Chapter 7: Rory - Entities to Lovers

“Put some more thought into it, I see?” I sing, swinging open the front door to my building.

Ezra leans against the frame and gives a halfhearted wave. While sometimes our tour guides add little scars or wounds to their costume makeup, it’s clear the one on Ezra’s head is not fake. Oh dear.

“What…happened to you?” I ask.

He dabs at his head, and winces. Then he does the same damn thing again. For someone who likes to boast about his intelligence, not continually prodding at a cut is First Aid 101. “Civil engineering is the latest thing to try and bring me to an untimely end.”

From the moment I left his side at the bar, the troubles began again. I did ultimately get shit on by a bird, in addition to a tiny pebble lodging itself in my shoe, slamming my pinky in a door, and putting dish soap in my tea instead of the honey I meant to use. Of course, I discovered the last one after I’d already taken a sip.

While none of these things are life-threatening, I can’t ignore the patterns and signs the universe is giving me. There’s been enough that I need to start trusting them. Ezra: free drinks, happy tarot card readings, career opportunities. No Ezra: I fall into holes, birds shit on me, Dawn rooibos tea?

I huff. “What the hell does that mean?”

“A street sign…uh…fell on my head.”

What surprises me most is that I feel bad. I find some humor in him tripping or stubbing his toe, but I don’t want him to actually get hurt. He’s standing in the doorway, with the sleeve of his jacket pulled around his fingers to keep the bleeding at bay. It’s slowed in the time it took him to get here, but a cut like that needs to be taken care of.

He’s also very attractive, so I guess it would be sad if he broke his face. Then his personality and face would be tarnished.

Right now, he looks like a cat with clinical depression.

“I think I should hear what you have to say.”

I straighten with pride, then realize what I’m wearing. I’ve changed out of my daily clothes, swapped for a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt with a skeleton and the caption The Horrors Persist, but So Do I, because it feels apt right now. I did, however, have to put my bra back on when he said he was en route.

I let him onto the landing. When Ezra enters Ye Olde Spirit Shop, he disrupts my peace, but I always know I can retreat home to my own sanctuary without him. Now he’s entering my only other controlled environment.

Oh my god, I hope Luna is on her best behavior.

“Come upstairs,” I groan.

“Wait!” he gasps before entering, carefully bending over and pulling up a penny.

“Ezra, no! It’s face down!”

“It’s a doubled die penny! They’re rare! I don’t have one of these.”

This man and his little coins.

“Fine.”

I’m acutely aware of him following me up the stairs extra carefully until we reach my apartment. I pause at the door. I’m prepared for him to make fun of every mystical book on my coffee table, the crystals charging on my bookshelf. He probably has mean things to say about my apple cider vinegar drinks, too. He wouldn’t be the first man to come in and cast his opinions over my belongings.

Ezra grumbles in pain and I turn around as he prods at the cut on his head again.

“Oh my god, stop touching it,” I chide. If he dies in my hallway, he might end up haunting the building and bothering me into the afterlife, too. I like it here and don’t want to move.

I usher him into my apartment. When I got home, I set up a medieval apothecary shop ASMR ambience video on YouTube and lit one of my jasmine candles. It was my attempt to cleanse the energy of this awful day from the air. He doesn’t make himself at home or drape himself on my furniture the way he takes advantage of every other space he’s in. At least he respects those boundaries.

“Uh, you can sit down,” I tell him. “I’ll get you something for your face.”

Ezra shuffles to my couch and slides his jacket off as I hunt through my freezer. I find a bag of frozen spinach and return to him with a tissue in hand. He folds up the tissue, presses it to the cut on his forehead, and leans back on the couch to keep the spinach in place.

My couch.

He infects every inch of this apartment with his presence. It already smells like sharp bergamot and musk and he melts into the cushions like he belongs here or something. I don’t know what to do with him, like that one time my mom got picked by the kitten distribution system and asked me to watch the cat…who just stared.

This is Ezra off duty, and it’s something I’ve never seen before. His coffee-stained shirt is unbuttoned and open, exposing the black undershirt draping nicely over his thin muscles. Between that and the dark jeans hanging low on his hips, it’s so casual it feels like a school dress code violation.

Ezra shifts on the couch and his T-shirt rides up, gifting me with a glimpse at the waistband of his underwear and a hint of ink in the hollow of his hip. The lines descend below the elastic, and my mind wanders to new lands. Planes of his chest and stomach, valleys dipping into his hip bones. Fuck, this is the last thing I need.

It’s also the first time he’s been quiet for more than a minute, and not just verbally. Ezra is someone who commands attention in every room he’s in. Sometimes, it’s because of his striking good looks. Other times, it’s because he simply won’t shut up and wants everyone to know how smart he is. I didn’t think someone like him had a mute button.

Perhaps Ezra Blackwell is not so bad when he’s quiet.

“Nooo,” he whines pathetically, as the spinach falls off his face. Silence broken. I pace over to him and hand the frozen greens back.

Something slides in the kitchen. I look up to find Luna rearranging my fridge magnets. I quickly realize she’s alphabetizing them. Amityville, NY; Cape Cod; Faneuil Hall; a USPS letter opener. The resident spirit is clearly focused, so I can’t exactly get her attention without saying her name. And then I’d have to explain to my injured work nemesis who the invisible person in my apartment is.

I’ll just…pretend this is normal. Totally normal. He won’t notice anyway. He’s blindfolded by produce.

“So,” I say. “You got hit with a street sign.”

“Yep. After my card declined while buying someone a drink. Then I spilled her wine all over her white dress.” His voice comes out somewhat muffled beneath the plastic bag.

Hearing him speak about buying another woman a drink makes my jaw clench. It had to have been moments after I left. He swept in quickly to put the moves on someone. The discomfort itself is the worst part. Why do I care?

The problem is I’ve always known I harbored an attraction to Ezra. From the day he first interviewed, I couldn’t stop looking at him. He was one of the most aesthetically interesting people I’d ever seen. Attraction comes to me so rarely that when it does, it’s like a lightning bolt. It’s a zing of something waking up inside me, like a bubbling excitement I can’t quell.

It didn’t make total sense until my mom invited a speaker to the store a few years ago to talk about intersections of queerness in the occult world. I heard the word “asexual” used in a way that didn’t refer to biological reproduction, or some misguided synonym for being a virgin, and something clicked in my head. It felt like doing a spread where the cards don’t seem to tie together in any way, and I’m struggling to find that morsel that makes it all make sense. And then one card pops out of the deck and gives everything context. A word alone gave me desperately needed insight to the way I interacted with the world and my relationships.

I stopped forcing myself to try new things with people I wasn’t interested in, because I assumed one day I’d just get it. I stopped giving time to people who I felt I had to justify my identity to.

It’s easy to forget these intense feelings toward Ezra exist…most of the time.

Now that he’s up close, in my space, and I don’t know when we’ll part ways? That…unsettles me a lot.

“I guess being cursed doesn’t sound so stupid now, huh?”

“Oh, I still think it’s outlandish, but in the interest of avoiding a cerebral hemorrhage, I’ll at least hear you out.” Ezra motions for me to get on with it. It’s hard to take him seriously with a bag of frozen greens on his face. “If we were cursed, what does that mean?”

I sit on the floor in front of the couch. Normally, I’d be afraid to share my thoughts, especially knowing they’d be dismissed. In this case, I feel certain I’m right and proving Ezra’s rebuttal wrong is all the motivation I need to speak up. However, I really wish I wasn’t right about this problem.

“Well,” I begin. “If we’re cursed, I think it started when we tipped over the altar. Whatever we did, I think we angered Temperance Talbot herself.”

“You said you heard a voice last night,” he recalls. Behind him on the couch, Luna dusts my shelves off with a feather. Jesus, no. I love her desire to clean the place up, but not now, girlfriend! “Hers?”

“Yes.”

“And that never happens?” he asks. Ezra’s tone quiets, like he’s investigating some primary source document, trying to get to the bottom of a story, or he’s parsing through old texts to make sense of them. It’s a shocking level of inquisitiveness that makes something in my chest flutter. It’s like he’s interested. And taking me seriously.

“Not at Talbot House, no,” I confess. “The energy is heavy and thick, but nothing ever talks to me. It’s like…you know when you have to sneeze and it just won’t come? You’re waiting but nothing happens? That’s what Talbot House is like for me.”

Ezra picks the spinach up enough to expose one eye. His face is red from the cold, a little damp from condensation. “Really?”

“Yes, which is why it really concerned me when the one thing she said was I’ll show you.”

Ezra sits up, propped on his elbows. The pack of spinach slides down onto his chest. His expression is still and pensive, maybe even a little alarmed. For the first time tonight, I think he might believe me.

“Show us what?”

“My first thought? She’ll show us punishment for what we did wrong,” I propose. In my frustration, I reach for the deck of tarot cards on my coffee table and shuffle to calm my nerves. “But I’ll admit, curses and hexes are not my thing at all.”

“Huh?”

Modern witchcraft is hardly pointed hats and wands. It’s a deeply spiritual and personal practice, and there’s no one “right” way to do it. It’s a choice, rather than power that’s imbued on a person. Witches these days focus on herbalism, rituals, honing a connection to nature, and seeking the magic in those things. Of course, there are spells and curses, but most of the ones I do are simple and more about welcoming certain energies into my life.

“I tried when I was in middle school on one of my bullies. My mom told me I was too young to be messing around with magic like that. She taught me the lesson the hard way by moving a taxidermy bat around my room and making me think I’d brought it on myself.”

Ezra bites down on his bottom lip, trying not to laugh. “Your mom Elf on the Shelf’d you with a dead bat?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“That is brilliant.”

“And traumatizing!” I cry. “There’s got to be some kind of way to break it. I don’t know, maybe we need to do a spell, maybe we need to kiss and—”

“Excuse me?” Ezra says, fully dropping the spinach bag. I can’t tell if he is horrified or embarrassed, but either way, it feels like a jab, like kissing me would be a terrible time.

“Kiss and make up, you buffoon.”

But the word’s out in the open now and it won’t fucking leave. An intrusive thought—like the voices and auras I feel—lingers around me with a deafening presence. Kiss kiss kiss. And then I look at Ezra’s lips, which are thin, but well shaped. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the people you hate most are going to be the hottest people you know.

I’m not to blame here. It’s the universe.

He’s quiet, until: “Good. I think if I let you kiss me, you’d bite my tongue off.”

Well, at least he’s ruined the moment now. I’ll never have to worry about my attraction to Ezra growing into anything else, because he is exceptional at killing the mood. “With my teeth?”

“No, you’d bite me with your nose—yes, of course that’s what I mean! Any ideas on where we begin?”

On TV, the ASMR cauldron bubbles. There’s a cat purring, too, but all I’m thinking about is Ezra. Maybe it’s just me, but he’s always been someone I can’t look away from, against all better judgment.

“We’ll have to ask her,” I suggest.

Ezra picks up the spinach. The cut is still bleeding, so I venture into the bathroom.

“Hang on. Don’t bleed on my couch,” I say. I find him a Band-Aid and a little cotton ball. I pass it to him, and he eyes me. “Do you want it or not?”

“I do,” he replies. “I figured you more as a strip of fresh woven linen type.”

“Come on, I’m not that woo-woo. I do plenty of modern things. I take Ubers. I have an electric teakettle. I listen to podcasts!”

I was going to help him, but now he can dress his own goddamn wounds. Ezra presses the cotton to his head and places the bandage over it. It seems to quell the bleeding for now. He musses his hair and lets some of the longer strands fall in front of the bandage to hide it.

“So, when you say ask her, you mean we’re going to have to contact Temperance?”

“Yes.”

“And you can do that?”

“I can try.”

“What if she needs a human sacrifice?”

“Well, thankfully we have you.”

“Ha.” He cradles the melting bag of spinach in his hands and almost sets it on my coffee table, but refrains. Instead, he places it on his lap to condensate there. Luna rustles one of my plants, the chain of hearts I’ve got dangling off a bookshelf. Ezra turns. Shit, shit, shit. This is past Luna’s usual bedtime, but I usually don’t have men in my apartment. I suppose I’ve thrown off her routine, but Ezra can’t see her. Not yet. I’ve got to gently drop it on him.

Yes, there is a very gentle neat freak of a ghost who lives here. She will not hurt you. If you see her moving something, just let her.

I clear my throat and the plant stops moving, thank god. I transition back to explaining what the plan is, but I’m not even certain of it. I’m throwing spooky spaghetti at the spiritual wall. “It helps to have some kind of connection to the spirit we’re trying to channel. Going to Talbot House would be ideal, but—”

“We’d have to break in.”

“Which we are not doing…”

“I don’t think I’m cut out for prison.” Ezra leans forward and rests his arms on his knees, thinking deeply. “Would some item that belonged to the person help?”

“It would.”

He nods triumphantly. “Then I think I know someplace that technically isn’t breaking and entering.”

His words sink in. He’s completely right.

“The Spirit Shop.”

“Indeed—one of Temperance’s donated brooches is there. If you could use that, maybe we could ask her if she cursed us and how to break it. Right?”

I give my tarot deck a brisk shuffle and set it back on the table. “I bet you’re glad you’ve got me around now, huh?”