Page 16 of Shroom for Improvement

“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 theirvarying 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, aplant 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.

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