“Apparently.” She grins at my expression. “The fungi recognize genetic markers somehow. It’s like underground nepotism. The forest playing favorites based on DNA.”
Underground nepotism.
Family preference systems.
Resource allocation based on connection.
Fuck, that hits closer to home than she realizes. My father’s entire business philosophy was nepotism and extraction. Take what’s yours, fuck everyone else. The Falk family legacy built on exactly that principle.
“What’s the practical application?” I ask, steering away from thoughts of my father.
“Well, it suggests that reforestation efforts should consider genetic diversity differently than we have been.” She’s animated now, gesturing with her hands. “If you plant all related seedlings together, they might support each other better initially. But you lose resilience. No genetic diversity means vulnerability to disease, climate change, whatever. But if you plant all strangers, they might not cooperate as well. So there’s a balance of sorts needed.”
“Between cooperation and diversity.”
“Exactly.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. It immediately falls back across her face. “It’s one of those things that seems simple but gets really complex when you dig into the mechanisms.”
I watch her push the hair back again. It falls forward again. She doesn’t seem to notice the pattern, but I’m cataloging every repetition. Every small gesture that reveals her thinking process.
“You want to hear more?” she asks suddenly. “I mean, if you’re actually interested. I can read some sections out loud. But I don’t want to bore you.”
Boreme.
This woman thinks her obvious brilliance could bore anyone.
“I’m interested,” I tell her. And it’s the truth.
She blinks, like she wasn’t expecting that answer. Then she shifts on the sectional, making room for me, so I sit next to her. Not too close. But not too far.
“Okay,” she continues. “So this next chapter is about carbon trading through mycorrhizal networks. It’s actually fascinating how they regulate the exchange.”
For the next hour, she reads to me.
Her voice transforms the dry scientific text into something compelling. She explains concepts as she goes, stopping to clarify terms or elaborate on particularly interesting findings. She talks about hyphal networks spanning acres underground, about nutrient exchange rates, about signaling molecules that trees use to communicate stress or danger.
I’m fucking captivated.
Not just by the information, although that’s genuinely interesting. But by watching her. The way her whole face changes when she’s explaining something she loves. How her eyes light up at particularly elegant data. The gestures she makes to illustrate concepts in three dimensions.
She’s beautiful like this.
Not magazine beautiful or Instagram beautiful. Somethingdeeper. The kind of beauty that comes from passion and intelligence and giving a damn about something larger than yourself.
My cock stirs.
Inappropriate.
Completely fucking inappropriate.
She’s here because she had nowhere else to go. She hates what I represent. And I’m sitting here getting hard listening to her explain fungal carbon allocation like some kind of pervert.
Get it together, man.
“This part is my favorite,” she’s saying, flipping to a marked page. “They did these experiments where they stressed one tree by cutting its leaves, and within twenty-four hours, the connected trees started sending it extra carbon and nutrients through the fungal network. Like they sensed their neighbor wasin trouble and rallied to help. I told you about that this morning, remember?”
I nod. “Altruism underground.”
“Sort of. Although some researchers argue it’s not true altruism since the trees are maintaining their network. If one dies, it weakens the whole system. So helping the stressed tree is actually self-interest at the community level. So it’s more symbiotic.”
