An Abundance of Sprouts

Claude

It turned out Sonny had written a great deal on mushrooms, and their various properties and benefits.

A. Great. Deal.

Like, he knew way more than me, an actual shroom fae. Waaaaaaaaay more. The margin of our knowledge was so vast it was frankly embarrassing.

Dozens of academic papers, hundreds of magazine articles and blog posts, and books—like proper hardbound books with photos of him on the cover and photos of him in the pages. And for some reason, even though the man was right next to me, every time I stumbled on a picture of him my insides did a weird upside-down, inside-out movement.

Worse still were the pictures of his muddy hands—sowing seeds, or planting, or just handling soil. I didn’t realise I had a dirty-fingers kink, but I often found myself needing to readjust my posture, or hold the tablet differently to hide certain involuntary bodily reactions I had to said hands.

While I read, Sonny paced. And he looked out of the windows, which were, of course, at exactly the correct height for him. And he attempted to complete the puzzle on my coffee table. And he visited my bathroom, running back into the lounge area with barely enough time for a decent hand wash to tell me how “my shower also drains into a butt in the walled garden,” and how he “can’t wait to use water flavoured with my filth on the tomatoes.”

After his outburst, he went quiet, said he was going to explore the house for a bit on his own, and asked if I wanted anything brought up from the kitchens.

I told him if Willow and Oggy were downstairs, I’d love a chai latte and a sandwich—any kind of sandwich, I wasn’t fussy.

With Sonny gone, I could focus on the text. And okay, be alone with the photos of his hands. Not that I was planning on doing anything with the photos, besides taking a few extra seconds to soak them in. Store them for later. Bank them up.

When Sonny returned approximately five hours later, the sky beyond the dick-turret windows was painted with stripes of pink and orange. I felt as though I’d learned so much, and yet nothing at all.

I tried to pluck a single new fact from my mind and failed, but I could hardly be blamed. He’d left me alone with pornography.

Sonny sat next to me again and an unfamiliar scent of lavender and lemongrass hit my nostrils. His hands were empty—no chai latte or sandwich. My stomach rumbled.

“Did you get lost?” I asked.

Sonny laughed. “Yes. Several times! I found a spa. A spa, Claude, with a steam room and a jet pool and a log cabin with a little crackling fire and a fucking tropical-rainforest room. I found a library too, but I couldn’t open the door. This place is incredible. There’s an aquarium. Seahorses big as chimps. Made eye contact with one. Pretty sure it was trying to communicate with me, or steal all my thoughts. Gave me the ick, so I left.”

I opened my mouth to say something about the spa or the creepy seahorses, but another thought popped into my head. “You found the library?”

Ever since Oggy and Willow had mentioned it a few days ago, I had been looking for that library, but to no avail. Figured it would be a great place to start my research on this house and its odd magic. Maybe it would even tell me what the ritual involved, though I wasn’t hopeful given the shroom laws. But I’d also hazard a guess none of those books contained distracting, risqué photos of Sonny’s filthy fingers.

“How do you know it was the library if you couldn’t open the door?” I asked.

“There was a blinking neon sign that read LIbrARY and an arrow.”

I laughed, figured he was joking, until I remembered he was fae, like me, and therefore wasn’t able to lie. “And the door wouldn’t open?”

“Nope. Locked. But there was no keyhole. It’s probably a magic thing. Maybe it will open for you?”

“Do you remember where it was? Could you take me? Like, now?”

He scratched at the back of his head again. Wrinkled up his face. “Maybe? It was right next to the room with the model trains.”

“What?” I was on my feet and already marching towards the door, the tablet abandoned on the couch. Did I have time for my shoes? No, no time. Slippers it was.

Sonny caught me up at the bottom of the staircase. “Uh... I think it was this way. Wait, are we looking for the library or the model trains?”

“Yes,” I replied.

We searched for over an hour. Sonny would run off ahead like an eager puppy out on walkies. He would open random doors, peer inside, sometimes pulling a face at whatever he’d witnessed, and sometimes slamming the door in such haste I was fearful he might lose a finger.

“Was it . . . Or maybe . . . This way . . . ?”

The sky was dark outside the windows. Occasionally, we saw a glimpse of the easternmost moon—the pink one. We’d reached the end of a narrow corridor which had only one door. A sign spelled out:

HIGH VOLTAGE. DO NOT ENTER

IMMEDIATE DANGER OF EXCRUCIATING DEATH AND/OR brUSSELS SPROUTS

“But what does that even mean?” Sonny said, studying the sign. “Actually... never mind.” He shook his head.

“That’s probably the wisest decision, given the curveballs this house throws at you. Sometimes literally.”

Sonny smiled, and yet again I found myself staring at those lips of his.

“I happen to really like sprouts, though,” he said.

“Me too,” I agreed. “They get such a bad rep. Just because they’re small and bitter doesn’t mean they’re unlovable.”

Sonny’s grin stretched wider across his face. His tongue darted out to wet his lips, and my whole body went into fight-or-flight mode. Except I did neither of those things—I froze. My heart stopped beating, my lungs wouldn’t function. The only things that seemed to work were my sweat glands.

All of them.

Gods, I hope he didn’t think I was talking about myself. I genuinely meant the vegetables. Sure, I was bitter, but at six foot, I wasn’t exactly small.

Unlovable, though. Why had I said that?

Maybe there was a therapist’s office somewhere in the chaos of this house.

Luckily, Sonny’s stomach rumbled so loudly it could have been picked up on a seismograph.

“All that sprout talk,” he said, placing a hand on his belly.

“We should locate the guest kitchens before we starve to death. Gods knows how long it’ll be before we find our way out of this labyrinth.”

Sonny nodded. “We can try again tomorrow. Do you reckon we might find books with information about the shroom magic?”

My gut churned again. Part hunger, part guilt. “It’s worth a try. It’s the only place I can think to start.”

“Me too,” he said. “What’s through here?” He stopped outside a plain panelled door. It looked like something you’d see in a hospital or office block.

“That wasn’t there five seconds ago.”

Tentatively, Sonny eased the door ajar. Chatter and laughter and cutlery tinkling against crockery greeted us, and warm, spicy, buttery onion scents that made my stomach groan louder than Sonny’s. The bed and breakfast’s dining room.

Oggy and Willow, with their now peach-coloured waves tucked into hairnets, busied themselves around the kitchen, feet tapping and heads bobbing along to the radio tunes.

At the far end of the dining room, John perched at a table littered with notepads and sticky notes and a couple of police files.

“He’s writing a book,” I whispered into Sonny’s ear as we shuffled into the space.

Sonny glanced at the papers. “Thriller? Mystery?” he whispered back.

“Memoir apparently, but don’t ask him about it unless you want some cockamamie hogwash story that will rob you of at least several hours.”

John looked up from his scribbles, beamed when he saw Sonny, and flicked his gaze between us. “It’s romance, actually,” he corrected, despite the impossibility of human ears having heard our whispers.

I motioned for Sonny and myself to sit at the table farthest away from John and his unsettlingly acute hearing.

“Shall we sit together?” Sonny asked, just as my ass was hovering a couple of inches from the seat of the chair, and just as I realised I’d chosen the only table in the entire dining room with a tablecloth, a vase of fresh tulips, and a fucking candle twinkling in the centre.

Dammit, I hope he didn’t think I’d done it on purpose. What if he thought I thought we were on a date?

Damn, damn, damn.

Too late to change my mind—because I’d look like an idiot—I sat all the way down, and Sonny pulled out the chair opposite me.

Gods, this was going to be awkward.

We heard the scrape of chair legs. John turned his entire body towards us, a smile stretched across his cheeks and a notepad poised on his knee. He held out his palm, making the universal gesture of as you were .

Despite Oggy telling me on my first day that the kitchens would be available for me to cook my own food in the evenings, both she and Willow had insisted on waiting on me every night. And supper had been just as good as breakfast, if not better, because it was always a mystery.

Usually I hated surprises—and change—but those two sentry fae seemed to produce the exact thing I’d been craving. Whatever I’d been craving.

“Evening, lads,” said Willow, appearing beside us. Today they wore a long green tunic with gilt embroidered birds around the collar. At least, I think it was Willow. “This is real cosy, no?” Yup, definitely Willow. “Get you something to drink?”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Please may I have—” Sonny began, but Willow had already turned on their tail and headed back to the kitchen.

“You don’t need to tell them what you want.” I placed my hand on Sonny’s wrist and immediately withdrew it. “They just know, somehow. Or the house knows. I’m not entirely sure.”

A few moments later, Willow returned with a dandelion and burdock for me and something pale yellow and sparkling in an elegant highball for Sonny. “I’ll be back in a moment with your food.”

“Thank you so much,” Sonny said, sipping his drink, his eyes going as round as saucers. “Um, what are we having? If it’s not too rude to ask. It’s just... I’m vegetar—”

“You must trust the process,” Willow replied before leaving us again.

Sonny’s brow furrowed. He bit his bottom lip.

“Try not to worry. It’s never been wrong for me before,” I said, and I resisted reaching across to grope him again.

“Did you learn much from my articles?” he asked.

My gaze dropped to his hands. One still cradled the base of his drink, the other rested atop his napkin. His fingertips idly traced the outer stitching.

Oh.

I had... reactions to them. To the gentleness of his movements.

Okay, sure, I was into dirty fingernails.

“What do you do again?” I asked, having semi-forgotten his original question.

“I’m a mycologist. I teach mushroomy things at Remy University.”

“But... why the seeds, and the plants, and the muddy hands?”

Sonny lifted his hands up, turned them over, examined his palms. Mine began sweating again, so I tucked them under my thighs.

“I’m obsessed with growing things, and using science to help grow those things. Natural science though, not chemicals. Who needs chemicals when nature and glamour do so much? Like fungi for example. Fungi is the thread that holds the natural world together. Did you know fungi can communicate with trees?”

“You mentioned it.”

He chuckled and slotted those dirty fingers between each other. “Without fungi, there would be no plants, or animals, or humans, or fae. I really fucking love mushrooms.”

In this light, and with his black eyes, it was difficult to tell what was iris and what was pupil, but I could have sworn they were more dilated. His blush had returned and his lips parted by a sliver.

More reactions happened to my body, and not only in my pants area. My abdominal muscles tightened, the tiny hairs on my arms rose to attention. I wasn’t one to invite conversation—with anyone, regardless of the situation—so it was a novel experience for me when I leaned forward in my chair and half whispered, “Tell me more.”

A small cough from beside us pulled me out of the moment so quickly I almost got whiplash. Willow held a plate in each hand. They raised a single brow, passed their gaze over Sonny and me, and their eyes went wide, as though they’d just caught us in a compromising situation.

Willow set a plate down in front of Sonny. “My apologies for interrupting.” They set mine down too.

“Not at all,” Sonny said, leaving me to wonder if I’d been in that moment alone. He glanced down at his plate and let out a bark of laughter. “Uh...”

I did the same.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Willow said, bobbing their weight from one foot to the other. “This is the first time Oggy has ever not fully trusted the process.”

I didn’t blame her. It must have been odd cooking that. But at that moment, I couldn’t imagine anything I fancied more.

“Sprouts, seven ways,” Willow declared, with a somewhat hesitant edge to their voice.

Sautéed sprouts. Grilled sprouts. Shredded sprouts in some kind of slaw. Breaded sprouts with what smelled like a parmesan crust. Smashed sticky-glazed sprouts. And a sprout and—I gave another sniff—fennel puree with more sprouts to dip.

“This is my fault. After we found the sprouts room, I developed a very severe craving for them,” Sonny said.

“Yeah, no, same,” I said, letting him know I was just as guilty in the manifestation of tonight’s dinner. “I’m gonna have to sleep with the windows open tonight.”

“Oh, my gods!” He threw back his head and laughed.

I decidedly did not stare at the column of his throat, or his Adam’s apple, or the shadow of stubble along his jaw.

Once Sonny’s mirth had subsided, he regarded me over a crispy-coated sprout speared on the end of his fork. “You’re a lot different from what I’d thought you’d be.”

“Different how?”

“Well, I was always told that shroom fae don’t...” He gave a nervous laugh. “That you guys don’t know how to have any fun. I thought the guy on the train, the one who prints my tickets and grunts and orders me to take my feet off the table... I thought that was you. But here you are making fart jokes.”

I wanted to tell him the same. That he was different. But Sonny was everything I’d imagined he’d be, and I realised in that moment, I’d imagined it way more often than I cared to admit. He was warmth, and lightness, and optimism, and passion, and rosy cheeks, and crooked smiles, and sexy, filthy fingers.

“I guess I was wrong about you, too,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I assumed, because of your type, you’d . . .”

“I’d what?”

“That you would be more of a...” I winced, couldn’t get the word out. I should know better, judging someone based on harmful stereotypes. Accusing them of wrongdoing.

Sonny shook his head. Plunged his hand into his pockets and placed a crystal salt cruet on the table. “Admittedly, I have a problem.” He reached into his other pocket and removed a glossy jigsaw-puzzle piece taken from my coffee table.

“Hey, that’s a corner piece!”

“I return everything. Eventually. I just can’t seem to stop myself from doing it. If it’s pretty and shiny and fits in the palm of my hand, it’s especially susceptible to my five-finger discount.” He let out a long sigh. “If that’s gonna be a big problem, I understand. I—”

“No,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly. “It’s not going to be a problem. But just so you know, I expect the things you’ve stolen from me to be returned once we’ve figured out this house-magic problem.”

“Right, yeah. The house magic.”

Seconds later, a sharp noise which could only be described as a bomb going off in a piano shop echoed above us, followed by a woman screaming.

“JASPER! YOU ABSOLUTE CRETIN! GET YOUR SORRY ASS HERE THIS INSTANT!”

With that, John leapt to his feet, and Willow and Oggy raced out of the kitchen.

“Mrs Ziegler’s coming. Go, boys! Save yourselves!” Willow said, ushering us out of our seats and towards the exit.

“WHEN I FIND YOU, I’M GOING TO SKIN YOU ALIVE AND BIND EVERY BOOK IN MY LIbrARY WITH YOUR HIDEOUS HIDE!”

“Go, go, go!” Oggy cried.

So Sonny and I ran. Into the bowels of the house, down corridors, up staircases, laughing and giggling like two kids playing knock down ginger. The deeper we got, the quieter the screams became. We didn’t stop until we reached the top of the spiral staircase that led to our rooms. Okay, that felt weird. It was only one room—my room—this morning.

“I’ve lived in this house now for almost a week,” I said between gasps of breath. “No joke, this is the fourth time I’ve run away from... Mrs Ziegler.” I didn’t say her name, I mouthed it instead. A habit I’d learned from Oggy and Willow.

“If she’s anywhere near as frightening as Jasper, then I’d say that’s understandable,” Sonny said. He was less winded than me. Didn’t have to take as many steps with those ultra-long legs of his.

“Oh, my gods, you call him Jasper? She’s easily a thousand times scarier than Mr Dupont.”

“Shit, really?” Sonny said. His hand hovered above the door handle of his room. “I’ve enjoyed my first day at Stinkhorn Manor. Thank you for accidentally inviting me here and for not kicking me out this afternoon. I need to...” He turned the knob and creaked the door open. “Call my colleague at uni, tell him I didn’t wind up as a hellhound snack, and ask if he can take on some of my lectures for a while.”

I nodded, wanted to ask him more, invite him into my lounge to continue the discussion on him, his appropriation of other people’s property, and our mutual love of sprouts, but I couldn’t muster the courage. “Sure, well, I guess I’ll see you at breakfast. Unless Mrs Z has destroyed the B&B before then.”

“I can’t hear the screaming anymore. That has to be a good sign, right?”

“It’s usually pretty quiet in these parts. I get the sense the rest of the guests avoid the main house.”

“Goodnight then, Claude.” Sonny flashed me one of his shyer smiles, and I almost choked on my own spit.

I stumbled backwards, knocking into the door frame in my haste to both run away from the situation and keep Sonny within my peripherals for as long as possible.

“Goodnight, Sonny,” I said, but only after he’d closed his door behind him and I was standing in the dimly lit corridor alone.

I retired to my room where I washed, ignored my aching, attention-seeking dick, dressed in my pyjamas, snuggled onto the couch, and nestled the stolen corner piece back into its spot.

Professor Sonny Daye.

The Professor Daye. From the emails.

I reached for the abandoned eSlate and brought the emails up. The only clues to his real identity were the acknowledgment of mushrooms and his super-long legs. Some of the messages were signed S. But there was no mention of the name Sonny.

Of all the mycologists, why him? How did his business card end up in my wallet?

But the weirdest thing was, I couldn’t decide if I was still irritated with him for stealing my cufflink, or secretly thrilled at the prospect of spending one, two, three, however many weeks in his company.

He made my heart beat in a strange, erratic new rhythm, and my palms sweat, and... he made me smile. More than once.

I switched off the lamp next to the couch and had begun my short walk to the mezzanine staircase when a knock at the door reverberated through the room.

I opened the door and there he stood.

He gave a nervous laugh. Scratched at the back of his head. “Can I sleep on your couch? Please? Funny story, the chair in my room, the one I was going to sleep on... well, it vanished.”

Or at least, that was what I thought he’d said. Because Sonny stood in the hallway with tousled, shower-wet hair and a crumpled pink T-shirt which read Sleazy for Naps in loopy green writing. Long, pale, hairy, and very naked legs poked out from the hem of his shirt. He’d placed a hand strategically over the front of his boxers.

Professor Sonny Daye was standing at my bedroom door in his underwear.

He began speaking, but it took a moment for my fuzzy brain to catch up. “I rang Mash. He was off his tits as per, so I just left him a message and I’ll try again tomorrow afternoon. Then I put a blanket and a cushion on the chair, had a shower, and when I came out, everything had disappeared. The chair, the blanket, the cushion. I’m sorry. Can I crash on your couch for tonight and I’ll find something more suitable in the morning?”

Don’t look at his junk. Don’t look at his thighs. “Sure, of course. Come in.”

Sonny was barely a foot inside my room when the door slammed itself closed.

Don’t look at his ass. Dear gods, do not look at his ass. “I’ll get you a blanket,” I said, busying myself in the opposite direction from Sonny’s half-nakedness.

“Uh, Claude?”

“Yeah,” I called out, bundling a puffy quilt from a blanket box into my arms and dropping it almost immediately after turning towards Sonny.

“Your couch is missing too.”

“What?” I said, even though I saw it with my own eyes. Four little circles were imprinted into the shag where the feet of the sofa had been. I glanced up at my four-poster bed on the mezzanine. Still there. Still huge.

“You said the house is magic, right?” Sonny asked. I nodded, unable to form words. “Do you perhaps get the sense it wants us to share a bed?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Let out a lungful of air. “Yes. I think that’s exactly what it wants.”