Page 107 of Shroom for Improvement

“Night, Sonny,” he said, snuggling down under the covers. “Thank you for today. I had a lot of fun.”

“Me too,” was all I said in reply.

I woke before Claude, desperate to pee, so I tiptoed out of his bed, down the staircase, out of his rooms, and into my bathroom where, after peeing, I noticed two things. One, the house had magicked my douche onto the glass shelf in the shower alongside my regular cleansing products.

And two, overnight I had grown a full beard.

I gazed into the mirror and scrubbed my hands through it. It was a short beard, each strand only measured three or fourmillimetres, but it was thicker, more lustrous than any beard I’d grown before. My actual hair seemed a little longer too, and a lot more unruly.

Would Claude like the beard? Or should I shave it off? I tilted my head from left to right, admiring the thickness of it. Something I ate, maybe? I foraged a few mushrooms yesterday, swallowed them raw after picking them straight from the ground.

The ground that just so happened to be embedded with ancient shroom magic. Enough to power an entire sentient mansion.

No wonder I had grown a beard.

I should make a note of that. Do some further research into the properties. It could help people suffering with alopecia. Not that I needed to add more research projects to my extensive list, but maybe it would give me a decent excuse to come back to Stinkhorn Manor in the future.

As long as I could convince the dean to grant me a few years’ sabbatical.

But that would mean certain heartbreak, wouldn’t it? There’d be no way to escape the inevitability. I couldn’t spend that amount of time with him and not fall in love. And it would hurt even more when I’d have to leave.

Because I had to leave, right? I couldn’t stay here indefinitely. My career was in Remy. My whole life was in Remy—the paper I had been working on since forever, my friends, my apartment, my allotment.

I shaved the beard off.

“Good morning,” Claude said, once I joined him in the guest house. He had his usual plate of eggs royale in front of him. But by the looks of things, he was still on his first serving.

“Good morning.” I sat opposite him.

Within seconds, Willow placed my breakfast on the table. Waffles with chicken of the woods and syrup. “The beard suits you,” they said.

“Beard?” Claude paused his fork halfway to his mouth.

I passed my hand over my face. Maybe it had grown back in the thirty minutes since I’d shaved it. It hadn’t. Willow must have had a sixth sense for those types of things.

“Every day you have the same breakfast. Don’t you ever get bored?” I blurted out, changing the subject. I couldn’t say why, but I didn’t want to talk about the beard.

“I guess not. If I became bored, surely Oggy and Willow would serve me something different.”

Hmm. That made perfect sense. They’d never failed to deliver on my cravings before.

“Plus, I enjoy knowing what to expect,” he said. “I like the reliability of it. Eggs royale is incomparable to anything else. Why risk the potential disappointment of a mediocre deviation when I know I’m guaranteed perfection?”

Damn, that made so much sense. Why did it make me want to kiss him? Sweep everything—eggs royale included—to the floor and throw him onto the table.

The library was perfect. Utterly perfect. The epitome of an ancient hallowed chamber bulging with the knowledge of generations. Shelves lined every wall, floor to cathedral-height ceiling, crammed to near bursting point with books. Smaller shelves, tables, and trolleys were dotted around the place, fattened with even more books. The only natural light filtering into the space was through the glass skylights.

“Are you crying?” Claude asked me, as we stood in the doorway, too awestruck to step over the threshold and enter the room.

“Yes.” I wiped my face on the heel of my palm, not even remotely embarrassed. “I just really love books.”

Claude took my hand in his and guided me into the centre of the library.

I spun around in slow circles as I tried to take everything in and not let myself succumb to the totally overwhelming feelings. “Where do I begin?”

I ran my finger along the spines lining the closest shelf. Leather-bound tomes with gilt titles, some in foreign languages, some so old the leather had dried and flaked away. Fairy tales, and classic literature, and epic fables. It appeared I was in the fiction section.

Suddenly, I was so grateful for my two-thousand-year fae life expectancy. If I were human, there’d be no way I’d get through even a fraction of these. I’d still struggle with all the time I had left.

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