Table Manners
"You know, I can think of hundreds of better things we could be doing right now. Like cleaning the sewers. You need someone to clean the sewers?"
"I think we're good."
Foiled again, Yuri's face darkens like a raincloud as he glares down at the table arrangement set before him. He's been trying to appeal to her for a while now and honestly, Estelle does empathize—when she was little, she all too often ran off and hid in the secret crawlspaces of the library just to avoid taking her own etiquette lessons. But at the very least, she wants Yuri to learn the basics of formal table manners before he shows up at the next royal banquet, so she's been trying to teach him for a good half hour now, with limited success.
"Yuri, please, could you just pay attention to me?"
Yuri pauses at that, then looks back up at her, his gaze slowly trailing down to her neck and chest and lingering there before heading back up to meet her stare. "Sure, I can do that," he drawls, a telltale smirk on his face, a sudden sultry purr in his tone.
Estelle rolls her eyes and smacks his shoulder. Okay, she should have seen that coming.
Though, she does see it coming when Yuri starts inching towards her in a way that's not nearly as subtle as he seems to think. His head is cocked, his eyes are wide and puppylike, but Estelle sees through his paltry mask of innocence, sees the calculations running through Yuri's head and the tensing of his muscles. She sees his movements a good half-second before he ever actually moves, before he abruptly leaps to his feet and his arm snaps out to embrace her…
Estelle snatches up the soup spoon from the table and whips it protectively in front of her mouth like a shield, and when Yuri leans in and his lips hit metal, he instantly yanks back, his face contorting with such shock and betrayal that you'd have thought she stabbed him with the knife instead.
"Nice try," Estelle laughs, then flourishes the spoon as a pointer that gestures to the chair. "Now behave. You're going to have to learn this sooner or later."
Yuri slumps his shoulders and pouts—and Estelle laughs even harder when that makes him look six years old—but he accepts defeat, grudgingly taking his seat again. Estelle doesn't miss a beat as she starts to run him through each of the utensils, and there's a scowl on his lips by the time she gets to the dessert fork, but Estelle intends to wipe that frown off his face soon enough.
As soon as Yuri gets this right, she'll be more than happy to be his reward.