Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 9: Rock, Paper, Queen
Saturday, according to the laminated schedule, belonged to no one.
Under SATURDAY, Yuki had written OPEN, and beneath that, in smaller kanji: TO BE DECIDED BY ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS THE NIGHT BEFORE.
BEST OF THREE.
NO CHEATING (HINA).
Hina had thrown rock three times in a row, because, as she said, “rock is honest.” Rei had thrown paper three times in a row, because she had watched Hina play two volleyball matches and noticed that Hina always went for the straight line.
So at five in the morning, Lena woke to a cool hand on her cheek and two grey eyes looking down at her in the dark.
“I won,” Rei whispered.
“I know.
I was there.”
“I am telling you again because I enjoy it.” Rei was kneeling between her ankles, her platinum hair loose, the red sweater from Ginza pulled over her shoulders and nothing else.
She had slept in it.
Lena suspected she would sleep in it for a month.
“Hina is asleep.
Yuki is asleep.
I will not wake them.
Unless you want me to go back to my place at your hip, in which case I will lose gracefully.”
“You don’t know how to lose gracefully.”
“I am learning.
You are teaching me.” Rei tilted her head.
“Well?”
Lena smiled and slid a hand into her hair.
“Yes, Rei.
Please.”
Rei had improved.
That was the problem with Rei, Lena thought, a minute later, staring at the ceiling with her mouth open.
Rei improved at everything.
Four days ago she had approached this like a duel, careful and precise, and Lena had liked it.
Now she approached it like a duel she had already studied on video.
She started slow, deliberately, her lips barely there, her hair falling forward in a silver curtain that brushed Lena’s thighs.
She tightened and loosened her grip in a rhythm Lena couldn’t predict.
When Lena’s breath caught, Rei paused, lifted her eyes, and waited, letting the tension stretch until Lena was trembling, and only then took her deep again, slow and complete, her throat working.
“Rei,” Lena gasped.
“That’s…
where did you…”
Rei pulled back long enough to say, quite seriously, “Observation,” and then went back to work.
The red sweater slid off one shoulder.
Lena saw the flush spreading down Rei’s neck, felt the little sound she made, a sound the Ice Queen would never in her life have made in public, humming against her.
And then Rei’s free hand found Lena’s and laced their fingers together, and somehow that was what undid her.
She came with her back arched off the mattress and Rei’s name broken in half in her mouth.
Rei held her through it, steady, patient, until the last shiver passed.
Then she sat up, licked her lower lip, and looked at the clock.
“Five twenty-six.
Four minutes until training.”
“Did you time it?”
“Of course I timed it.
Yuki keeps records.” Rei bent and kissed her stomach, just once, very softly.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and for a second she didn’t sound like a queen at all.
To Lena’s right, Hina opened one eye.
“I heard everything,” she announced.
“Rock is still honest.”
“Rock is predictable,” Rei said.
“Next week,” Hina said darkly, “I throw scissors.”
“I know,” said Rei.
*Ding.*
[Rei Kurosawa | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “Strategist” — Won the morning slot through game theory.]
The match against Keio was at one, at the university gym, and Hina did not jump.
She had promised.
Lena watched her keep the promise with an effort that was almost physical.
Hina played back row, as setter, and every time the ball rose high and perfect near the net, every time her whole body coiled for the spike she had made a hundred times, she stopped, hands up, and set it for the middle blocker with the ponytail instead.
“She hates this,” Yuki said, beside Lena in the bleachers.
“She’s doing it anyway.”
“For the sesame seed,” Yuki said, and Lena squeezed her hand.
Rei sat on Lena’s other side in the red sweater and sunglasses, holding a clipboard because she had volunteered to keep the score, which in practice meant she was correcting the official scorer’s arithmetic in the margins.
Half the gym kept glancing at the three of them.
The other half kept glancing at Lena.
[Your aura is affecting 64 adult women in the gymnasium.]
The Keio players kept glancing too.
Their libero missed an easy dig in the second set because she was looking at the bleachers, and Hina, at the net, saw exactly what she was looking at.
Something passed over her face.
The next serve she sent over the net was so fast the libero didn’t even move.
“Captain Takeda,” Rei murmured, writing a note, “has just served at a speed I do not have a column for.”
They won in four sets.
Hina ran to the bleachers afterward, sweaty and triumphant, and climbed over the railing and threw her arms around Lena in front of everyone.
“I didn’t jump,” she said into Lena’s neck.
“Not once.
Tell me I’m amazing.”
“Tell me again where the Keio libero can hear.”
“Hina.”
Hina laughed and kissed her cheek, loud.
Then she lowered her voice, still smiling.
“She looked at you the whole second set.
I saw.”
“I didn’t look back.”
“I know.” Hina pulled away and touched the sunflower key under her jersey.
“That’s why I’m only a little bit scary today.”
At three, Yuki took her to the Literature building.
It was Yuki’s first meeting of the Modern Japanese Prose Circle, a club of nine students and one very old professor who met on Saturdays in a room that smelled of tatami and dust.
Yuki had been too nervous to go alone.
She had been too nervous to go at all for two weeks.
Today she held Lena’s sleeve the whole way up the stairs.
“You don’t have to come in,” she whispered at the door.
“You can wait outside.
It’s literature people.
They’ll stare.”
“Everyone stares.”
“Not at you.
At me.
Because I’m with you.” Yuki took a breath.
“I want them to.”
They read Kawabata’s *Snow Country* aloud, a page each, around the low table.
When it was Yuki’s turn, her voice shook for the first line and then didn’t.
She read the passage about the mirror in the train window, the girl’s face floating over the dark mountains, and the old professor stopped writing and looked up.
“Again,” he said.
“That last paragraph.
Slowly.”
Yuki read it again.
The room was silent.
“You’re from Hokkaido,” the professor said.
“Yes, sensei.”
“It shows.
You read snow like someone who has been cold.” He made a note.
“Next week, you’ll lead the discussion.”
Yuki walked out of that room six inches taller.
On the stairs she stopped, turned, grabbed Lena’s collar with both hands, and kissed her so hard their teeth clicked.
“I was brave,” she said.
“You were brave.”
“I want to be brave all the time,” Yuki said, flushed and shining, and Lena felt the talent she had taken from her, the soul of literature, warm and proud in her chest, as if Yuki had just written a new chapter in it.
At eight-fifteen, Lena parked the Ninja on Namiki-dori, under a streetlight, and found the boutique dark except for a single lamp in the back.
The door was unlocked.
A small bell rang.
“In here,” Ayaka called, from somewhere behind the racks.
She was in the fitting area, by the three-way mirror.
She had let her hair down.
Lena had never seen it down: it was long and black and fell almost to her waist, and it changed her entirely, made her younger and softer and more nervous.
She had taken off her suit jacket.
The silk blouse under it was the color of red wine.
On a velvet chair beside the mirror, a measuring tape was coiled like a sleeping snake.
“I said it was a fitting,” Ayaka said.
“So.
It’s a fitting.
Stand there.”
Lena stood there.
Ayaka picked up the tape and stepped close, closer than she had dared yesterday, and put it around Lena’s shoulders.
Her fingers were trembling.
She measured shoulders, and bust, and waist, and wrote nothing down, and when she knelt to measure the length of Lena’s skirt, her hands stopped on the hem.
“I remember,” Ayaka said, very quietly, to the floor.
“Nine days ago.
You said you don’t wear any.”
“I still don’t.”
Ayaka closed her eyes.
“I haven’t slept properly since.
I’m twenty-nine years old.
I’ve worked in Ginza for eight years.
Actresses come in here.
Politicians’ wives.
I’ve dressed women who were on magazine covers.
I have never once forgotten my own name in front of a customer.” She opened her eyes and looked up at Lena from her knees.
“I forgot it in front of you.
Twice.”
Lena knelt, too, so they were face to face on the boutique’s soft grey carpet.
“Ayaka,” she said.
“Your name is Ayaka Mori.”
Ayaka laughed, a shaky, startled sound, and then she leaned forward and kissed her.
It was not a careful kiss.
It was nine days of not sleeping.
Ayaka’s hands went into Lena’s hair, and Lena’s went to the small of her back, and the silk was warm and thin, and Ayaka made a sound against her mouth that went straight through her.
They ended up against the three-way mirror, a hundred reflections of them, Ayaka’s blouse half-unbuttoned, Lena’s skirt rucked up, Ayaka’s palm sliding up her bare thigh and stopping, wide-eyed, at what she found there. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“Oh,” Ayaka breathed.
“Yes,” Lena said.
“That’s also new.
Is it—”
“It’s,” Ayaka said, and swallowed, and her hand stayed exactly where it was, curious and warm.
“It’s very much okay.”
*Ding.*
[Ayaka Mori | Attraction: 98% → 100%]
[Ayaka Mori has reached 100%.]
[Talent to acquire: “Eye of the Stylist” — Flawless taste, the ability to read any body and any mood at a glance, and a saleswoman’s gift for persuasion.]
Ayaka pulled back, breathing hard, her lipstick smeared, her hair everywhere.
She looked at Lena in the mirror, all hundred of her, and then she reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out her phone.
“I don’t have your number,” she said, and her voice cracked.
“I gave you mine.
You never gave me yours.
I don’t even know where you live.” She held the phone out with both hands, like an offering.
“Please.
And…
I want to come home with you.
Not tonight, if it’s too much.
But I want to.
I want to know what your house smells like in the morning.”
Lena took the phone and typed in her number.
Then she held it a moment longer, and didn’t let go.
“There’s something you need to know first,” she said.
“I don’t live alone.”
“I know.
The Ice Queen.
It was on the blogs.”
“Not only her.
There’s Yuki, who was first.
And Hina, who’s pregnant.” Ayaka’s eyes went wide.
“And it’s not only my house.
It’s theirs.
Nobody comes home with me unless they ask Yuki and Hina first.
That’s the rule.
Hina is…” Lena searched for the word.
“Very protective.”
Ayaka sat back on her heels, blouse open, hair wild, and looked at her for a long moment, reading her the way she read every customer.
“Then I’ll ask,” she said simply.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.
Sunday dinner.
Yuki makes curry.”
Ayaka took her phone back and held it to her chest.
“What does Hina like?”
Lena thought about it.
“Honesty.
And people who aren’t afraid of her.”
“And are you,” Ayaka asked, “afraid of her?”
“A little,” Lena admitted.
She got home at ten, buzzing, her lips still tingling.
Rei was waiting in the dark hallway, leaning against the wall in the red sweater, arms folded.
“You smell like a Ginza perfume that costs forty thousand yen a bottle,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“My father’s secretary wears it.” Rei unfolded her arms.
Her eyes in the dark were bright.
“I was jealous for an hour.
Then I decided jealousy is inefficient.
Come here.”
She pulled Lena into the guest room nearest the stairs, kicked the door shut, and pushed her down onto the bed, and climbed on top of her with the sweater still on, and nothing under it.
She sank down onto Lena slowly, deliberately, holding her gaze the whole way, until she was full and gasping and her composure cracked straight down the middle.
“Tell me,” Rei said, beginning to move, her hands braced on Lena’s chest, “about the saleswoman.”
“Now?”
“Now.
Everything.” Rei rolled her hips, and Lena’s head fell back.
“I want to know who I am going to share my mornings with.”
So Lena told her, in broken sentences, between gasps, while the Ice Queen rode her in a red sweater and listened with the focus of a judge, and asked follow-up questions, and came, finally, with her forehead pressed to Lena’s and a low, astonished laugh.
Afterward, curled against her, Rei said, “She will have to get past Hina.”
“I know.”
“I’ll put money on her,” Rei said thoughtfully.
“Hina respects people who walk in the front door.”
Lena’s phone buzzed on the nightstand.
A new number, saved two hours ago.
*”I can’t sleep.
What does Yuki’s curry need?
I want to bring something.
— Ayaka”*
And then, a minute later:
*”Also, what do I say if Hina has a knife?”*
[End of Chapter 9]