Chapter 9: My loving Scarlet dominator
The announcement came over the campus speakers at nine the next morning, in Kyle Rawul Marx's polished, reasonable voice.
"Due to scheduling harmonization for the remainder of the term assessment window, certain roster adjustments take effect today. Students should check their portals. Thank you for your flexibility."
Yuma checked his portal outside the cafeteria, coffee still warm in his hand, and felt the ground tilt politely under him.
Economics 309, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Advanced market behavior, Tuesdays. Statistical applications, Thursday afternoons. Sociology of group dynamics. Contemporary ethics. Four classes, all shuffled, all new.
Not one of them had a single Lily Garden name on the roster.
"Kyle," Uma said over his shoulder, reading the screen upside down. She said the name the way other people said clinical diagnoses. "The student president. Who put seven hundred thousand yen on you."
"And who doesn't actually have to justify a roster change," Yuma said. "Scheduling harmonization. It's untouchable. You can't even complain about it without looking paranoid."
They stood in the flow of morning traffic while students streamed past, and Uma's hand found his and held it, publicly, the way she always did now.
She walked him through his new rosters line by line on her tablet, because Uma processed things by organizing them, and stopped at the third line of Economics 309 and went quiet.
Yuma read down the list of names. He recognized two. Both belonged to the Largann faction. Both had been at the pool that day, standing behind Elianna Sogran's shoulder like furniture.
And there, fourth period Thursday, in Contemporary Ethics of all things, sat a name he would have known blindfolded. Elianna Sogran.
"She rebuilt your week," Uma said. Her voice was soft and level, which was worse than shouting. "Every single class. Not one friend. Largann faces in three of them. Her, in the fourth."
"It's clean," Yuma said. "That's what bothers me. It's not intimidation, it's not a threat, it's just a schedule. Nothing anyone could point at."
"She's isolating you so she can corner you somewhere without witnesses."
"No." Yuma turned the idea over, and it fit together with an ugly, admiring click. "It's smarter than that. Think about what two weeks of this looks like. Every day, surrounded by people who were told there's a million yen in it. Hostile room, no allies, and me. Sooner or later I have to talk to someone. Form some connection. Study partner, lab group, anything. And the moment I do, it's a Largann, and every conversation becomes leverage. Or a bargaining chip. Or a way to pressure me into caving on something." He stared at the roster. "Force the environment to negotiate for her. That's the whole design."
Uma looked at him for a long moment.
"I married a market analyst," she said. "Sometimes I forget and then you say something like that and I remember and it's terrifying. Sweetheart, that's a horrifying read and it's probably correct."
"So we don't panic," Yuma said. "Two weeks. I go to class. I'm polite. I'm boring. I come home to you. Nobody gets a connection worth having, and nobody collects a million yen, and at the end of it I get paid for my trouble."
"I hate every part of that plan except the ending," Uma said, and kissed him hard enough that two Largann girls by the fountain turned to look, and let them look.
The first two days went exactly as predicted, which somehow made it worse.
In Economics 309, the Largann pair flanked him without a word, took notes, answered questions, and never once looked at him. The not-looking was its own kind of loud. In Statistical Applications, a girl from the Crescent camp offered him gum and small talk with the careful casualness of someone testing ice. In Sociology, a boy he'd never met asked, too innocently, what he thought about the student talk page.
Yuma was polite. Yuma was boring. Yuma went home to Uma and told her everything over dinner, and she took notes in her notepad, the same notepad, and underlined nothing twice, which he learned was her highest grade of concern.
Thursday morning, on his way to fourth period, she squeezed his wrist at the corner of the humanities building.
"Ethics. She's in that room with you for ninety minutes."
"Ninety minutes of her ignoring me," Yuma said. "I can survive being ignored."
He believed it, right up until two days later, when he pushed open the door of Economics 309 and found it empty.
Not late-morning empty. Abandoned empty. Twenty desks and a lectern and nobody, though class had started seven minutes ago, though the campus ran on a clockwork he could feel in his teeth. He stood in the doorway and checked the portal again. Room 309. Tuesday, ten o'clock. His name on the roster, cheerful as ever.
At the back of the room, behind a large potted fern that had no business being indoors, a door stood ajar. It hadn't been there before. Or rather, he realized, walking closer, it had always been there, disguised as cabinetry, painted the same institutional gray, and now it was open and breathing cool air and bass-heavy music into the classroom.
He should have texted Uma. Mynia's rule was absolute; nobody went anywhere alone.
He texted Uma. I found something weird in 309, going to look, and stepped through.
The door opened onto a staircase going down, and the music got louder, and at the bottom of the stairs the world changed.
It was a room that shouldn't exist under a classroom. A huge low-ceilinged space, warm and dim, strung with amber lights. Couches in nested circles. Long tables buried under bottles and cups and snack wreckage. A dance floor where thirty people moved together under a light rig, and along the far wall a proper bar, brass rail and all, with a hidden quality to it, tucked behind a partition like a secret. In the corner, a staircase led up to a lofted second level, curtained, mostly in shadow.
A rager. A full, organized, professional rager, at ten on a Tuesday morning, under an economics classroom.
Yuma recognized half the crowd. Largann jackets by the bar. Crescent scarves on the dance floor. A cluster from the Rawul administration laughing over a phone. Even some neutral faces he knew from lectures. He swept the room twice and found no red armbands, no quiet traditionalist collars. Moto Okaini's people, the one faction that took the Fukuba event as sin, were entirely absent, and their absence said something, though he couldn't yet say what.
He should go. He had Uma's reply buzzing in his pocket. On your way out, now.
Instead his feet carried him to the bar. He was, he reasoned, in a room full of witnesses. Nobody was going to do anything to him with eighty people around. And the bar was right there, brass rail gleaming, and he had walked into a party the way a man falls down stairs, one step at a time, each one individually reasonable.
"Lychee martini," he said to the bartender, a tall woman with cropped silver hair and three shakers going at once. "Double. Grey Goose, if you have it."
"Have it." The shaker hissed. She poured, garnished, slid it across. He paid. He sipped. It was absurdly good.
"Question," he said, leaning in over the music. "Who throws a party like this? At ten in the morning? In a classroom?"
The bartender didn't stop working. "Honest answer? Nobody knows. I got hired through an intermediary. Paid in advance, cash, generous." She glanced at him, one eye. "Everyone just calls the host the Red Velvet Princess. Invites go out, drinks show up, space gets booked. Nobody's ever met her."
"Red Velvet Princess," Yuma repeated.
"Red Velvet Princess," the bartender confirmed, and turned to the next order.
The title snagged in him like a hook. Velvet was soft. Princesses got what they wanted. He was still turning it over when a voice beside him said, "Hey, I haven't seen you here before. What's your name?"
He turned.
A girl had taken the stool next to his. Small, five foot three maybe, blonde pigtails tied with red bows, a crisp white button-up over a red velvet miniskirt, thigh-highs, one red shoe swinging. She was, objectively, adorable, in the way of things that are adorable right up until they aren't. She raised two fingers at the bartender. "Dragon berry mojito, please."
"It's my first time here," Yuma said. "I just moved into this class, actually. Upstairs."
"Moved classes?" Her head tilted. "Mid-term?"
"Scheduling harmonization."
"Mm." She took her drink and drank half of it and looked at him. Really looked. Her eyes were mismatched, one red, one pale white-blue, and she held the look without blinking, and something about it pressed against him strangely. The eyes felt dead. Flat, patient, unread, like a doll's. And underneath the flatness, aimed directly at him, they felt caring. Warm, even. Both at once, with nothing between them, and Yuma's skin crawled and relaxed in the same second and he could not have explained either feeling.
"Macie Redwood," she said, offering her hand. Her grip was small and dry and precise.
"Yuma."
"Nice name." She sipped again. "You look tense. First party?"
"Something like that." He hesitated, then, because it seemed important to establish early, "I have a girlfriend."
Macie laughed. A bright, genuine, delighted laugh, head tipping back. "So do I! Well. Sort of. It's complicated, she's not exactly a people person." She waved her glass at him. "Relax. I'm not hitting on you. I'm buying you a drink because you look like a man who just discovered his classroom has a basement and needs to process it. Another?"
"That's," said Yuma, and found his refusal had no legs. "One more. Sure."
The second martini went down faster than the first. The third faster still, because Macie was easy to talk to, in a way that disquieted him even as it worked. She asked nothing about the factions, the talk page, the bounty, the council. She asked what he studied, and laughed at his answers, and told a story about a robotics lab fire that had him snorting into his glass. The dead eyes stayed dead and the caring stayed caring and the martinis stacked up underneath both, and somewhere around the bottom of the third the room got soft at the edges and the bass felt friendly.
"You're woozy," Macie observed, pleased about it for reasons he was too fuzzy to examine.
"Little bit."
"Come on. There's a room upstairs. You should lie down for a bit. You'll feel like death in an hour otherwise, and your girlfriend will never forgive me."
"That's true," Yuma said gravely. "She keeps records."
He let her walk him up the corner staircase, past the curtained loft, into a small warm room at the top with a wide low bed and amber light. She sat him down. "Lie down. Rest. I'll check on you."
"You're very," Yuma said, lying back, the ceiling rippling pleasantly, "hospitable."
"I'm very everything," Macie said, and the door clicked softly, and he was asleep.
He woke in stages.
First the headache, a polite cotton wool pressure behind the eyes. Then the light, amber and low, hours later by the feel of it. Then the room itself, the wide bed, the quiet music thumping faintly up through the floor.
Then the movement beside him.
Macie knelt on the bed next to him. She was no longer in the white shirt and skirt. She wore a red leather one-piece suit, glossy, zipped halfway, a small red mask pushed up on her forehead, and her hand was between her own thighs, moving slowly, and she was watching him sleep.
Yuma came fully awake in a cold spike.
"Don't stop on my account," Macie said. Her voice had changed. Softer, slower, a purr with machinery under it. "You looked so peaceful. I couldn't help myself. Do you know how long I've wanted to watch you?"
"How," Yuma said. His mouth was dry. "What is this?"
Her free hand came down onto his chest, over his shirt, and slid down his body with unhurried patience, over his stomach, resting on his hip.
"Ohh, Yuma, Yuma, Yuma." Each repetition of his name was a separate stroke of the hand. "I don't want the money. Not Kyle's, not Momoi's. Let everyone else fight over a million yen. I just want to enjoy your body. I want to make you feel things you'll remember forever."
"The only Futanari I want," Yuma said, and his voice held, which surprised him, "is Uma."
Something flickered across Macie's face. Not anger. Approval, deep and hungry.
"Mm. Good answer. But sweetheart, who said I was a Futanari?"
She took his hand and drew it down, over the red leather, between her thighs, and there was no bulge. There was nothing but heat and softness and wet, her own fingers withdrawing to make room, and she pressed his palm against her pussy and let out a low, shaking moan that ran straight up his arm.
"See?" She guided his hand once, twice, her hips moving. "Nothing down there but me. Ohh, baby. I'm not one of those Futas. I'm just a really, really kinky, depraved, sexually starved girl."
She shifted up the bed. Before he could move or speak she swung a knee over his head, and the heat of her lowered onto his face, leather and skin and musk, her moan directly above his mouth as she rocked, slow and shameless.
"You're blushing all the way down your neck," she observed, delighted. "That's so cute. I knew you'd be cute."
"Macie." His voice came out strangled against her thigh. "Uma. I have Uma. I love Uma. Get, please get off."
"In a minute." She leaned down, and her hair curtained his face, and her mouth came to his ear, and the purr dropped to a whisper. "Listen to me. Or else I tell Uma about your little secret."
The room went very still.
Yuma's whole body went cold under the heat of her. "What secret."
"How did I know?" Macie didn't move off him. She settled her weight comfortably, conversational, as if they were at the bar again. "I know lots of things. It's a hobby. Should I say it out loud? You went quiet on the word Futanari just now, up from the bar. Not loyal-quiet. Guilty-quiet. You weren't attracted to any of this at first, were you, Yuma. Not until the event. Not until the porn. Hours of it. Weeks. A boy who'd never once thought about it, suddenly unable to stop." Her fingers combed through his hair. Gentle. Horribly gentle. "And then you wanted to know for sure, didn't you. What you were. So you paid a girl. Another college, wasn't it. Not here. Cash. You paid her to sleep with you so you could ground your sexuality, get a clean answer, and she looked at what you had and said no. Refused. And that broke something, and the porn got worse, and for a little while there were substances too. Twice, I think. Quick tries, both times, before you scared yourself straight."
Yuma could not move. The amber light swam. Every word landed on a place inside him that had never once been spoken to out loud, not by his therapist, not by anyone, and Macie was reciting it like a shopping list while sitting on his face's doorstep.
"How," he said again. Nothing came after it.
"It doesn't matter how." She finally, mercifully, lifted off him, and sat back on her heels beside him, and both hands came to work: one rubbing slow circles on his scalp, the other massaging his shoulder, warm and firm and skilled. "But it's okay. That's what I came to tell you. It's okay. I don't want you to feel scared." Her thumbs worked into the knots along his neck. "Well. Kinda. A little scared is healthy. But mostly, listen. I don't want your money, I don't want to ruin you, I don't want Uma hurt, I'm not going to tell anyone anything, as long as you're sensible. I just want you to be my fuck buddy. That's all. Nobody would ever know. Not her, not the council, not the factions."
"Nobody would know," Yuma said hoarsely.
"Nobody would know," she agreed, "and here's the beautiful part. I won't even make you cum. Not once. Not ever. I'll take care of you in every other way, but you stay faithful where it counts, all of you stays hers, so you can tell the truth to everyone with a clean heart. Uma keeps her boyfriend, the bounty stays uncollected, the million yen lands in your account, and you and I just, play. Privately. Everybody wins. It's the most honest cheating in the world."
"That's not," Yuma started. "That logic is insane."
"Probably," Macie said happily. "I have a very high IQ and all my logic is a little insane. It's a documented trade-off."
He lay there under her hands, and the terrible thing, the thing he was going to examine later with the kind of honesty that made his stomach hurt, was that the panic was draining out of him and something complicated was pooling in behind it. Her hands were good. Her voice was warm. The blackmail sat there in the room like furniture, and she patted it fondly every time she passed it, and neither of them screamed.
"Or," Yuma said, because some analyst in him was still awake and cataloguing, "I tell Uma everything. Right now. Tonight. The blackmail, all of it. She's terrifying, you know. She kept a tally."
"Oh, I know all about the tally." Macie's smile widened. "Twenty-three. I've read the rumor twice and I think it's an undercount."
"Then you know she'll end you."
"Mm. Maybe. But you won't tell her, will you?" The dead eyes looked down at him, caring and bottomless. "Not first, anyway. Not before you've had a chance to think. Because if you tell her, I tell her the rest. The porn. The paid girl. The substances. And it wouldn't even be a lie, sweetheart, that's the sad part. I'd just be honest, at the worst moment, in the worst words." She bent and kissed his forehead, soft as a sister. "But you don't need to decide anything tonight. Drink water. Sleep."
"Okay," Yuma said, because his head was pounding and the room was amber and there was nothing else to say.
He started to sit up. "I should, before anything, you should know, um. If you're expecting something from me. I have a really small dick. Like, really small. So honestly you'd probably have to do all the work, though I could maybe still make you cum, if you used my, if we,"
The sentence died.
Because something had come to rest in front of his face.
Red. Sleek. Glistening. It hung there at the level of his eyes, bobbing gently with the bed's movement, drooling a slow clear thread of lube onto the sheets. It had the polished look of precision engineering and the confidence of a living thing.
Yuma looked up.
Macie was standing on the bed above him, one foot planted either side of his body, leather creaking, hands on her hips, looking down at him with the fondness of a woman about to introduce family.
"Aww," she said. "You think I wouldn't bring my girlfriend with me?"
The red thing twitched. Swelled. Grew, visibly, inch by smooth inch, the surface flushing darker, flexing once with an audible hydraulic breath, and a bead of something thick and milky welled up at its tip and slid slowly down the shaft.
"Well, baby. This is her. Scarlet. My strap-on."
Scarlet got hard the rest of the way, all at once, and dripped for him.