My Succubus Landlady Has a Contract With My Grandmother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Terms
On the first rent night, Ria sits on Nanami's kotatsu with her grandmother's forty-year-old contract and asks, formally, whether Nanami agrees to the terms; Nanami says yes and then pulls Ria in by the cardigan.
The landlady knocked at eight o'clock exactly, and Nanami Hoshino was still in her work shoes.
She had barely been home ten minutes.
She had eaten half a convenience-store rice ball standing up and put the other half in her mouth when the knock came.
She swallowed it badly and opened the door with her lanyard still around her neck.
A very small woman stood in the hallway holding a long wooden tube.
She had waist-length wavy hair the color of red wine, and a cream cardigan that hung past her knuckles.
Her tabi socks were white, and a ring of old brass keys hung at her hip.
She looked about twenty-three.
"Hoshino Nanami-san," she said, and bowed from the waist. "I am Mikage Ria, the landlady. I have come to collect the rent."
"I have it ready," Nanami said, and her voice cracked on the rice ball.
She had put twenty-eight thousand yen in an envelope on the shoe shelf, because the agent had said the landlady liked cash.
She held it out with both hands.
Ria looked at the envelope.
"That is not what I collect," she said.
She stepped out of her sandals, stepped into the room, and sat down on top of the kotatsu.
She sat on the tabletop itself, cross-legged, on the quilted cover Nanami's grandmother had left behind.
Nanami stood in her own genkan with an envelope in her hands.
"Please sit," Ria said. "You look as if you have been standing since six this morning."
"Since seven," Nanami said, and sat on the floor.
She slid her legs under the kotatsu blanket because the room was cold.
The heater was not plugged in.
She had been meaning to plug it in all week.
It was warm anyway.
Ria uncapped the wooden tube and slid out a long sheet of paper, yellowed at the edges and covered in brush writing.
She laid it across the tabletop and turned it so Nanami could read it.
The signature at the bottom was in a hand Nanami had known her whole life.
It was her grandmother's, with the long tail on the "Fu" that Obaachan had always flicked too far.
Next to it was a second signature in red ink, small and upright.
"That is Hoshino Fumie," Ria said, more quietly. "She signed this forty years ago. She lived in this room for all of them."
Nanami had to look at the table for a moment.
She had attended the funeral in March and carried the box and not once cried.
"The agent said my rent was twenty-eight thousand yen because of a family arrangement," she said.
"Yes."
"For Koenji, that is a joke."
"It is not a joke," Ria said. "It is a contract."
She cleared her throat, and her voice went formal, like a court clerk's.
"I will read the terms.
"One. The tenant of Room 202 gives the landlady one night a week of her attention, from eight o'clock until the first train.
"Two. Attention means company: a meal, conversation, the kotatsu, her presence.
"Three. In return the rent of twenty-eight thousand yen a month is waived."
She stopped.
"Four. Nothing after the tea is owed," she said, and her ears went pink.
"I say that aloud on purpose. It is not in the paper, and it is the most important term."
Nanami stared at her.
"You want me to sit with you once a week," she said.
"I want your attention," Ria said. "I do not mean your obedience. I do not mean anything else."
"Why would anyone want that?"
Ria folded her hands in her lap.
Her eyes, which had been amber, were suddenly the color of lit lamps.
It lasted one second, and the room smelled faintly of cinnamon.
"I am a succubus," she said. "I live on being wanted."
Nanami laughed, because it was funny, and because she had worked fourteen hours.
"I am two hundred and fourteen," Ria added. "The lease says twenty-three. Please do not tell the agent."
"This is a prank. My friend Aya did this."
"You skipped lunch," Ria said calmly.
Nanami stopped laughing.
"You wanted to cry in the stairwell at three o'clock. You did not, because someone came up the stairs."
"How do you..."
"I can taste it. Wanting, tiredness, hunger. They sit on people like heat on a stove."
Ria tilted her head.
"You have been looking at my mouth since I sat down."
Nanami's face went hot to the roots of her hair.
"I was not."
"You were. It is a great deal of wanting, Hoshino-san. I have not tasted so much in forty years."
Under the blanket, Nanami's foot had slid forward on its own and touched something.
It was Ria's ankle, bare above the tabi, and as cold as a river stone.
Neither of them moved.
Slowly the cold ankle warmed against her sole.
"I am sorry," Nanami said. "I did not mean..."
"Do not move it," Ria said, and then, much less formally, "Please."
She leaned across the table and reached for Nanami's blouse.
Nanami stopped breathing.
Ria only straightened her collar, which had been folded under for fourteen hours, and smoothed it flat with two fingertips.
Her fingers were light and cool.
They brushed the side of Nanami's neck, just once.
Nanami's whole body answered, from her scalp to the soles of her work flats, and Ria saw all of it.
"Ah," Ria whispered. "There."
"Is it so obvious?"
"It is a lantern," Ria said. "Do you agree to the terms, Hoshino-san?"
Nanami looked down at the paper.
Her grandmother's signature looked back at her, with its crooked tail.
"What happens if I say no?" she said.
Ria's eyes slid away.
"That is covered elsewhere in the document," she said, and turned the page face down before Nanami could read the last clause.
It was only a small movement, and Nanami noticed it, and she was too tired and too warm to ask.
"The nights are company only," Nanami said. "Nothing after the tea."
"Nothing after the tea. I swear it on my keys."
"Then I agree."
"Thank you," Ria said, and bowed again, still sitting on the table. "That concludes the collection. I will see myself out."
She slid off the kotatsu and found her sandals.
She was at the door, one tabi toe in a sandal, when she looked back.
"You have been wanting to kiss me for twenty minutes," she said, in her notice-reading voice.
"The contract does not ask for it. I am only reporting it."
Nanami got up so fast she hit her knee on the table.
She crossed the little room in two steps, took a fistful of the cream cardigan and pulled.
"Then it's free," she said, and kissed her.
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