The Wanting Hour

There are three rules for surviving a bad breakup, and I invented all of them, so I get to break all of them.

Rule one: no wine on a weeknight. It’s Tuesday, and I’m two glasses into a Malbec that cost more than my dignity.

Rule two: don’t answer texts from Daniel. My phone has buzzed four times. I’ve answered zero, which I’m counting as a moral victory even though the not-answering is taking up roughly ninety percent of my available brainpower.

Rule three — the important one, the one I made after the second glass — do not, under any circumstances, light the ridiculous candle your sister mailed you with a note that said manifest something worth wanting, Cora. XOXO.

So obviously I’m holding the candle.

It’s black wax in a squat amber jar, and it smells like cedar and something warmer underneath, something I can’t name that makes the back of my neck go loose. There’s a symbol pressed into the top. My sister has been very into what she calls “her practice” ever since her divorce, which mostly means crystals on the windowsill and a subscription to an app that sends her moon updates. I love her. I also think she’s ridiculous.

I light the candle anyway. Because it’s Tuesday, and I’m tired of wanting things I can’t have, and lately the list of things I can’t have has gotten long enough that I’ve started to feel invisible inside my own life.

“Fine,” I tell the empty apartment, lifting my glass toward the flame. “Manifest something. Surprise me.”

The flame bends toward me like it heard.

I should mention I don’t believe in any of this. I’m an architect. I believe in load-bearing walls and the tensile strength of steel and the fact that things stand up because the math says they will. I do not believe a candle can hear me.

So when the shadows in the corner of my living room fold in on themselves — when the temperature drops and then climbs, when the air goes thick and sweet like the moment before a storm — I assume I’ve had more wine than I thought.

“You called,” says a voice from the dark corner.

I do not scream. I want that on the record. I set my glass down with a steadiness I’m proud of, and I look at the man who is now standing in my living room where no man was standing four seconds ago, and I say, “I called a candle. Big difference.”

He steps into the lamplight.

Okay. So.

Here’s the thing about being an architect: you spend your whole life looking at proportion. Golden ratios. The way a good façade holds your eye and won’t let it go. And I am looking at a face that has been designed, deliberately, cruelly, by someone who wanted to ruin the day of every person who ever saw it. Dark hair pushed back like he’s been running his hands through it. A jaw you could set a level against. Eyes that are — and I hate this — the exact warm amber of the candle, lit from somewhere behind.

He’s wearing a black shirt with the sleeves shoved up his forearms, which is a completely normal thing to wear and should not be doing what it’s doing to me.

“You don’t believe in me,” he observes. He sounds delighted about it.

“I believe in a lot of things. Structural engineering. The Oxford comma. A well-negotiated lease.” I fold my arms. “Hallucinations brought on by grief and Malbec are new, but I’m adaptable.”

He laughs, and the sound goes through me like heat through a floor.

“I’m not a hallucination, Cora.”

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“No,” he agrees. “You didn’t.”

And that’s the first moment the wine-calm cracks, just a hairline, because he says it so simply — not as a threat, just as a fact, the way you’d mention the weather. He knows my name. He came out of the dark. The candle is still burning, and the flame is still bent toward me like it’s listening.

“What are you,” I say. Not who. He notices. Those amber eyes warm another degree.

“Clever girl.” He takes a step closer, and I notice he moves like water finds the low place — no wasted motion, all of it aimed at me. “You have a word for it. It’s an old word, and it’s not a flattering one, and your sister would faint if she knew her little candle actually worked.”

The warmth underneath the cedar. The way the air went sweet. Manifest something worth wanting.

“Incubus,” I say.

The word lands in the room and just — sits there. Enormous. Absurd. I’m an adult woman with a mortgage saying incubus to a man in my living room like it’s a diagnosis.

“There it is,” he says softly.

I should be terrified. I’ve read enough to know what the word means — the thing that comes in the dark, that feeds on wanting, that leaves you hollow. Every cell in my body should be screaming run.

Instead I’m thinking about how long it’s been since anyone looked at me the way he’s looking at me. Like I’m the only thing in the room worth seeing. Like the looking is a thing he can’t help.

“So,” I say, and I’m proud my voice holds. “You feed on desire. That’s the pitch, right? I want, you eat, I wake up feeling like I skipped a night of sleep and made questionable decisions.”

“Roughly.” His mouth tilts. “You’d enjoy the questionable decisions.”

“I’m sure I would. I’m sure that’s the whole point.” I pick my wine back up, because if I’m going to be seduced by a demon on a Tuesday I’m going to do it with a drink in my hand. “Here’s my problem. I’ve spent a year being wanted by someone who wanted the idea of me. The dinner-party me. The looks-good-on-his-arm me. Daniel didn’t want me, he wanted a mirror that agreed with him.” I meet those impossible eyes. “So forgive me if ‘a creature who literally eats my desire and gives nothing back’ doesn’t sound like an upgrade.”

Something shifts in his face.

I expected charm. I expected the smooth line, the practiced heat, the thing that has clearly worked on a thousand lonely people before me. What I get instead is stillness. He studies me like I’ve said something in a language he didn’t know I spoke.

“You think I give nothing back,” he says slowly.

“Don’t you?”

“Cora.” He crosses the room, and now he’s close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that the sweet-storm smell fills my whole head. He doesn’t touch me. He just looks down, and up close his eyes aren’t only amber — there’s a darkness moving under the gold, something old and tired and, God help me, lonely. “Do you know how long it’s been since anyone called me by a name to my face instead of screaming? Since anyone argued with me?” His voice drops. “You lit a candle and got a demon and your first instinct was to critique my business model.”

A laugh startles out of me. “It’s a bad business model.”

“It’s a terrible business model,” he agrees, and there’s the smile again, but it’s different now — real, rueful, and it does something worse to me than the practiced one did. “I take the wanting. I never get to be wanted. Do you understand the difference?”

I do. That’s the horrible part. I understand it exactly.

“What’s your name,” I ask. “Your real one. Not the word.”

He goes still again.

“No one asks that.”

“I’m asking.”

He tells me. It’s not a name I can spell, or entirely a sound a human throat is built to make, but it lands in my chest like a struck bell and I feel it, feel the shape of a thing that is very old and has been very alone, and when I say it back to him — imperfect, human, my mouth doing its clumsy best — he closes his eyes like I’ve touched him.

“Say it again,” he breathes.

I do.

And that’s when he touches me — just his fingertips, just at my jaw, tilting my face up. His hand is warm. Warmer than a hand should be. The heat of it sinks past my skin and pools somewhere low, and every rule I’ve ever made for myself goes quiet at once.

“This is the part where you feed,” I manage.

“This is the part,” he says, his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone, “where I ask. I don’t take what isn’t given, Cora. That’s the difference nobody believes.” His eyes search mine. “So I’m asking. Do you want this?”

And here’s what undoes me. Not the face, not the voice, not the impossible heat of his skin. It’s the asking. It’s that a demon out of the oldest dark in the world is standing in my living room with his whole ancient loneliness in his eyes, waiting — actually waiting — for me to say yes.

Wanting my wanting. Not the dinner-party me. Not the mirror. Me. The two-glasses-of-Malbec, breaks-her-own-rules, argues-with-demons me.

“Yes,” I say.

The word barely clears my mouth before his does — closes the distance, catches the yes right off my lips and kisses it back into me, and the storm in the air breaks all at once.

He kisses like he’s been starving and I’m the first warmth he’s found in a hundred years. One hand slides into my hair, the other splays wide against the small of my back and pulls, and I go, I go so easily, arching up into all that heat with a sound I’d be embarrassed by if I had any capacity left for embarrassment. The wine glass — I don’t even hear it land on the carpet. His mouth leaves mine and drags along my jaw, down the line of my throat, and where his lips touch, that low pooling warmth blooms and spreads until my whole skin feels lit from within.

This is the feeding, I understand dimly. Not something taken. Something shared — a current running both directions, my wanting pouring into him and his rushing back into me, doubled, until I can’t tell whose desire is whose anymore, until the wanting is just one bright thing filling the room.

“You feel that,” he says against my collarbone, and it’s not a question, and his voice has gone rough at the edges, unspooled, nothing practiced left in it. “That’s you. That’s what you do to me.”

I get my hands under the black shirt and shove it up and off, and he lets me, lets me set the pace, lets me press my palms flat against the warm plane of his chest and feel the way he shudders under an ordinary human touch like it’s the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened to him. Maybe it is. The thought makes me bold. I walk him backward toward the couch and he goes, this thing that could unmake me with a look, going wherever my hands push him, watching me with those burning eyes like he can’t quite believe his luck.

“Careful,” he murmurs as the backs of his knees hit the couch. “Keep looking at me like that and I’ll forget every rule I have.”

“Good,” I say, and climb into his lap. “I’m out of rules. Catch up.”

He laughs — wrecked, wondering — and then his hands are on my hips and his mouth is on mine and the heat rolls up through both of us like a tide coming in, and I stop keeping track of the difference between what I’m giving and what I’m getting, because for the first time in longer than I want to admit, they’re the same thing.

The candle burns lower on the table. The flame stands straight up now, steady and gold, its work done.

Outside, it’s still Tuesday. In here, it isn’t anything at all — just heat, and hands, and a name I can’t spell said over and over into the dark, and the discovery, made twice at once, that the deepest hunger either of us has ever had was only ever to be wanted back.

✦ ✦ ✦

He’s still there when I wake up, which the old stories say shouldn’t happen. But that’s a rule too, and I’ve stopped believing in those.

Plus One From Hell

There is a demon in my kitchen holding a mattress advertisement like it’s a sacred text, and I have twenty minutes to give him a name.

“Sealy,” he says. “Sealy Posturepedic.”

“No.”

“It has weight, Cora. Authority. A man named Sealy Posturepedic has never once been asked to leave a room.”

“A man named Sealy Posturepedic has never once existed.” I take the flyer out of his hands. He lets me, mostly because he’s discovered that letting me take things away from him results in me standing very close to him, which he has decided is a loophole in the concept of losing. “We’ve been at this for forty minutes. Pick a human name. A normal one. One that a person at a party could say out loud without their face doing something.”

He leans back against my counter and crosses his arms, and the sleeves-shoved-up thing happens, which I have asked him not to do while I’m trying to accomplish tasks. Three weeks of cohabitation and I still lose about nine seconds every time.

“Blade,” he says.

“Where are you getting these.”

“Your bookshelf. I read it.”

“Which one.”

“All of it.” He says this the way you’d say I had a sandwich. “Also the manual for your dishwasher, the pamphlet from your dentist, and the bylaws of your homeowners’ association, which are a crime against language. Article Six is four hundred words about a fence.”

“Article Six is about a fence—”

“Article Six is a cry for help.”

Here’s what happened, briefly, because I’ve had to explain it to exactly zero people and I’m still workshopping the phrasing:

Three weeks ago, on a Tuesday, in the depths of a breakup and two glasses into a Malbec, I lit a candle my sister mailed me with a note that said manifest something worth wanting. The candle worked. It worked in the sense that a load-bearing wall “works” until you take a sledgehammer to it, at which point you find out what the whole house was resting on.

He’s an incubus. That’s the word. He hated it at first. Now he says it the way other people say they’re in insurance.

He didn’t leave in the morning, which the old stories say shouldn’t happen. He hasn’t left since, which the old stories don’t cover at all. He has, in three weeks: learned to work my espresso machine with unsettling precision; developed a relationship with the ice maker that I would describe as devotional; discovered infomercials and formed opinions; and started buying groceries with money whose origin I have decided not to interrogate.

He has also, and this is the part that matters today, never once told me a name I can actually pronounce.

He told me his real one, that first night. It landed in my chest like a struck bell and it is not a thing my mouth is built to do. I can approximate it. I do approximate it, frequently, usually somewhere between eleven at night and one in the morning, and every single time he closes his eyes like I’ve handed him something he can’t believe he’s allowed to hold.

That’s beautiful. That’s also not going to work at my sister’s engagement party.

“Okay,” I say. “New approach. What do you want to be called?”

He goes quiet. This is the trick with him, the one I figured out early: ask him what he wants and he short-circuits, every time, like the question has never been pointed at him before. Nine hundred years of being summoned and used and never once asked.

“Something short,” he says finally. “Something you could say fast. If you needed to.”

“Needed to.”

“If you were across a room.” He shrugs, and it’s not a casual shrug, it’s a shrug doing a lot of work. “If you wanted me to look up.”

I have to put the flyer down and hold the counter for a second.

“Ash,” I say. “The first sound of your real name is close to it. Ash.”

He tries it. Rolls it around. Something in his face settles.

“Ash,” he agrees.

“Ash what? People are going to ask for a last name.”

“Posturepedic.”

“Ash.”

“See,” he says, delighted, “you said it fast.”

✦ ✦ ✦

The party is at four, at Margot’s, and Margot is my older sister, and Margot is the one who mailed me the candle.

I need you to understand the specific texture of my dread here. Margot has been into what she calls Her Practice since her divorce four years ago. Her Practice involves crystals on every windowsill, an app that sends her moon updates, a smudge stick situation that got her building’s fire alarm replaced, and a level of belief in the unseen that I have spent four years gently, lovingly, condescendingly humoring.

I once told her, at Thanksgiving, in front of our mother, that manifestation was “astrology for people who found astrology too rigorous.”

And now I have to walk into her engagement party with a nine-hundred-year-old demon on my arm.

“She’s going to know,” I say in the car. “She mailed the candle. She’s going to take one look at you and know, and then I’m going to have to live in a world where Margot was right.”

“Is that worse than the demon?”

“Substantially.”

He laughs. He has a great laugh. It’s the only thing about him that doesn’t seem designed — everything else on that face was clearly drafted by someone with a grudge against the general public, but the laugh is just his, unguarded, and it does something to the back of my neck that I have decided is a private matter.

“Rules,” I say, turning onto her street.

“You’ve given me eleven rules.”

“I’m adding two.” I hold up fingers. “One. You do not tell anyone what you are. If someone asks what you do, you say consulting. Nobody asks a follow-up about consulting, it’s the conversational equivalent of a wall.”

“Consulting.”

“Two.” And here’s the one I’ve been circling all week, because it’s the one that actually scares me. “There are going to be a hundred people in that house, Ash. Couples. Engagement party. It’s going to be — how do I put this—”

“An open bar,” he says.

“I was going to say a lot.”

He looks out the window. The easy thing goes out of his face, and what’s underneath it is careful.

“It is a lot,” he says. “You understand what I am, so you understand what a room like that is. It’s not — I don’t have to take anything. It’s ambient. It’s in the air. Standing in it is like standing in a bakery.” He glances at me. “You can be a person who’s already eaten and still stand in a bakery and lose your mind a little.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ve been in worse rooms.” A beat. “I’ve usually been in worse rooms on purpose.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’ll be fine,” he says, and I would like the record to reflect that I believed him.

✦ ✦ ✦

Margot’s front door opens and Margot is standing there in a jumpsuit the color of a traffic cone, and she looks at me for approximately one and a half seconds before her eyes slide left and land on Ash.

I watch it happen. I watch my sister’s entire face reorganize.

“Oh,” she says.

“Margot—”

“Oh.”

“Margot, this is Ash, he’s a consultant—”

“Cora.” Margot does not look away from him. Margot has gone extremely still, the way our mother goes still when she finds a receipt she wasn’t supposed to find. “Cora, did you light it.”

“It’s an engagement party. There’s a chocolate fountain. Let’s—”

“DID YOU LIGHT IT.”

“Congratulations on your engagement,” Ash says warmly, and offers her his hand.

She takes it. She holds it. She turns it over like a jeweler.

“Priya,” she calls, without turning around, in the tone of a woman calling for backup. “Priya. The candle worked.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Priya is Margot’s fiancée. Priya is an actuary. Priya has the calmest face I have ever seen on a human being, and when she comes to the door with a glass of prosecco and takes in the tableau — her fiancée gripping a stranger’s hand, that stranger being very obviously not entirely a stranger to anything — she simply says, “Which candle.”

“The Tuesday candle. The manifestation candle. The one I made—”

“You made it?” I say.

“I charged it—”

“Under a moon,” Priya says, to me, gently, the way you’d explain a rule of a game to someone joining late.

“Under a specific moon,” Margot says.

Ash, still having his hand held, says, “It was very well made.”

And my sister — my ridiculous, crystal-hoarding, moon-app sister, who has been quietly humored by this entire family for four consecutive years — makes a small sound and puts her free hand over her mouth, and I feel like the worst person who has ever attended a party.

“Margot,” I say.

“Don’t.”

“I’m sorry I said the thing at Thanksgiving.”

“You said it in front of Mom—”

“I know.”

“You said ‘astrology for people who found astrology too rigorous,’ Cora, I wrote it down—”

“I know, and I’m sorry, and you were right, and I’m going to need you to be a little bit normal about it for the next four hours.”

Margot lets go of Ash’s hand. She wipes under her eyes with one knuckle, very carefully, because she’s wearing the kind of eyeliner that has to be negotiated with.

“I have a binder,” she says.

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s tabbed.”

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s laminated, Cora, I laminated it—”

“Later,” Priya says, hooking an arm through Margot’s and steering. “Sweethea