Chapter 26: Ezra - Entities to Lovers

“This can’t be happening.”

Rory must say it several times, but I’m still in a fugue state where everything I’m hearing and seeing is cast in a delirious blur. The one thing that stuck out was the small blot of red blood beneath Rory’s nose, and that pulled me to shore, but now that we’re back to discussing electrical wiring, I’m back to dissociating.

“I don’t understand. No one can get here?” Delia laments.

“It’s Halloween. We have to shoot The Out There on Friday. What are we supposed to do?” Rory asks. “Light candles?”

“We can’t run the computers without Wi-Fi and would have to do all purchases by hand and with cash only,” Delia ponders. “My god, that’s going to be a pain in the ass. I’d rather close.”

“Mom, we can’t do that.” Rory’s voice grows frantic. “This was going to be our chance to get more customers and exposure for the store. We can’t blow it. I can’t blow it—not any more than I already have.”

Delia approaches Rory and cups her cheeks. “I’m going to figure it out.”

“No, you need to let me help you. Mara was looking for me.”

Mara.

No wonder it asked for her. That horrendous spirit could have done so much worse to her; she had to deal with that spirit trying to weasel its way into her head again, making her think she’s less. She’s safe, physically, but I wasn’t there.

I begged her to go, and she had to face her worst fear without me. Mara hurt her, and I don’t know what cruel words she had for Rory this time around or how they’ll impact her in the days or weeks to come. I failed her, and now I don’t even have a job. My confident attempt to free us from this curse just ruined both of our circumstances.

What the fuck is the point of being brave if it leaves us broken?

“Are you good at electrical wires?” Delia inquires, her voice softening to cushion Rory’s grief.

“No.” Rory frowns.

“Then what else can you do, baby girl? Let me handle it. I’m going to go make some calls.”

Delia vanishes into the storage room and shuts the door behind her, leaving Rory and me alone in the store together. She paces sadly over to her alcove and lights two candles on her séance table, in height order, as always. They give a flicker of light to the room as the rain thunders against the windows.

“This is all my fault,” she whispers to herself. Her eyes are heavy with tears, and her pain draws me in. I feel this physical urge to make it go away, to do something to fix what’s hurting her, but something stops me—the fear I’m going to get it wrong. I fear I’m going to make it worse.

The more I do, the more I might just be pushing Rory away.

A tear drips down her cheek and she wipes it away. Fuck, she’s so beautiful, and it feels illegal that anything should be allowed to make her this upset. This opportunity she wanted badly is now slipping through the cracks because of my idea, my brilliant ploy to save us—and for what? To get fucking fired? For her own shot to be blown?

If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I’m not going to meet the moment. I never, ever do.

“Rory, I’m sorry,” I finally say.

“What do you have to be sorry about?” She shuffles her tarot cards. “It’s not your fault this all went wrong. Now we can’t do this shoot that was supposed to be my chance to prove I’m capable of handling anything around here. Anything except my silly little cards and ghosts.”

She sniffles into the palms of her hands. I ease into the chair across from her.

“I made you leave. I told you this would be how we broke the curse and it…clearly it wasn’t. I should have skipped the fucking meeting because…”

I’m nauseous even thinking about telling her. When I look at Rory, I know I’m going to disappoint her, too, and fuck, I can’t do that. I can’t fall so hard for her that one day, she realizes there’s nothing worth loving here. That’ll be the defeat that really breaks me.

I’ve been fired before—namely, a frozen yogurt place in high school I simply wasn’t best for and a bartending job where I was let go for cutting lemon slices too large. Those were hiccups, and technically failures, but I was never destined to be an amazing yogurt boy or the best bartender the world had ever seen. But to be let go from my first ever teaching position because I dared to do things my own way?

There’s still time to find another job before next semester, and if worse comes to worst, I could always try to pick up more hours at the store. And even then…what’ll happen? What happens when I fuck up here, too?

“Because what?” she asks, quiet and inquisitive. The look in her big green eyes is so tender and affectionate, the squeeze she’s giving my hand tells me she’s here, but I refuse to accept her safety.

I’m falling in love with her, and she looks at me like I amount to something. I can’t bear to let her see that I don’t.

“Because bad things happened here.”

It’s not a lie, so it’s one less sin to be guilty of.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Rory confesses. “I just…I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. We’ve done everything. We got to know each other, we kissed, we did many other things. We shared space and I learned you’re not so bad after all.”

My eyes water and a knot grows in my throat, but I try to play it cool. “Well, thanks.”

“Ezra…” she says, lowering her voice when she sees me struggling to hold it together. “What’s going on?”

“It didn’t work,” I say.

“Breaking the curse?”

“Yes. We’re not getting any closer to breaking this curse, and I don’t know what else to do. I can’t keep living like this, where I can never leave your side. It’s ridiculous and I’m just…over it.”

“You think I’m not frustrated?” she pleads. “Every time you leave, something absolutely shit happens. I was supposed to nail this shoot and help my mom through the busiest time of year, and instead, I might have reverted us to the Revolutionary War era. Where we have to sell shit by candlelight. And you…how did your meeting go?”

“Rory, I don’t want to talk about it.” But that says it all, doesn’t it?

She gasps. “It didn’t go well…?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did something go wrong because I left?” she asks. “Because I wasn’t there for you when you needed it.”

“Rory, I told you to go. I was the one who told you to come here and help your mom, and look what happened. You had to face up to Mara alone, and I…I was wrong. Really wrong.”

The right answer here is to say “I’m sorry” and accept I was wrong. Then we’d get back up and keep trying. But the more time I spend with Rory, the more I’m falling for her, and the more I desperately want to let myself fall the rest of the way in love with her. By the time I’ve done that, she’ll realize there’s nothing about me worth fighting through the worst days for. I want—no, I need—to do what I always do: flee before she has the chance to break me. It’s the only way to protect myself.

Something inside my chest thumps, like my heart trying to crack through my rib cage and tell me to stop being an idiot. But I pull away.

“I don’t know what to do next,” she gasps, trying not to cry. “I just don’t know how we navigate this.”

“Me either. At what point do we push back and tell Temperance we’re done playing this stupid game? I want to be done with this, Rory.”

Rory lets go of me. My fingertips tingle, the ghost of her touch still haunting my skin.

“What are you suggesting?” she asks, cautiously. Inside, I crumble like an ancient statue as a teardrop falls down her cheek.

“I’m suggesting we show Temperance right back. We tried everything, and it didn’t fix the problem. We can’t figure this out, so why are we still playing along? I think it’s time we tell her to stop meddling with our lives and let us go back to how things were. Maybe that’s the bravery we need to show her.”

The store is silent, save for the rain outside. The pause between Rory and me constricts the air around me. I suddenly can’t breathe at all. I’m a fucking monster.

“So you’re giving up?” Rory whispers.

“It’s not giving up—it’s not playing this fucking game. Maybe she’s trying to show us we should give each other a chance, and we did. We’ve done it all but we can’t crack the code here. How much more are we going to destroy in the process?”

“Ezra, that’s going to make things worse. Look, I know it’s hard and we’re being run through the gauntlet here, but I don’t think we should quit now. I don’t think we should quit on us, either.”

Lettie told me twin flame relationships aren’t always easy, but they are worth it in the end—but that’s for people who aren’t me, people who aren’t consistent disappointments. Someone like Rory deserves the world, and I can’t fathom being able to do that for her.

“Rory, I…”

The candles extinguish in front of us, darkening her alcove. It’s a sign we’re not alone, I think. We’re being watched. No, tested.

“Temperance told us we had to be brave,” Rory asserts, standing up from the table.

“No, she told us to be afraid,” I correct her. “I’m tired of trying to figure out what that means if it’s going to wreck everything around us.”

Rory’s smart enough to read between the lines and see what I’m saying. I’m trying to flee.

“It feels like you want to get away from me,” Rory says, and her words strike me directly in the stomach. So hard I swear I’m going to be sick. The tears come harder and faster, but so does her need to cover it up and hide this vulnerable side of herself. For a second, she lets her heart break.

Glass cracks and I look to one of Rory’s oil bottles on her bureau. It leaks a trail of greasy liquid onto the cloth. Temperance is clearly listening, but I’m done playing by her rules if all they’re going to do is tease me with what I could have, then hurt me.

This conversation is an off-ramp. At least if I leave her on my own terms, I can pretend it wasn’t because I’m never worth the effort.

“You think she’ll really be happier if we just fucking quit? Temperance has been asking us to pay attention this whole time.”

“And that’s not working, Rory!” I shout, rising from the table, too. And of course, I bang my knee hard in the process. “We’ve followed all her instructions and it left you with fried wires right before you needed a win. We’re letting her run us into the ground and it’s not teaching us anything. And I’m sorry you couldn’t have ended up cursed with someone much braver than me.”

Then Rory does what she does best—especially with me—and covers herself in thorns and fights back. “Fine, if that’s your brilliant hypothesis on the clusterfuck at hand. Just walk away and give up on me.”

“Whatever we were doing was not making a fucking difference.”

Beside Rory on the bureau, her incense ignites again and burns like a wildfire, blowing smoke into the air. She races to blow it out, but when she does so, she stumbles into the bureau. Trying to go to her, I slam my other knee on the table. Then, inexplicably, my fly is down, too. Everything’s going to shit again—just like the morning we fought.

“God damn it,” she mutters and turns to me. “If nothing’s making a difference, then go. Instead of working to fix this, go cower if it makes you feel better, Ezra.”

Fuck, the worst part about this is that Rory knows how to fight back. It’s what we did for months, always trying to challenge each other to a sharper bite, but I don’t want to do that now, not back to her. She can hit me with whatever she wants, but I won’t even admit her words hurt.

“I’ll pick up your slack, I guess,” she tells me as I rest a hand on the curtain.

The urge to break down and fix this, to tell her I’m falling in love with her but I’m so, so scared is strong. I want to kiss her one more time, hear her laugh at one of my bad jokes. But when my self-confidence is in the absolute trash, I don’t know how to find the part of myself that’s brave enough to trust her. He’s lost like the rest of me. I only know how to hold on to this self-sabotage and hope it leads to her seeing I’m doing this for her own good.

“Well, you liked this place better without me anyway, didn’t you?”

Her lip trembles, and she almost shakes her head. She storms to the front of the alcove and flings the curtain open with such fury, she strikes one of the display cases outside and gasps in pain.

“Fuck. Ezra,” she groans. “Just go.”

I keep my head up, and before I talk myself out of it, I head for the door. No looking back at her, no convincing myself I can still salvage this, and no walking right into inevitable heartbreak. I grab my jacket from the rack, but the rack falls and strikes me on the head and blocks the door. I catch it before it hits the ground, return it to its home, and push open the door. I trip immediately.

A gust of wind sends a sheet of rain directly at me. Freezing water drips down my neck. I still refuse to face Rory again. The sooner I walk away, the sooner she can find someone better than me and forget we ever happened. Just like everyone else does.

A car pulls up to the corner a little too tight, nearly taking me out when I clearly have right of way. I obliterate someone’s poor jack-o’-lantern. My heart’s beating so hard it radiates all over my body. Each step makes the sensations worse.

I can’t speak to ghosts, but a voice is shouting no no no in my head loud and clear.

I don’t listen.