Page 72 of Shroom for Improvement

After breakfast, we came back to my room to practise the teacup glamour. Sonny brought me a small glass beaker filled with what looked like cold tea, no milk.

“What’s this?”

“It’s water, with ten mils of lion’s mane tincture,” he said. I raised a brow. “It’s a mushroom, has incredible abilities to help you focus. Clears brain fog like nobody’s business.”

“Sure.” Why ever not? I drained it in one. Tasted a little rubbery, but not too unpleasant.

“The glamour is the same principle as last time,” Sonny said, picking up the teacup and effortlessly swirling the tea leaves into a tiny tornado inside it. “Only this time, all you need to do is whoosh the leaves about. We’ll start with dry leaves because they’re lighter, and when you’ve mastered that, we’ll move to wet ones.” He smiled at me as though it was all super simple, and it probably was. But I guessed now he’d learn just how inept I was at any form of glamour.

“So, I feel, not think?”

“Exactly. You got it,” he said, smiling at me.

“Can we talk at the same time? I have a lot of gossip.” I paused, doubt flitted through my mind. “Wait, Jenny, am I allowed to tell him everything you said?”

“Of course,” Jenny replied. “And there’s so much more where that came from.”

Sonny looked at me, eyes wide, eyebrows raised, an expectant smile playing on his mouth. So I told him everything Jenny had told me in the bathroom. About MrsZiegler-slash-Hades and her imprisonment, about Mr Dupont and his attempts to sabotage Stinkhorn Manor, even about John not being human.

“Knew there was something off about that guy,” he said.

“Same. What’s with that fucking notebook?”

Sonny shrugged, laughed, and I concentrated hard on trying to make the leaves swirl. We stayed mostly silent for the rest of the morning. Sonny lounged on the couch next to me. Occasionally, he would sit forward in excitement, but when he realised the leaves hadn’t moved of their own accord, and it was in fact my resigned breaths that caused them to stir, he would relax again, and say something along the lines of, “Not to worry. You’ll get it soon enough. I believe in you.”

Which caused all manner of emotions to churn in my stomach like an emotion soup. Scepticism, doubt, frustration, but also pride, because he must have believed I could do it. He was fae. He wouldn’t be able to say that if it weren’t the truth.

We paused only for bathroom breaks and for lunch at around one o’clock. At three, Sonny said we should call it a day as his ass was falling asleep from sitting too much. Since I was attempting not to think about Sonny’s ass and I still hadn’t even so much as made a leaf quiver, I agreed without hesitation. For the rest of the afternoon and evening we wandered the grounds and halls of Stinkhorn Manor, trying to find the library, or the room with the model trains, or else any sign of the Earth Bells.

As per, Jenny was about as helpful as an edgeless, six-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a blue, cloudless sky. We found nothing. No library, no model-train room, no tiny mushroom folk.

After dinner, we got changed into our PJs. Sonny had a shower because he preferred to wash the day off rather than sleep in it.

“I’m usually all sweaty and muddy, and it feels so icky at night,” he’d said. And then we climbed into bed, and Sonny continued to tell me about improving soil health, and how to create good microbes in the soil.

I turned onto my side so I could watch the way his lips moved over the words. He had a barely there lisp, which I hadn’tnoticed until I studied the movements of his mouth, but now heard plain as day. His tongue would just peek out from behind his teeth over the letters S and C (when pronounced like an S). I wondered if he’d sucked his thumb when his teeth were forming. It was freaking adorable and made my chest feel achy.

As though moving of its own accord, my hand crept along under the covers, into the no-man’s-land between us. I left it there, in case—my heart beat faster at the thought—Sonny wanted to press his against mine.

He didn’t, but I left it there regardless.

And every night since.

The Dusty Courtyard

Sonny

I checked the coast was clear—it was—and I relieved my bladder onto my pee-bale, now situated in the walled gardens. Over the past two weeks—though it may have been more, may have been less, difficult to keep track of the days in Stinkhorn Manor—my pee-bale had been alternating between the gardens and the paddock where the ley lines met.

Claude spent most of his time practicing weather glamour, switching between the teacup in his rooms and the storm magic in the field. It was going frustratingly slowly, but I tried not to let it register on my features. Claude hadn’t so much as conjured a drop of rain or a gust strong enough to blow a single tea leaf. I was starting to worry he might not have it in him.

After day seven or eight, he sent me away.“Go and find the library, or go do some gardening or something. I can’t concentrate with you around.”

I tried not to think too much about his dismissal. Did he mean I was a distraction in a bad way? Or, well, not a good way, but... a good way? Like, did he like me?

So, that was what I did. I planned and recorded lectures, and logged into the university’s online system to chat with students, and I worked in the gardens. I scattered wildflower seeds on all the bare patches of soil, and watered them in with Claude’s butt water. I didn’t have any good compost to hand, but I’d found a decent-sized empty area behind the walled gardens where I could create the beginnings of a compost yard.

Jenny had provided me with timber and some tarps, and basically everything I needed, and I built a row of bays to start the new compost off. Jenny had also given me a wormery, so it wouldn’t be long before the quality of the soil began improving.

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