Page 120 of Shroom for Improvement

I groaned out loud and scrubbed a hand down my face. “I guess I am. Out of curiosity, when did you notice the change?”

“When you came back from the lagoon,” it said.

“Yep.” Sounded about right. I wanted to ask if Sonny felt the same, if Jenny could sense the shift in his soul too, but I bit my tongue. I wasn’t a masochist. Either answer would hurt beyond anything I was capable of tolerating. Either my love was unrequited and Sonny didn’t feel the same, or he did, but was still planning on returning to Remy.

Not that it was a choice for him, but it would kill me to know he would ache as I would.

I needed to stay here and protect the house and its occupants from greedy developers like Mr Greene, and Sonny needed to go off and save the Eight and a Half Kingdoms fromself-destruction. We would lead separate lives, down separate paths. This was how it was meant to be.

But I still had three weeks with him. Well, just under three weeks. I would make the most of those days.

I practiced lightning magic at the ley lines. Day after day. From the second I left the breakfast table to the moment either Oggy, Willow, or Sonny came to fetch me for dinner. I practiced in the heatwaves and in the rain, and everything in between. I was getting better. Could conjure clouds and the accompanying thunder, and I could make the lightning crackle from one palm to another. But I was yet to create a powerful enough burst to strike the stone tablet like before. I’d get there. I was sure of it.

I hardly saw the residents of the guest house, which was both a blessing and somewhat disconcerting. Occasionally, John sat with me in the paddock and made indecipherable notes into his jotter. Sometimes he would tell me about Mrs Ziegler and Mr Dupont’s antics.

Mr Dupont had not taken well to the pissy hay stuffed into his mattress and had responded by boring an inch-wide hole in Mrs Ziegler’s bedroom wall, feeding a pipe through said hole, and pumping a metric tonne of methane into it.

In return, she had drugged him and filed his two front teeth into stumps. Consequently, he was now talking with a lisp. John said it was surprisingly endearing.

Mr Dupont’s revenge came in the form of a priest, whom he’d paid to follow Mrs Ziegler around Stinkhorn Manor, continually absolving her of her crimes. Mrs Ziegler found this maddening enough to smash Mr Dupont’s monster truck into a mangled pile of black and red metal.

He’d cried, apparently. I tried to imagine a lisping, nine-foot fire daemon weeping. Failed.

I was always thankful when I’d created enough magic to make it rain, and John, not wanting to get his “life’s work” wet, would huff and return indoors.

Sonny spent his time in the library with his head buried in ancient tomes. Or in his lab, his neck bent over the microscope. Or on his laptop, chatting with his students. Or in the allotment, tending to the veg. This, he claimed, was to decompress. Though he said he enjoyed everything and loved it here at Stinkhorn Manor.

So, I didn’t get to see that much of him during the day.

But after dinner, that was our time.

We wasted not a second of it. Exploring every ridge, every divot, every angle of each other’s bodies, with our fingertips, our tongues, our cocks.

Jenny complained every single time we asked it to make itself scarce, yet it never failed to supply us with a romantic atmosphere. Mood lighting, candles, music, gallons of lube. It provided us with interesting settings for us to fuck in. Not only a bed or a couch, but a beach, a snow-stranded cabin with a roaring log fire, the open-block shower cubicle of some team-sports locker room, the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie theatre, a stopped-mid-air cable car.

Sonny enjoyed being tied up, I’d learned. And edged. He fucking loved being edged until he was shaking, crying, begging for release. And he loved it when I took care of him afterwards. Cleaned him up and stroked his hair, and carried him back to the bed.

“You’re stronger than you look,” he’d said.

“It’s all the eggs royale I’m eating. So much protein.”

And then in the morning, after waking up in my bed in each other’s arms, we would slow fuck. With the sheets pulledright over our heads, blocking out all the early sun, making a space that was only for Sonny and me.

Except we weren’t fucking. Again, we were making love. And neither of us pretended it was anything else.

Sometimes Sonny woke up with a full beard and other times he didn’t. It was odd and there was no rhyme or reason to it, but we’d come to accept it as just another weird phenomenon that happened in this house. He looked incredible either way.

Over the last few weeks, Jenny seemed quieter than before, more withdrawn. It didn’t make as many snide or sassy comments, didn’t ask random questions as frequently, didn’t seem to want to talk about my dick as much.

I figured, like everyone else, it was feeling the sorrow of Sonny’s impending abscondment.

“Can we trick him into staying?” I whispered to Jenny one morning after Sonny disappeared to shower before breakfast.

But Jenny never replied. And I didn’t hear from the house after that.

The Asshole House

Jenny

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