Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 989

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.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify