Mother and Son
After half-forcing me into a date with Senior Mo, Professor Morgan had thrown me one small compensation.
An improved formula for the Stamina Booster.
What had once been a liquid was refined into a compact pill. The duration dropped from roughly twelve hours to about four, but the materials required shrank accordingly, and it became far easier to take.
Using the new recipe, I poured every last coin I had scraped together working as a host over the break into manufacturing a fresh batch.
The finished stock came to a mere thirty pills.
I blew everything I had… and this is all I get?
Production cost sat at two hundred rupies a pill. Even if I held myself to three a week, that was still twenty-four hundred rupies a month.
Considering the average monthly income of a freshly adult demon just starting work hovered around eighteen hundred, the expense was absurd.
And now that break is over, I can barely even take shifts…
I was living the old warning about how dangerous addiction could be—yet abandoning the Stamina Booster was simply not an option.
So whenever I could steal the time, I slipped back to the host club and worked under the table. That night, too, I showed up looking sharp and waited in the lounge for a call.
“We’ve got a guest in Room Twelve. Anyone want it?”
At Manager Oliver’s question, my hand shot up.
“I’ll take it!”
“Oh, Dorn. You’ve been putting in the work lately. Good. Room Twelve’s yours.”
Leaving him nodding with a pleased little smile, I headed straight for the room where the guest was waiting.
I already had my professional smile in place when I opened the door. A woman of indeterminate age sat on the sofa in a dress that bared one shoulder, watching me arrive.
I greeted her and introduced myself under my alias.
“Hello. I’m Norn.”
I checked whether she was satisfied with me; she gave a small smile and a nod.
“I’d like to pour you a drink… Is there anything you particularly like?”
I slid into the seat beside her and tried to steer her toward an order, but she only stared at me without answering.
“…Ma’am?”
“So the rumors were true.”
“Pardon?”
“I heard a student from the Cradle was working here.”
A chill ran down my spine, but I kept my face carefully blank.
“A student…? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Playing dumb, are we?”
The corner of her mouth lifted.
In the next instant her face changed as if a mask had been peeled away.
“Hhk—”
A neat black bob that left her forehead bare. Long, tapering eyes and dense lashes. A face that held softness and cold severity at once—I remembered it perfectly.
Vice Principal Lemier, who had conducted the entrance ceremony from the dais on my first day at the Cradle.
Her voice was ice when she spoke.
“First-year Dorn. When classes end tomorrow, come to my office.”
I was completely, utterly fucked…
The next day.
The moment class ended, I went straight to Vice Principal Lemier’s office and stood before the door.
Knock knock.
“Come in.”
I opened the door. Sunlight poured through a broad window and filled the room with a soft, bright glow.
Vice Principal Lemier sat at a round table near the window in a close-fitting gray dress, looking over a stack of papers.
My eyes snagged for a second on the steep curves of her body before I forced myself to focus.
“Come here and sit.”
She spoke to me as if I were a child.
“…Yes, ma’am.”
She was every bit as dazzling as she had been at the entrance ceremony—but right now her beauty mattered far less than whatever she intended to do with me.
She smiled gently.
“You don’t have to freeze up like that. This isn’t a faculty meeting or a disciplinary hearing.”
“I… is that so?”
Vice Principal Lemier made light small talk. How were my classes? Was I having any trouble settling into life at the Cradle? Nothing of real weight.
I answered through a throat gone dry as dust, and at last she came to the point.
“You’re working at that establishment… for the money, I take it?”
“…Yes.”
“I thought as much.”
She rested her arms on the table, propped her chin in one hand, and smiled with quiet amusement.
“There’s no need to worry so much. I have no intention of making things difficult for you. In fact, if money is the problem, I can help.”
“Help?”
I wondered if she meant some kind of scholarship. What she said next was nothing like what I expected.
“I can give you as much money as you need.”
Of course, it wasn’t free.
“As long as you meet with me on a regular basis.”
“…Huh?”
The proposal was so outrageous coming from a vice principal’s mouth that shock stole my voice entirely.
What “regular meetings” with her would entail was blindingly obvious.
“Oh dear. Did I startle you, saying something like that?”
How the hell was I supposed to not be startled…
My expression answered for me. Lemier laughed softly—fufu.
“There’s no need to think of it as strange. Guiding students is part of my position, isn’t it? I’m simply allowing myself a little enjoyment along the way.”
I lived a thoroughly trashy life myself, but hearing her claim that propositioning a student under her care for paid companionship counted as “a little enjoyment” made my head spin.
At the entrance ceremony she had seemed strict and sensible. To say something like this so brazenly…
Is it because she’s a demon with enough power and authority that she never has to care what anyone thinks?
She kept coaxing me in that sweet, honeyed voice.
“Wouldn’t it be more comfortable and safer for you, Dorn, to meet with me alone rather than entertaining any number of random women at a place like that?”
“Still, I—”
“Once a week. One thousand rupies each time. Two to three hours. That should be more than fair, don’t you think?”
I stared at her in open shock.
“What are you after?”
“After? Whatever do you mean?”
“…The pay for the time is completely ridiculous.”
Once a week, two to three hours, a thousand rupies a session. That came to four thousand a month—more than double the average salary of a young demon just starting out in the world.
Vice Principal Lemier treated it as nothing at all.
“That much money means very little to me. And I’m not simply giving it away.”
There was one more condition beyond the private meetings themselves, she said, if I wanted the money.
“When we’re alone together, call me Mom.”
“Uh… Mom?”
Only then did I understand why she had made the offer in the first place.
So that’s her taste…
Even in my previous life I had heard of women who paid younger men for companionship and made similar requests. Vice Principal Lemier seemed to be one of those cases.
Not that someone with a cuckold fetish like mine had any right to call her particular.
And she is offering real money…
Meet once a week, call an absolute beauty “Mom,” have sex with her, and walk away with a fortune?
Honestly, for someone already living a sex life messy enough that no one could object to calling him a slut, the offer was extremely tempting.
But then one crucial fact hit me, and I shook my head.
“…Even so, I don’t think I can.”
“And why is that? I thought the terms were rather generous.”
“Because you’re already married, Vice Principal.”
And her husband was none other than Professor Zegerof.
The water buffalo dragon who was basically the sworn enemy of every first-year male student.
That he and Vice Principal Lemier were husband and wife was already common knowledge among the students.
“If we ever got caught, Professor Zegerof would kill me. How am I supposed to—”
Lemier blinked once at my answer—then burst out laughing.
“That he would harm you… Pfft—”
She reacted as if she had just heard an excellent joke. When I tilted my head, she waved a dismissive hand.
“That will never happen, so you needn’t worry. I give you my word—even if we were embracing right in front of him, that man would not lay a single finger on you.”
She staked everything she was on that certainty.
It did not sound like empty talk, so I found myself nodding before I quite meant to.
“Then are you accepting my proposal?”
“…What happens if I refuse?”
“That would be fine as well. But you should know that, separate from this matter, I will no longer tolerate you working at that establishment.”
I had figured as much.
Once again, I had only one real choice.
“When and where should I come to you… Mom?”
“Oh my.”
At the carefully added “Mom,” a deep, satisfied smile curved Lemier’s lips.
“When would my son have time?”
Being called “son” by a beauty who looked no older than her late twenties felt deeply strange.
“…I’d prefer to avoid weekends if possible.”
“Then I’ll call for you on a suitable weekday. Wait for me.”
Like Professor Morgan, the vice principal could command a familiar; she said she would summon me through it.
“Take these.”
She let several glittering coins spill into my palm—ten hundred-rupie pieces.
“What are these for…?”
I wondered if she was paying me in advance. She wasn’t.
“This is just pocket money from Mom. Spend it on whatever you need.”
“Whoa…”
That was the moment I truly understood the charm of a wealthy older woman.