Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 24: Quiet
Hina had read Nanami’s message over Lena’s shoulder at midnight, and she had said nothing at all, and that was how Lena knew she was thinking very hard.
At five-forty on Sunday morning, she said something.
“Make it quiet,” Hina whispered.
She was lying on her side on the new bed, her face a few centimeters from Lena’s, her hand on her own stomach, the sunflower key glinting in the early light.
“For her.
Today.
All the way down.”
“You’re not angry?”
“I’m a little angry.
I’m always a little angry.” Hina smiled, crooked.
“But she asked the right question.
She asked if it’s really her.
Nobody else ever asked that.
Not me.
Not Yuki.
Not even Rei.” She was quiet.
“I didn’t want to know.
I was scared it wasn’t real.”
Lena turned the dial down.
All the way, in the bed, for the first time, until the faint warm hum she always felt around herself went silent.
Hina’s eyes widened slightly.
“Oh,” she said.
“What?”
Hina looked at her for a long time in the grey light.
Then she started to laugh, softly, and her eyes filled.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing changed.
You’re just you.
I still…” She pressed her face into Lena’s shoulder.
“I still want you so much it’s stupid.”
Lena held her.
After a while, Hina lifted her head.
“Sunday,” she said, sniffing.
“Mine.
With it off.
I want to see if it’s different.
Can I?”
“Yes.
Please.”
It was different.
Not in what Hina did.
In how she did it.
She slid down Lena’s body slowly, kissing her as she went, and when she took her into her mouth she did it without the hunger that usually drove her, without the *mine, mine* in her throat.
Just tenderness.
Long, slow, deliberate strokes, her eyes open, watching Lena’s face, as if she were seeing it for the first time without a filter over it.
Lena put her hand on Hina’s cheek.
Hina leaned into it and didn’t stop.
She took her deep and stayed, and Lena felt her smile around her, which was impossible and happened anyway.
She moved her tongue in slow circles.
She cupped Lena gently with her free hand.
And when Lena began to tremble, Hina didn’t speed up, didn’t push, just kept the same slow, warm rhythm, patient as a tide coming in, and let Lena come to her.
Lena came quietly, almost gently, her breath leaving her in a long sigh, her fingers in Hina’s hair, and Hina stayed with her until the end and then laid her cheek on Lena’s thigh and closed her eyes.
“Same,” Hina murmured.
“Exactly the same.
Better.”
From the ridge at the foot of the bed, Rei said very softly, “No score.
Some things shouldn’t be scored.”
*Ding.*
[Hina Takeda | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Pregnancy: Day 19 — Healthy.]
[System Note: Love that is freely chosen never fades.
Verified with Aura at 0%.]
At breakfast, five women sat around the kitchen table and, one by one, asked her to turn it off.
Yuki asked first, shyly, adjusting her glasses.
When the hum went silent, she tilted her head, considered Lena for a long moment as if rereading a favorite page, and said, “Oh.
Yes.
That’s the same book,” and went back to her rice.
Ayaka asked next and stared at Lena with her stylist’s eye for ten full seconds and then said, “Your posture is better without it.
You stop performing.” And then, quieter, “Still you.
Still mine.”
Mizuki asked last, very formally, as if requesting a document.
When the hum stopped, she sat very still, and then she wrote something in her notebook and showed it to Lena under the table.
It said, in her neat, perfect hand: *No change.
100%.
I checked twice.*
Rei didn’t ask at all.
“I don’t need to,” she said, when Yuki pointed this out.
“I fell in love with her while hating her.
The aura was making me want her, and I was refusing.
“But you can turn it off anyway.
I like her face when she’s not trying.”
The General Library at ten on a Sunday was cold and quiet and smelled of old paper, and Nanami was waiting at the usual table with two thermoses, a bag of homemade rice crackers, the Accounting textbook, and a face so pale it was nearly green.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.
You came.
Sit.
Did you…
is it…”
Lena sat.
She turned the dial to zero.
She felt the hum around her go silent.
Across the table, Nanami flinched, as if a loud radio in the next room had suddenly been switched off.
She sat very still.
She blinked twice.
She put down her pen, very carefully, without dropping it.
And then she looked at Lena for a long time in the cold library light.
Lena didn’t move.
She didn’t smile, or try to.
She just sat there and let herself be looked at.
“Oh,” said Nanami finally, very quietly.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“It’s still there.” Nanami’s voice cracked.
“I hoped it wouldn’t be.
Kind of.
I hoped it was just the music, and then I’d be normal again, and I could just be your study partner and go home.” She pressed her hands to her face.
“It’s still there.
It’s worse.
Now I can hear it properly.”
Lena waited.
“I liked you at the welcome ceremony,” Nanami said into her hands.
“I dropped three pens.
That was the music.
But then you sat next to me in Accounting and didn’t laugh when I dropped one.
And you drew the little machine losing slices of itself.
And you said I was smart.
And you stood in the Economics Society and let me take the marker.” She lowered her hands.
Her eyes were wet.
“That wasn’t music.
That was you.”
“Nanami.”
“I know about the others.
Everyone knows.
The Ice Queen.
The volleyball captain.
The literature girl.
People say there’s a woman from Ginza and someone from a big company.” Nanami laughed, shaky.
“I’m not stupid.
I know I’m a second-year who drops pens.
I’m not asking you to…
I’m not asking to come to your house or anything.
I don’t even know what I’d do there.”
“Then what are you asking?”
Nanami took a deep breath.
She folded her hands on the Accounting textbook to stop them shaking.
“A date,” she said.
“One.
A normal one.
Just us.
Not studying.
Like normal people.
I’ve never been on one.” She went crimson to her hairline.
“And I want to do it with the music off.
So that afterward, whatever I decide, I’ll know I decided it.”
*Ding.*
[Nanami Okamoto | Attraction: 96% → 98%]
[Aura: 0%]
[System Note: This increase occurred with the aura disabled.
It is entirely hers.]
Lena reached across the table and laid her hand, palm up, beside Nanami’s folded ones.
She didn’t take them.
She just left it there.
After a moment, Nanami unfolded one hand and put it in hers.
“Yes,” Lena said.
“A normal date.
Next Sunday.
After we study.
You choose where.” This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“I’ve never chosen anywhere in my life,” whispered Nanami.
“Then that’s the first thing,” said Lena.
They studied for three hours with the aura off.
Nanami did not drop a single pen.
At one o’clock, she packed up her bag, stood, hesitated, and then bent and kissed Lena’s cheek, very fast, and fled the library so quickly she left both thermoses behind.
In the afternoon, Lena took Yuki to Jimbocho.
The book town was all narrow streets and towering shelves, a hundred and fifty second-hand bookshops shoulder to shoulder, dust motes floating in the October sun.
Yuki walked through it the way Hina walked onto a volleyball court, transformed, taller, her eyes shining.
She touched spines.
She whispered titles.
She stopped in front of a shop window full of Meiji-era literary magazines and made a small sound like a kitten.
Lena led her to a shop at the end of the main street, three floors of rare books with a bell on the door, where an elderly dealer in a cardigan was waiting for them with a cloth-wrapped parcel on the counter.
“I telephoned on Friday,” Lena told Yuki.
“With Mizuki’s memory, I remembered your whole wish list from the night you made it.
Fourteen books.
This is the second.”
The dealer unwrapped the cloth.
It was a slim volume with a soft cover printed in an elegant Chinese-style pattern, red and gold and black, slightly faded, the corners worn round by a century of hands.
*Kokoro.* Natsume Sōseki.
Iwanami Shoten, 1914.
“First edition,” the dealer said quietly.
“Cover designed by Sōseki himself.
He did it by hand.
It was the first book Iwanami ever published.”
Yuki didn’t touch it.
She put both hands over her mouth and stood there in the dusty shop and cried without making a sound.
“You can touch it,” Lena said gently.
“It’s yours.
It’s for reading.”
Yuki lowered her hands.
She picked it up as if it were a sleeping bird.
She opened it to the first page and read the first line under her breath, *I always called him Sensei,* and then she closed it and held it against her chest and looked up at Lena.
“I always called him Sensei,” she repeated, wet-eyed.
“Lena.
You’re going to fill the whole library, aren’t you.”
“Every shelf.”
“Then I have to read them all,” said Yuki.
“So I’ll have to live forever.
That’s a lot of pressure.”
The dealer, who had been watching with his hands folded, cleared his throat.
He was perhaps eighty, and his eyes behind his glasses were kind.
“Young lady,” he said to Yuki.
“I have been selling books for sixty years.
Most of my customers want them to own.
Very few want them to read.” He bowed slightly.
“Come back whenever you like.
I’ll set things aside.”
[Library: 2 / ∞ rare editions acquired.]
That evening, Yuki read *Kokoro* aloud in the library, curled in the leather armchair by the fire, and Mizuki sat on the floor at her feet with her head against Yuki’s knee, listening.
Lena found them there at ten.
The fire was low.
Yuki’s voice had gone soft and drowsy.
Mizuki’s eyes were closed.
And when Lena knelt beside them, Yuki set the book down on its handkerchief on the side table, very carefully, and reached for her, and Mizuki opened her eyes and reached too.
It was slow and sweet and quiet, in the firelight, on the rug under the shelves that were beginning, one book at a time, to fill.
Yuki on Lena’s lap in the armchair, moving slowly, her glasses slipping, Mizuki kneeling behind her and kissing her shoulders.
Then Mizuki on the rug, on her back, her loose hair spread in a dark fan, Lena moving inside her while Yuki lay beside them stroking Mizuki’s face and whispering lines of Sōseki into her ear until Mizuki came, laughing and crying at once, and pulled them both down into her arms.
“I’ve never had a friend,” Mizuki said into the dark, afterward, “who read to me.”
“Now you have,” said Yuki sleepily.
“Every Sunday.
It’s on the schedule.
I just decided.”
At eleven, the gate intercom buzzed.
A delivery woman stood at the gate under the pines with a single wooden crate on a hand truck.
She had no company logo.
She said only that the sender had paid for Sunday-night delivery and asked that it be given to Kurosawa Rei personally.
Rei came down in her red sweater.
She signed.
She opened the crate on the hallway floor, with all of them standing around her, and inside, packed in straw, lay a small wooden practice sword, child-sized, worn smooth with use.
The same one as in the photograph on Genji’s desk.
A little girl on her mother’s shoulders, holding it up.
Tied to the hilt was a card, in Genji’s sharp, angular handwriting.
*”She gave you this before the other one.
You were five.
I kept it.*
*I am told you smiled.*
*— Father.”*
Rei knelt on the floor of the hallway, holding the little sword in both hands, and didn’t move for a very long time.
[End of Chapter 24]