Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 20: Ayaka’s Wednesday
Ayaka’s first official Wednesday began with a dress form.
Lena woke at five-ten because something was standing over the bed.
She opened her eyes, saw a headless female silhouette looming in the grey light, and nearly fell out onto Hina.
“It’s Mathilde,” Ayaka whispered from beside it.
“My dress form.
I brought her down.
I wanted you to see this before anyone else.”
Draped on Mathilde was a skirt.
Short, pleated, charcoal grey with a single fine line of red silk running along the hem, so subtle it only showed when the pleats moved.
“The first piece of *Bow*,” Ayaka said.
“Finished it at three.
The red is from the Ducati.
The grey is from your professor’s sweater.” She smiled, a little shy.
“I’m telling you what’s in it so you’ll know I’m always watching.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I know.” Ayaka slid the skirt off Mathilde, folded it over the back of a chair, and then knelt on the edge of the bed.
She was wearing nothing but the silver bow key on a ribbon around her neck.
“It’s Wednesday,” she whispered.
“Officially.
It’s laminated.
In green.” She leaned down until her hair curtained both their faces.
“May I?”
“You may.”
Ayaka had decided, apparently, that Wednesdays would be a fitting.
“Don’t move,” she murmured, sliding down Lena’s body.
“I’m taking measurements.”
Her mouth moved like a tape measure: a long, slow line from Lena’s navel downward, lips barely touching skin.
Then the inside of each thigh, measured in kisses.
Then, finally, the length of her, from base to tip, with the flat of her tongue, so slowly that Lena forgot how to breathe.
“Mm,” said Ayaka thoughtfully.
“Same as last week.
Good.”
“Ayaka—”
“I said don’t move.”
Lena didn’t move.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done.
Ayaka took her into her mouth and held her there, warm and still, and then began to work with a patient, devastating thoroughness, her lips tight, her tongue circling, one hand stroking in counterpoint and the other spread flat on Lena’s stomach, holding her down, feeling every tremor.
Every time Lena’s hips tried to lift, Ayaka pressed gently and slowed down, until Lena understood that the stiller she kept, the more she got, and lay there shaking with the effort while Ayaka took her apart.
Hina, awake now, had propped her chin on her hand and was watching with open professional interest.
“She’s doing the thing,” Hina whispered to Yuki, who had also woken.
“The don’t-move thing.”
“I’m taking notes,” Yuki whispered back.
Lena came with her whole body locked rigid, as ordered, a strangled cry tearing out of her, her fingers twisted in the sheets, and Ayaka hummed approvingly and held her through every wave of it until she went limp.
Ayaka sat up, swept her hair back, and smiled.
“Perfect fit,” she said.
From the foot of the bed, Rei clicked her stopwatch.
“Twenty-two minutes.
Nine point eight.
The stillness was extraordinary.”
“Thank you, judge.”
“You’re welcome, contestant.”
*Ding.*
[Ayaka Mori | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “Fitting Room” — Achieved perfect stillness through superior tailoring.]
Rei didn’t come to breakfast.
She had trained at five-thirty as usual, in silence, and then gone into the half-built salle in the east wing and closed the door.
Through it, they could hear the steady stamp and clash of someone fencing against the wall target, alone, over and over.
“Leave her,” said Hina, who had gone to listen at the door and come back.
“That’s not sad fencing.
That’s thinking fencing.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because she’s not hitting the target in the face,” said Hina.
Mizuki sat at the end of the table in her black suit, eating toast with careful, precise bites, and looking up at the ceiling every few minutes.
“There’s hammering on the roof,” she said.
“Leak,” said Yuki, too quickly.
“A leak.”
“A very big leak.
Ancient.
From the previous owners.” Get faster updates on g.com.
Mizuki looked at Yuki.
Yuki looked at her rice.
Mizuki, who could remember every number she had ever been told, slowly lowered her gaze to her toast and said, very gently, “I hope they fix it soon,” and did not ask again.
[Mizuki Hayashi | Attraction: 99%]
Statistics was at nine, and it was hypothesis testing, and Lena understood it completely and found it extraordinarily boring.
So she spent the lecture with Fujiwara’s credit-by-examination reading list open under her notes.
It was terrifying.
Graduate-level microeconomic theory: preference relations, general equilibrium, fixed-point theorems, a textbook so thick it could stop a door and probably had.
She read twenty pages and understood twelve, and then understood fourteen when she read them again with Yuki’s literary memory, and then sat staring at a proof of the existence of Walrasian equilibrium for ten full minutes while the statistics lecturer talked about p-values.
*You don’t have the Mind of the Professor yet,* she thought.
*You have to do this yourself.*
[System Note: Correct.
Talents cannot be used to bypass a test of the giver’s integrity.]
Lena smiled, closed her eyes for a moment, and started the proof again from line one.
At lunch she carried the doorstop textbook to the General Library and found her usual table occupied by a sleeping woman.
She was perhaps twenty-two, with messy dark hair in a clip, a hoodie that said ASTRONOMY CLUB — WE’RE UP ALL NIGHT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO, and her cheek pressed against a star atlas.
A thermos of coffee stood guard by her elbow.
When Lena set the textbook down, the thud woke her, and she sat up with a page of the atlas stuck to her face.
“Sorry,” she croaked.
“Was I snoring?
I was up until four.
Saturn.” She peeled the page off and blinked at Lena, and kept blinking.
“Oh.
You’re the Ice Queen’s girlfriend.
She gave us the spot next to the takoyaki.”
“She was angry about your note.”
“It was a clear night!” The woman looked genuinely wounded.
“Kaede Shimizu.
President.
Fourth-year physics.
Tell her we’re sorry.
Tell her Saturn was worth it.” Kaede squinted at the textbook.
“General equilibrium?
On purpose?”
“On purpose.”
“Respect,” said Kaede, and put her head back down on the atlas.
[Kaede Shimizu, 22 | Attraction: 70% → 74%]
[New candidate registered.]
At four, she went to the gym to watch volleyball practice and found the team in mutiny.
Hina was standing in the middle of the court with a clipboard, red in the face, while the middle blocker with the high ponytail stood in front of her holding up one shoe.
The sole was peeling off like a banana skin.
“Captain, I can’t jump in these!
They’re three years old!”
“Then jump in your socks!”
“The university budget for new shoes is next April—”
“Then jump in your SOCKS!”
Lena walked across the court.
Twelve heads turned.
Twelve faces went pink.
Hina’s face went an entirely different, much more dangerous color.
“Can I see?” Lena asked, holding out her hand.
The middle blocker handed her the shoe.
Lena turned it over, looked at the worn sole, and then took out her phone.
“What are you doing?” said Hina.
“What size is everyone?”
The team stared at her.
Twenty minutes later, a delivery van from the Asics flagship store in Ginza pulled up outside the gym, and two employees carried in fourteen boxes of the newest indoor court shoes, plus fourteen sets of knee pads, plus fourteen team jackets in the university’s light blue with each player’s name embroidered on the back.
And one more jacket, slightly different: TAKEDA — CAPTAIN, in gold thread.
The team went silent.
Then completely, deafeningly loud.
Hina stood in the middle of the chaos with her jacket in her hands, looking at Lena over the heads of her screaming teammates.
The jealousy had drained out of her face.
Something else was there instead, something so raw it made Lena’s chest ache.
“You didn’t buy them for you,” Hina said, when she finally got close enough.
“You bought them for me.
So I’d look like a good captain.”
“You are a good captain.”
“I yelled at her about socks.”
“You’re a good captain who yells about socks.”
Hina laughed, wet, and pulled the jacket on and zipped it up to her chin.
“They’re still not allowed to look at you,” she said.
“Even with shoes.”
“I know.” This story is hosted at g.com.
“Okay.” Hina turned around and bellowed: “EVERYONE SAY THANK YOU TO LENA AND THEN NOBODY LOOK AT HER FOR THE REST OF PRACTICE.”
“THANK YOU, LENA,” roared the team, and then, as one, turned their backs.
Rei came out of the salle at seven.
She was soaked in sweat, her white uniform clinging to her, her ponytail half fallen, the old Paris épée in her hand.
She found Lena in the kitchen and stood in the doorway, breathing hard.
“Fence me,” she said.
They went back into the half-built salle, among the sawhorses and the stacked mirror panels and the smell of fresh lacquer, and Rei fenced her as if she were trying to cut through something invisible.
Fast.
Furious.
Twelve touches in a row.
Lena couldn’t stop a single one.
On the thirteenth, Rei’s blade swept Lena’s aside and the tip came to rest exactly over her heart, and stayed there, trembling.
Rei pulled off her mask.
Her face was wet, and it wasn’t only sweat.
“She left me a sword,” Rei said.
“And then she built a company that holds exactly enough of my father’s shares to matter, and never used it, for nine years.
And she writes to Kaito’s mother every October.
And she never once wrote to me.”
“Maybe she couldn’t.”
“I know.” Rei dropped the épée onto the mat.
“That’s what I’ve been fencing about all day.
Whether it’s worse if she couldn’t.
Or if she could.” She swallowed.
“Make me tired, Lena.
I don’t want to think anymore tonight.”
Lena pulled her close and kissed her, salt and sweat, and unzipped the white jacket, and laid her down on the half-finished floor among the sawhorses.
It wasn’t gentle.
Rei didn’t want gentle.
She pulled Lena down onto her, wrapped her legs around her hips, and dragged her in deep, gasping, her nails raking Lena’s back through her shirt.
They moved hard and fast on the bare wooden floor, Rei meeting every thrust, her head thrown back, her grey eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling where the light fixture wasn’t installed yet.
She came once with a cry that rang off the bare walls, and didn’t let go, and pulled Lena’s face down to hers, and came again, sobbing into her mouth.
Afterward they lay on the floor, spent, sawdust in their hair.
“I’m tired,” Rei whispered.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
“I’m going to win the national championship this year,” Rei said, staring at the ceiling.
“And if she reads about it in the paper, in Kamakura, and doesn’t come, then I’ll know.” A long pause.
“And if she comes, I’ll know that too.”
At midnight, Lena went downstairs for water and found Mizuki sitting on the stairs to the second floor in the cat pajamas, her knees drawn up, holding her phone.
“Can’t sleep?” Lena sat down one step below her.
“In ten minutes I’ll be thirty-three.” Mizuki smiled faintly.
“Nobody knows.
My mother will call at seven.
She always does.
Otherwise, nobody.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.
I told you at the pond.” Mizuki looked down at her.
Her hair was loose, her face scrubbed clean, younger.
“I’m going to choose tomorrow,” she said quietly.
“On my birthday.
That’s the only thing I’ve ever decided for myself on my birthday.
Is that all right?”
“Choose whatever you want.”
“I already know what I want,” said Mizuki, very softly.
“I just want to choose it on a day that’s mine.”
The clock in the hall chimed midnight.
Lena leaned up and kissed her cheek.
“Happy birthday, Mizuki.”
Mizuki’s eyes filled, instantly.
And then her phone buzzed in her hand.
She looked at it, and every trace of softness vanished from her face.
She turned the screen so Lena could see.
*”Tomorrow, cancel my afternoon.
Bring Ms.
Lena to my office at four o’clock.
Alone.*
*— G.K.”*
[End of Chapter 20]