Page 38 of Can't Refuse Him
For some days, I had laid on the couch and let the hours rot away, in hope I would too. I had woken up on the floor often. On some days, I had eaten dinner on the toilet. I watched the ceiling until my eyes burned. Nothing on my streaming services was good enough to distract me.
I had gotten lost in my thoughts about losing someone who wasn’t even meant to exist. Someone who had died decades before I had been born and yet made me feel more seen that any living person ever had. Someone who had been called “trash” but was absolutely a treasure.
I tried to jerk off to the memory of us when we finally had sex. Just to feel something. But my dick was like a taffy pole and wouldn’t cooperate.
Turns out my arousal, now no longer cursed, is dampened. I broke one curse but find myself with another.
Heartbreak.
I had longed. Forhim. And only wanted to be with him. My hands, porn,nothingdid the trick.
Tonight, I hit a new low. It’s Friday. I open the fridge, and at the sight of rotting vegetables I had forgotten to use; I am reminded of him and burst into tears.
Then, just as I shut the fridge, there’s a knock at my door. I panic. For a second, I hope that somehow beyond reason he is there. I let my heart feel something foolish, because I deserve this… happiness.
I deserve happiness. Don’t I?
But my heart sinks as I open the door.
It’s Claudia. I’m surprised and happy to see her, of course, but disappointed for a split moment that she’s not Eddy.
She had brought me food—jam donuts, and a thermos which I think has soup—and a pack of tarot cards in a raccoon-shaped velvet pouch.
Her hair is braided with ribbon and feathers, and her eyes look at me with a kind of kindness that isn’t pity, its concern, and something even closer to love. She’s dressed exactly how I imagined her outside of work: a sleek, elegant silhouette in flowing black, like a modern-day Morticia Addams, if Morticia shopped at occult thrift stores and moonlit markets.
A sheer lace shawl drapes over her shoulders, catching the light like spider silk, and a silver pendant glints at her throat. She’s all velvet and mystery, the kind of woman who smells faintly of ash and freshly burnt sage and always knows the right thing to say.
“Thank fuck you’re not dead. I would have had to eat all this by myself.”
Scratch that; maybe she doesn’t. I groan internally.
“Uh… thanks,” I reply as she steps inside like she lives here. We don’t hug. We don’t need to. She just hands me a jam scroll and then sits cross-legged on my floor across from my couch like my house is her personal coven and she is theSupreme. I sit on the floor across from her and smile as I take a bite of the donut.
I want to cry. It’s so delicious, beyond anything I can imagine. How long had I been without a proper bite to eat?
“So… what happened, Oscar?” She asks me, and my heart wrenches in two. I tell her everything.
“I miss him.” Finding myself admitting this after I finish explaining, my voice cracks somewhere in the middle, and I’m already holding back tears. “He was utterly, tragically… beautiful… and thoughtful in ways I didn’t even realise I needed.”
“You were in love with the Bin-Spirit.” She says, nodding as if that is the most normal thing in the world to happen. Which maybe for our world now, it is. I don’t know what’s normal and not now. Hell, all sorts of supernatural creatures are out in the open now, so whycouldn’tI be in love with a ghost?
“I…I still am.”
Claudia takes out a candle that smells like rosemary and burnt sugar. She lights it. “Love like that doesn’t rot away, Oscar. It burrows its roots into you, deep. You grew from it, and that’s why your curse broke.”
She looks at me, and I can feel a tear streaking down my face. “I don’t know who I am now.”
She reaches out and takes my hand. “You’re the same man I met a year ago, who at least now won’t get hard over a coffee cup,” she says, and I let out a chuckle. “You’re different now, though. Better. You’re softer, cleaner. You let someone in behind the walls you put up. Oscar, you let someone see you inall your trash and glory. You saw them back, and it changed you. Both of you.”
I don’t want to cry again. But the tears fall anyway. And they come hard and ugly—I cry in that way when someone who is close to you is suddenly ripped from your life. I cry like you do when you see a heartbreaking moment on a TV show, the kind that changes the show forever.Ihad been changed. Forever.
Soon, I run out of tears and all I’m doing is sobbing, but I’m so exhausted from everything. They’re leaking out of me like sap from a tree–slow, and quiet. Claudia passes me a tissue.
I blow my nose hard. We have our own little vigil for Eddy. The Bin-Spirit who changed me. The Grouch, who had been anything but grouchy. He had been full of life. Full of joy. Full of love.
And I? An uncursed man, but a man who wakes up crying.
That is enough for now.
