Page 60 of Shroom for Improvement

The answer was for both Sonny’s and Jenny’s questions.

Sonny and I settled in my bed, taking up the same positions as the night before. I tried not to breathe in the shower-fresh scent of him. His clean, mossy incense smell. Was it his soap, or his shampoo, or justhissmell? In any case, it was doing all sorts of funny things to my body, which I largely pretended weren’t happening.

I lamented not using the same time to shower, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I liked morning showers, where I would be fresh for a day on the underground trains. Where my skin would be warmed and soft and ready to shave. But now I was getting paranoid that I hadn’t washed the day’s stink off me, and poor Sonny would have to breathe in my musty funk all night.

“Do I stink?” I blurted. Sonny pulled his brows together, tilted his head to the side. “I can go shower if you want me to.”

“You don’t have to. I like the way you smell,” he said, before closing his eyes in a slow blink and grimacing.

Neither of us spoke for a few seconds, possibly minutes. Sonny’s comment echoed through my memory. He was fae. He couldn’t lie. Which meant... he did like the way I smelled.

If Jenny could tell I had a crush on Sonny, maybe it’d be able to say if the reverse was true as well.

Sonny eventually broke the silence. “Did I get taller, or does this bed seem smaller to you?”

“Jenny?!” I yelled. “I am this close”—I held my thumb and forefinger out like I was holding a golf ball—“to getting the overground back to Borderlands and letting you dissolve into compost.”

The bed grew by ten centimetres each way.

The house groaned. “I’m just trying to help a guy out. When was the last time Little Claude—ha! That’s not accurate, is it? When was the last time Not-So-Little Claude saw any action?”

I pretended not to hear the house.

“So, tomorrow, I thought we could go to the ley lines and...” Sonny began.

“Try shit out,” we both said.

I had an idea. “Jenny, would we know if we stumbled across the right thing? Like, would there be any sign?”

“Oh, you’ll know,” Jenny said.

“What did it say?” Sonny asked.

“It said yes, we’ll know.”

Sonny’s eyes lit up. He sat upright, and the covers tumbled into his lap. “How will we know? What will happen?”

“He’s a scientist. He’ll work it out,” Jenny said.

“You can’t tell us, can you?” I asked.

To which Jenny mimicked my voice, made it higher pitched, whinier.“You can’t tell us, can you? Whaaaah.”

Sonny watched my expression closely, his black eyes trained on my face, a ghost of a smile echoing around his mouth. Damn, he was gorgeous.

“It can’t or won’t help us,” I said. Based on what Willow and Oggy had told me about the house, I’d wager the latter was true. Maybe it was deliberately sabotaging things.

But, no . . . that would be so stupid.

As though Sonny read my thoughts, he said, “Seems self-destructive, but whatever.” He sighed and relaxed against theheadboard. The back of his head hit the wooden slats, and he closed his eyes.

My eyes followed the curve of his jaw, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed on his swallow, the long line of his neck, his collarbone, the way the fabric of his sleep tee hung over the contours of his chest. And I swallowed too, my mouth suddenly very dry.

Sharing a bed with Sonny for the next month or two and not being able to “release the tension” was going to be one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do.

Literally.

I whined, and face-palmed at my accidental pun.

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