Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 989: Learning Feminine Grace

Yunohana set her cup down and considered the request with complete seriousness. With her hair unpinned she looked years younger and far less official, and what she looked like most of all was a woman delighted to be asked.

”Then let us start with serving, since you watched me do it all evening,” she said. ”When you bring a man his tea, come around and offer it from beside him, never from across the table.”

She mimed setting a cup down at an invisible elbow.

”From his side you are close, your shoulder almost at his, inside his world for a moment. From across the table, you are simply staff delivering a cup.”

”Wait, it’s starting.” Sarah sat up straight. ”It’s actually starting.”

”The second lesson is attention. Suppose your hands are busy pouring when he begins speaking to you. Do not drop everything and stare at him like a startled maid. Finish the pour calmly, set the pot down, and only then raise your eyes to his.”

She demonstrated with one of the wooden washing ladles, finishing an unhurried pour of nothing at all before lifting her gaze, and even with a bath ladle, the little pause before her eyes came up felt strangely like a reward.

”He will notice that pause without ever understanding what he noticed. It tells him his words are worth finishing things gracefully for.”

Emily whimpered and began writing on her own palm with one wet finger.

”The sleeve,” Aria said, leaning in. ”At dinner, when you poured for Kai, you gathered your sleeve back first. I stole the move on the spot, and I suspect I only got half of it. What’s the other half?”

”Ah.” Yunohana’s eyes warmed. ”The practical half keeps the silk out of the tea. The other half is that drawing it back slowly bares the inside of your wrist to him while you pour. It is the most innocent thing a woman can do entirely on purpose.”

A short silence followed, as every woman in the bath revisited the dinner pour and understood how much of it they had missed.

”Is there... anything about bows?” Emily whispered, barely above the waterline.

”Hold it one breath longer than feels natural. He will spend that whole extra breath looking at you, and wondering why.”

Emily made a sound like a kettle reaching temperature.

”Does it actually work, though?” Leia asked, half doubt, half already practicing the wrist motion underwater. ”In real life? On real men?”

Yunohana refilled her cup. ”My mother raised four of us on it.”

The water went reverent.

”Now that’s worth a toast.” Scarlet hoisted the whole bottle overhead. ”To hard-working mothers!”

”To hard-working mothers!” the bath answered, cups and one wooden ladle rising with it.

”Teach me the tea one!” Calypso surfaced with a slap of both palms on the water. ”Darling deserves the tea one!”

”Then come, and we will practice with what the bath gives us.” Yunohana handed her the wooden ladle and an empty cup, then talked her through it: the grip, the slow tilt, the stream kept thin and unbroken.

Calypso’s first pour would have drowned a tea house. Her second was merely a flood. Her third, with her whole face scrunched in concentration and her arms trembling from the effort of being gentle, actually resembled a pour, and she looked up for her grade.

”Very good,” Yunohana said warmly. ”Tomorrow you shall graduate to a real pot, with real tea in it.”

”Darling is going to love this!” Calypso vowed.

Through it all, Aria kept pace. When the pour was demonstrated, she poured for Nyx with the sleeve gathered, flawless on the first attempt, because of course it was. When the delay was explained, she performed it once and made it look native.

Then Yunohana, mid-answer to Leia, refilled Scarlet’s cup and turned it so the seam of the ceramic faced away before it touched the stone. She did it without pausing her sentence, without appearing to know she had done it.

Aria looked at the cup. Then at her own hands.

Then she laughed at herself, under her breath, and the contest ended where nobody but her had known it was running.

All her life, Aria had been the standard other women measured their grace against, and at some point she had stopped believing a level above her own existed. It did. It was sitting right there in the steam, pouring sake buck naked and looking majestic while doing so.

The sting of that lasted exactly one breath before it turned into something better: she still had room to grow more graceful, more feminine, more devastating. And every inch of that room belonged to Kai.

”Lady Yunohana.” Aria glided through the water and settled at her side, inclining her head to the shrine maiden, student to teacher. ”While we’re in Japan... would you teach me? Not just tonight’s tricks. The whole art, everything you’re willing to pass on. Until tonight, I believed I had finished learning it.”

”Gladly,” Yunohana said, visibly pleased. ”Come find me tomorrow, after the training.”

The sake kept moving, and it eventually found Emily.

”If he ever poured tea for me,” she announced to the ceiling, ”I would simply pass away. I mean it. You’d have to update the handle.”

”We’d carve the handle on your gravestone,” Sarah said. ”Here lies Kaiden’s Wife.”

”It was ironic-”

”Sound carries over the wall, by the way,” Kaiden’s voice floated across, conversational.

Emily sank without a word. Bubbles rose where the moderator had been.

Nyx reached over and hauled her back up by one arm. ”None of that, online wife bestie. Breathe. I need you alive in case another hate wave hits our channel.”

Alice had watched the entire seminar from the shallow end, pretending very hard not to. When the laughter moved on, she waded over, planted herself in front of Yunohana, and bowed to the shrine maiden at a schooled, correct angle.

”Miss Yunohana, will you please teach me too?” she asked, dead serious. ”The real lessons, not the joke ones. I want to learn how to pour tea the pretty way.”

The bath fell silent one girl at a time.

Yunohana studied the earnest face in front of her, found nothing in it to smile at, and set her cup aside.

”Then let us begin with how you stand, if you’ll allow me.” Two gentle fingertips squared Alice’s shoulders, and one guided her chin up a degree. ”There. Lovely. Now the pour.”

She handed her the wooden ladle and a cup. ”Keep your weight on the back hand, and pour slower than you believe slow is. If the cup is for someone you cherish, let him see the whole pour, beginning to end. The ending is not something to hurry.”

Alice’s first attempt wobbled. Her second ran clean, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.

”Once more, if you would.”

The third was slow and steady, start to finish.

”Yes. That one.”

Alice glowed.

Yunohana, who watched their streams and knew perfectly well which young man all this pouring was for, chose perfect diplomacy.

”Somebody is a very lucky young man,” she observed, refilling the practice cup.

”Yeah!” Alice beamed, with zero shame anywhere in her body.

Down the pool, Luna choked on her sake. Nobody translated the exchange for their hostess, and their hostess required no translation.

”Then we will make the pour flawless,” Yunohana said. ”Again, please.”

The soak wound down from there, cup by cup and lesson by lesson, until the mod trio had gone pink to their ears and even Luna had given up her war with the temperature.

It was Nyx who finally rose out of the water, wrung out her hair, and looked toward the bamboo wall with a warming smile.

”Alright, girls. He’s had a full hour of peace and quiet,” she said. ”Any more of it would just spoil him.”

Five towels came off the rack in perfect unison.

On the other side of the wall, Kaiden was drifting somewhere at the edge of a nap when the curtain of the men’s bath whispered aside, and more than one set of bare feet padded in across the wet stone.