Motherfucking Dimples

Sonny

Most people’s collections comprised stamps, or coins, or toy cars, or dusty bottles of wine, or squishy stuffed bears, or books, or galleries of nearly priceless artworks, or notches on a bedpost.

Not mine. I had two collections.

The first was located on my apartment building’s rooftop, at the back of my allotment, shielded by fence panels. And the second, well...

I sat in the cramped nook between the end of my bed and the forty-five degree sloping floor-to-ceiling windows, and laid the objects out in front of me. On the window ledge, because I liked the way the early evening sun glittered off them.

A centimetre-sized circular white enamel pin with a golden number ten in the centre.

An orange enamel pin with a silver number twenty-five—my favourite.

A sterling-silver hexagonal pin with an embossed image of a train.

A stainless steel L-shaped crank handle from a U-Rail ticket machine.

Another stainless steel L-shaped crank handle, which had replaced the original missing one.

Three golden buttons stamped with UR, taken from the cuffs of a UR-issued conductor’s jacket (not at the same time).

One mother-of-pearl button, taken from the collar of a UR-issued button down.

A steam-train-shaped key chain made from pewter, complete with a puffy cloud of steam and probably his actual front door key—I should definitely have returned that one.

A black plastic name tag, with gold-coloured lettering spelling out C. Stinkhorn.

A fancy, dark green fountain pen, also etched with the name C. Stinkhorn.

And now, a penny-sized gold-mushroom cufflink. Twenty-four-carat gold, in fact. It was heavy and beautiful. A family heirloom for all I knew.

Shit. I was a terrible person. I didn’t know why I couldn’t just... not steal from him. And then why I couldn’t return his things either. People who knew me knew to expect some degree of item relocation. But with Claude, for some completely unfathomable reason—and definitely not because I needed him for my research, or because I had a tiny, teensy weensy, microscopic, so small you couldn’t even clearly define it, crush on him—I couldn’t give them back.

They were pretty—his things—and I liked pretty things. They made me feel warm and cosy and homely, as though I were building a nest. Perhaps I should not have found solace in Claude’s possessions, but I did, and I couldn’t see myself stopping anytime soon.

I would return them. All of them. For definite. But... not right away.

I did, however, have plans to return his cufflink the very next morning on the eight-thirty to Downtown Remy, only Claude never showed up. Three years and he hadn’t missed a single day of work, and now he just... wasn’t there.

Exactly where he was supposed to be.

Where I’d always waited for him.

All along, my plan had been to steal his cufflink and alert him to that fact, getting him all riled up and annoyed, so the next day he would march straight up to me and demand what for. Thereby creating the perfect-ish scenario for us to finally chat—for me to finally convince him to go on a date with me.

Academically speaking, of course.

I’d built myself up to it. No longer dancing around my nervous chatter, I would have come clean about my research project and admitted how three years of attempting conversation with him had all been for science.

Yep, for science. Definitely nothing else.

This morning, I had caught the train like I usually did, despite not even needing to be at the university, and hey, guess what? He hadn’t been there again. The man never took a day off, and suddenly it was four days in a row.

I’d asked Patricia why Claude was so uncharacteristically absent and had she any idea when he’d return, and her response was, “Who?”

I let my head hit the end of the mattress and released a sigh. What was I meant to do for two whole weeks until term started again? Go in to work still? Get the train every morning in the hopes Claude was just taking a few days’ rest? Go into the lab, and stare at the same data I’d been staring at for years? Hope that something, anything, will mean first-hand research is obsolete? Or look for another shroom fae to experiment on? It was difficult finding the first one, but there had to be others. I could try other cities, maybe. Or other grotty, gross U-Rail stations.

I’d wasted three years of my life trying to get one shroom fae to agree to have a fucking coffee with me. I couldn’t stand to waste another three.

Maybe it was time to fuck my entire project in the bin and think up something else? I’d exhausted every piece of literature about mushroom magic I’d gotten my hands on. Not that there was a lot.

But I didn’t want to quit.

I’d come so far, and if I could help someone, somehow... if it held answers...

Surely it was not a want or a need, but a duty.

So maybe I wouldn’t give up, at least not yet, but I definitely needed a break. Claude would be there in two weeks’ time, just as present and steadfast and reliable and miserable as ever, on the eight-thirty to Downtown. I’ll let him give me a bollocking then, and afterwards, I will demand a date—

Not a date.

An academic interview.

My phone buzzed, and I glanced at the screen.

Mash:

You coming tonight, or what?

I gathered all my breath in puffed-up cheeks and let it out really slowly. Maybe a break was just what I needed. A chance to not think about all of this for a night. Maybe I would drink from Mash’s big yellow keg, get absolutely wankered, and forcefully scrub these thoughts from my mind. Or maybe I’d meet a cute guy—we’d hit it off, fool around, fall in love, get married at Gryphon World, and I’d forget all about Claude.

What did Mash say Marnie’s friend was called again? Josh? Was it Josh?

Me:

Sure. Need me to pick anything up on my way?

Mash Cassidy lived in Waterside, not too far from my own apartment. Just across the river, in fact.

I chose my building based on the communal rooftop allotments and the beautiful view out over the docks and piers, but Mash chose his because of its proximity to the bars, and nightclubs, and gyms, and generally anywhere he deemed decent “hunting” ground. So it was always bedlam in the few blocks surrounding his place. Pure noise pollution, and light pollution, and smell pollution—if that was even a real thing—and actual pollution. Like takeaway-food litter, empty cans and bottles of whatever, and people using the streets as toilets.

Mash loved it. I think he still considered himself a student at heart. I was probably too old for it all now, but Mash was insatiable. He was the horniest person I knew, and a hedonistic fucker to boot. And while this meant his parties were usually lots of fun and very well attended, he sometimes lagged somewhat when it came to effort invested in our friendship.

I couldn’t say I minded too much. We were colleagues more so than friends, and I didn’t often have cause for complaint on that front. He was never late. He was reliable. He always pulled his weight. It was just... I wished the relationship was more reciprocal. I wished we could do things I enjoyed sometimes. Like hiking, or gardening, or sitting by an open log fire with a good book and a great glass of wine. Not every outside-of-work interaction needed to end with Mash vomiting in a bush, or off his tits on party drugs, or abandoning me in some grimy little hovel of a bar because he’d met a human woman with a knotting kink.

They were his Achilles’ heel—human women.

Sometimes I even questioned the validity of his work ethics. Did he care about saving the planet? Or was it the “I’m a professor of dendrology at Remy University” pickup line that sold the profession to him? And the easy access to the students?

I shuddered and buzzed myself into Mash’s building.

“Good evening, Dr Daye,” said Roobyn, the doorman. He held his hands over the tops of his jacket pockets. An instinctive, reflexive move he probably wasn’t conscious of. Still, it never escaped my notice when people did that. Which they did almost the second they spotted my iridescent black hair and ghostly white skin.

Going by the trinkets on my window ledge, they had every reason to.

“He’s here!” Mash cried as soon as I walked through his wide-open front door. He slung an arm around me and pulled my head down into his furry neck. He was already swaying, already reeking of booze. “Mate, Joshsiswaiting foryou,” he whispered, his words sliding into each other. “You’re not going home alone tonight.” He planted a disgusting, sloppy kiss on my cheek.

I pushed him off me.

Mash grabbed my face with one hand, smushing my lips together. “Forget about that mushroom bellend for one night, yeah? Oh, fuck, there’s Marnie. Hey, Mars!”

And then the bastard left me standing by the door like a total lemon. I should have expected nothing less.

“You, uh, you must be Sonny.” A guy appeared on my right, or perhaps he’d been there all along. He scratched the back of his head, looked down at his feet, then back up to me, and offered me a smile—which may have been coy, or it may have been affected coy. Nevertheless, it was fucking effective. Suddenly, I was no longer so pissed off with Mash.

“And, are you Josh?” I asked.

He flashed that smile again. “I get the feeling we’re being set up.”

Josh was human, about six-five, Black, gym-hewn muscles, and cute. Super cute. Like cartoon-deer-level cute. He had enormous brown eyes, and his features were all smooth lines and edges and geometrically agreeable angles. I already wanted to brush my fingertips all over them. And he had dimples. Motherfucking dimples.

I didn’t really have a “type.” I liked all sorts of people—different genders, different body shapes, different species—but the oxytocin my brain released whenever it saw dimples, put any adult owner of them firmly within the classification of my “type.”

Claude didn’t have dimples. Or maybe he did, but I’d never seen him smile, so how would I know if they were there?

But why did I now need to find that out?

“I brought craft ale!” I practically shouted, shaking the thought of Claude’s hypothetical dimples, and holding up the overpriced, probably grainy as hell beers I’d bought from the indie brewery a few blocks away. “Do you like hipster swill, Josh?”

He laughed, his dimples all dimpling. “Sure.”

“Come on,” I said, guiding him through the chaos of Mash’s apartment, through the floor-vibrating techno music Mash had blaring from his wall of speakers, through the crowds of students and the younger members of the department in their varying states of inebriation, to the relatively quiet-by-contrast balcony.

“So, you work with Mash?” Josh seated himself on a slatted wooden sun lounger. I took the one next to him and handed him a bottle of ale. He cracked the lid off on the edge of Mash’s railing. He’d obviously been here before. Nobody would know to use the lip of the third railing down as a bottle opener if they hadn’t been here before. It annoyed me for some reason. I didn’t know why. “You teach, what was it, something about trees?”

“No, that’s Mash’s area of expertise. I teach mycology,” I said. Josh frowned at me. “The study of mushrooms.” I pulled the hem of my T-shirt down, straightening the material so Josh saw the full design. A screen print of a stylised, winking mushroom giving a thumbs up while driving a bumper car at a funfair. The text read: I’m a fun guy. “Specifically, mycelium, the network of underground fungi and its overall importance to the soil.”

“You . . .” Josh cleared his throat. “Mushrooms? Oh . . . kay.”

I got that a lot. I feigned a smile and cracked the lid off my own beer. “I really enjoy it, though. Love mushrooms. Could wax lyrical about them.” Please let me wax lyrical about them. Please. No? Inwardly, I sighed. “What about you? Mash said you teach law?”

Josh nodded.

“What is it about law that gets you up every day?”

“The money.” Josh laughed, and his face lit up. “Not gonna lie, it’s boring as fuck, but the pay is decent, and the hours are great.”

Gods, he was gorgeous. I chose to ignore the weird nagging, doubting sensation in my gut. He took a sip of his beer and placed the bottle on a tiny spindly table. It was, in fact, a plant stand, but Mash had always maintained it was for resting your drink on. Josh watched me for a few moments. His gaze travelled from the ends of my scruffy skate trainers—not that I ever skateboarded anymore, despite it being an eco-friendly and fun mode of transport—to the top of my also scruffy hair, and came to land on my mouth.

“You know, Mash told me I’d have to watch my wallet around you.” Josh moved his hand onto my wrist. He stroked soft, slow circles with his thumb.

“Did he now?” Another thing I’d become accustomed to. People pre-warning their friends about me. “Heads up, this guy will steal from you.” I never expected it from Mash, though. Or maybe I should have. Maybe I’d been blinkering myself.

Josh leant closer. His leg brushed against mine. His boozy breath filled the space between us. He’d obviously been at the party a lot longer than I had. “But I said to Mash, what if I didn’t care about my wallet? What if I want him to take something else? Everything else.”

Before I had a moment to think about this, Josh closed all the gaps between us and crashed his mouth into mine. I hesitated for a second, and kissed him back. He tasted like beer and candy, and his lips were soft and hot... and skilful. As though he’d done this a million times before. As though muscle memory had taken over and he wasn’t even trying or thinking about it. His tongue was in my mouth, sliding against my own, and his fingers threaded into the back of my hair.

And in that moment, everything was perfect. He was perfect, and nothing else mattered.

There was no project. No paper. No research. No shroom fae. No experiments. No shiny copper curls. No eight-thirty to Downtown. No stolen cufflinks. No burning urge to map hitherto uncharted dimples.

Josh couldn’t be further from Claude. He was human, and he smiled, and he’d kissed me within twenty minutes of meeting me. And he was here with me right now, and Claude wasn’t, and... I should just stop thinking about that bloody shroom fae.

I let my hands travel down the back of Josh’s shirt, feeling the damp warmth of his muscles through the fabric. His fingers wove higher into my hair. We pulled apart.

“You’re really fucking good at that,” he panted into my mouth, his eyes slightly unfocused.

“Three hundred years of practice,” I replied. “So, what do you want to do now?”

“Take me back to your place. And fuck me.”

I was already on my feet.