t swallow, her back arching, her hand fisted in the sheet, and Ayaka held her through every pulse of it, slow and steady and wonderfully thorough, until Lena collapsed back onto the pillows, wrecked and laughing.
Hina had woken up.
She propped her chin on Lena’s shoulder and looked down the bed at Ayaka with frank admiration.
“Teach me that,” she said.
“Every Saturday I win,” said Ayaka, “I’ll give a lesson.”
“You’ll never lose,” said Hina.
“That’s the problem.”
*Ding.*
[Ayaka Mori | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “The House Always Wins” — Won the open slot by reading four opponents.]
After training and after breakfast, Lena took Ayaka upstairs, to the fourth floor, to the room at the end of the hall with the slanted ceiling and the skylights.
It had been an empty attic.
Now the morning light poured through the glass onto a long cutting table of pale cypress wood, three dress forms in different sizes, a wall of shelves holding bolts of fabric in every color Lena’s new eye could name, and, on a stand by the window, an antique black sewing machine with gold scrollwork, polished until it shone.
Ayaka stopped in the doorway.
“That’s a Singer 201,” she said faintly.
“From the fifties.
My grandmother had one exactly like it.
She sold it when I was twelve to pay for my school uniform.”
“I know,” Lena said.
“You told me in your sleep.”
Ayaka turned and stared at her.
“Tuesday night.
You were dreaming.
You said, *Obaachan, don’t sell the Singer.*” Lena leaned in the doorway.
“And the fabric is from a mill in Nishiwaki that’s been open since 1887.
The silk is from Kyoto.
And there are business cards in the drawer.
They don’t have a name on them yet.
You choose it.”
“Business cards,” Ayaka repeated.
“For your own line.
Someday.
When you want.
Or never, and it’s just a room where you make things for us.” Lena smiled.
“But I’ve seen your sketchbook.
The one you hide under your futon.
You should have a room where you don’t have to hide it.”
Ayaka walked slowly to the Singer.
She put her hand on it, on the cold black enamel and the gold leaf.
Her shoulders shook once.
Then she turned, crossed the room in three long strides, and pushed Lena back against the door, and kissed her until neither of them could breathe.
“I’m going to make you something,” she said against Lena’s lips.
“Right now.
On this machine.
And you’re going to stand there for the fitting, and you’re not going to be allowed to move.”
“What are you making?”
“A skirt,” said Ayaka, her eyes dark.
“Very short.”
It started with Ayaka on her knees with pins in her mouth and ended with Ayaka bent over the cypress-wood cutting table, the half-made skirt crumpled under her cheek, her own skirt around her waist, gasping Lena’s name while Lena moved inside her in long, slow strokes, the skylight pouring gold over both of them.
She came biting a bolt of Kyoto silk, and Lena came a moment later with her forehead pressed between Ayaka’s shoulder blades.
“I’m calling the line *Bow*,” Ayaka said, breathless, face still down on the table.
“After the key.”
Mizuki Hayashi was waiting at the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno at noon, by the lotus beds, exactly as she had said she would be.
Lena almost didn’t recognize her.
She wasn’t wearing the black suit.
She was wearing a pale blue cardigan and a long skirt and flat shoes, and her hair, which Lena had only ever seen pulled into a severe bun, was down around her shoulders, a little wavy from being tied up all week.
Without the tablet in her hands, she didn’t seem to know what to do with them.
She held the strap of her bag with both.
When she saw Lena, she bowed.
Too deep.
Then straightened, flustered.
“Ms.
Lena.
Thank you.
I’m sorry.
I don’t know why I asked.
I’ve been standing here since eleven, trying to think of what I’d say.”
“Did you think of anything?”
“No,” said Mizuki, and laughed, and it changed her whole face.
They walked around the pond.
The lotus leaves were turning brown at the edges, and the boats were out, swan-shaped pedal boats with couples in them, and the air smelled of roasted sweet potatoes from a cart near the shrine.
Mizuki talked, slowly at first and then faster, as if a dam had cracked.
She was thirty-two.
She had worked for Genji Kurosawa for five years.
Before that, at a bank, and before that, at a temp agency, and before that, in a small town in Niigata where her mother still ran a dry-cleaning shop.
She had never once been late.
She had never taken a sick day.
She had a perfect memory for schedules, for names, for numbers, and she used it all day, every day, for a man who didn’t know her birthday.
“Which is when?” Lena asked.
Mizuki stopped walking.
“…Next Thursday.”
“Then I know it now.”
Mizuki looked at her for a long moment, under the yellowing willows.
“Why did you help us?” Lena asked gently.
“At the house.
With the tablet.
You could have lost everything.”
“Because,” Mizuki said, and stopped, and tried again.
“Because I’ve watched Rei-sama for five years.
I watched her eat dinner alone at a table for twenty.
I watched him correct her posture in front of guests.
I left sweets on her desk because I didn’t know what else to do.” Her voice cracked.
“And then you walked in and told him she was twenty-one and could live where she wanted.
Nobody has ever said anything like that in that house.
Not in five years.
Not to anyone.
Not to me.”
She was crying now, quietly, standing very straight.
“I’ve been in love with you since that moment,” she said.
“I know it’s absurd.
I know you have four women at home.
I know you’re twenty and I’m thirty-two and I work for your enemy.
I’m not asking you for anything.
I just needed to say it out loud once, to your face, on a day when I’m not working.”
Lena took her hand.
Mizuki’s fingers were cold and trembling.
“It’s not absurd,” she said.
*Ding.*
[Mizuki Hayashi | Attraction: 98% → 99%]
[System Note: One percent remains.
It isn’t yours to take.
She must decide to give it.]
Mizuki wiped her eyes with her free hand and laughed again, embarrassed.
“I don’t want to come to your house yet,” she said.
“Not while I’m still his secretary.
It wouldn’t be fair.
To Rei-sama.
To your girls.
I’d be bringing him in with me.” She took a breath.
“But someday, when I’m free to…
I’d like to ask them.
Properly.
The volleyball captain first, I think.
She frightens me most.”
“Yuki first.
Then Hina.”
“Yuki first,” Mizuki repeated, memorizing it, the way she memorized everything.
“Then Hina.” She squeezed Lena’s hand once and let go.
“Thank you for the walk.”
A tiny garage, shutter half up, oil-stained concrete, a hand-lettered sign: *KANEKO MOTORS — REPAIRS — SINCE 1968*.
And inside, on a stand, under a bare bulb, gleaming candy-apple red and chrome: a 1972 Honda CB750 Four.
Four chrome exhaust pipes.
A tank like a jewel.
Lena stopped the Ninja so hard the tires chirped.
The owner was a woman of about seventy, in grease-stained overalls, with a cigarette behind her ear and forearms like a carpenter’s.
She looked Lena up and down, from her boots to her skirt to her face, and snorted.
“Not for sale,” she said.
“I haven’t asked.”
“You were going to.
I know that face.
My husband had that face.” Mrs.
Kaneko jerked her chin at the CB750.
“That was his.
He rebuilt her twice.
I’ve turned down three collectors this year.”
“I don’t want to put her in a collection,” Lena said.
“I want to ride her.”
Mrs.
Kaneko looked at her for a long time with narrow, shrewd eyes.
Then she took the cigarette from behind her ear and pointed it at her.
“Come back next Saturday.
Start her without help.
Ride her around the block without stalling.
Then we’ll talk.”
“Deal.”
“And don’t flutter your eyelashes at me, girl,” said Mrs.
Kaneko.
“I’m seventy-one.
It doesn’t work.”
It did, a little.
Lena saw her ears go pink as she turned away.
But she pretended not to.
At three, Yuki led the Prose Circle.
She had prepared for a week.
She had index cards.
Lena sat in the corner of the tatami room, as quiet as she could make herself, and watched Yuki kneel at the head of the low table, adjust her glasses, take a breath, and begin to talk about the mirror in the train window in *Snow Country*.
About faces that float over landscapes.
About how Kawabata never lets you touch anything directly, only reflections.
“He was afraid,” Yuki said.
Her voice was steady.
“I think he was afraid that if he touched anything directly, it would melt.”
The old professor closed his eyes and nodded slowly.
Afterward, the other students crowded around Yuki with questions, and Yuki answered all of them, flushed and bright, and the old professor came over to Lena in her corner and said, in a low voice, “That one will write something someday.
Keep her fed.”
“I will.”
“And keep her brave,” he said, and shuffled off.
That night, there was a storm, and they all ended up in the indoor pool.
Nobody planned it.
Hina went to float.
Yuki followed with the first edition in a waterproof bag, which Rei said was insane, and then Rei followed to supervise the book, and Ayaka followed with wine, and finally Lena came down and found all four of them in the warm water under the glass ceiling, with the rain hammering above and the underwater lights glowing blue.
It was slow and lazy and tangled and wet.
It was Rei’s back against Lena’s chest in the shallow end, Lena’s hands on her hips, Rei turning her head for a kiss and moaning into it.
It was Yuki and Ayaka kissing on the steps, Ayaka’s long fingers in Yuki’s hair, Yuki’s glasses fogged completely.
It was Hina floating on her back, watching all of them, smiling, one hand on her stomach, the other trailing in the water.
It was Lena lifting Ayaka onto the edge of the pool and kneeling in the water between her long legs until she sobbed.
It was Rei on Lena’s lap on the submerged bench, riding her slowly, their foreheads together, while Hina held Rei’s hand.
Later, wrapped in towels on the warm tiles, Rei said into the dark, “Mizuki was crying, wasn’t she.
At the pond.”
Lena looked at her.
“Ayaka told me your shoulders were ‘tender’ when you came back,” Rei said.
“And I know Mizuki.
She cries standing very straight.” She was quiet for a moment.
“She left a box of chestnut sweets on my desk the night before my sixteenth birthday.
With no name.
I think I’ve loved her a little since then.
Not like this.
But a little.”
Hina, from the water, said, “Yuki first.
Then me.
Then I look at her face.”
“Then you look at her face,” Rei agreed.
Above them, lightning lit the glass ceiling white.
And Lena’s phone, on the tiles beside her, lit up too.
A message from an unknown number.
A photograph.
Grainy, taken from a distance, with a long lens.
Lena and Mizuki under the willows at Shinobazu Pond, holding hands.
No text.
Just the photo.
And then, a second later, a single line:
*”I know who she is now.”*
[End of Chapter 16]