There are many hazards living with a witch, one of which was that my apartment was rarely in a state that was clean, reasonably safe, or even in the right astral plane. Another one was that there were candles on every available surface; it had gotten to the point where our entire apartment smelled like cheap perfume, gas station hand soap and marijuana from Natasha's 'special candles'. They were supposedly to increase her spiritual awareness but were really just filled with weed.

​

      Natasha was a sophomore at Blair University, and had moved in only about two months ago. Her ex-roommate Isobel kicked her out when she got engaged to her boyfriend. My former roommate had dropped out last semester, and I’d been scrambling to find another one ever since. 

​

      It didn’t take long for me to wonder whether Isobel had another reason for kicking Natasha out.

      The first instance of this, perhaps, would have to be when I came home to find Natasha had turned the living room into an aquarium, complete with a shark and a coral reef where the couch used to be. Luckily, Natasha was able to turn it back before the neighbors noticed and it was contained to only one room (which she pointed out to me defensively, several times) but the carpet always smelled like seaweed after that. 

​

      Other things happened, too; she accidentally animated the pans in the kitchen to become aggressively affectionate towards me, she turned my favorite purse into a koala that clung to my leg wherever I went, and she bestowed powerful elemental magic onto a lobster in a tank at the supermarket. The staff made her take it home, and I soon discovered that the lobster not only had the ability to manipulate the elements but she also had a very strong desire to drench me in the water from her tank every time I passed within four feet of her. Natasha gave her glittering claws and called her Aurora. 

​

      “It’s how she shows affection,” Natasha defended her, the lobster had drenched me for the third time that same day.

​

      Two weeks ago, Natasha accidentally attracted a gremlin with a blood magic ritual she was doing for class. It broke into my room, stole all the photos of my ex-girlfriend Kylie from the box in my closet, and retreated under my bed to scream and rip them to shreds with its little furry paws. We had to call an exterminator. Not to mention that Natasha. Was. Always. Eating. Licorice. Elderberry licorice, to be precise. Constantly. She said that it enhanced her magical abilities, but just made everything that didn’t smell like her candles smell like sour fruit.

​

      So, I should have learned my lesson by this point. Natasha was magic, and messy, and chaotic and that chaotic, magical mess was usually directed at me. But, after a week or so without incident, I started to let my guard down. Natasha seemed to have cooled down and everything was going smoothly. I could focus back on school without having to worry about whether or not Natasha had bewitched all the sheets in the house to hug you so tightly you couldn’t get out of bed if you tried. I started to relax.

​

      That was a mistake. 

​

      I was coming home from the grocery store on a regular Wednesday, my arms filled with groceries and Aurora’s food. I was mentally complaining about the lobster and her attitude towards me, but not too loud. It may have been simple paranoia, but I was about seventy-nine percent certain that the crustacean could read my thoughts. 

​

      This, and any other thought that might have been observed by the malicious lobster, flew out of my head the instant I stepped off the elevator and saw our apartment door. Copious amounts of smoke were billowing out from underneath it. I could feel the heat from where I was standing.

​

      I shouted unintelligibly and dropped the paper bags all over the hallway. The door was unlocked when I kicked it open, covering my mouth with my scarf and yelling “Natasha!” and “Fire!” in a very muffled voice. When I stumbled through the haze into my living room in an insane attempt to stop whatever disaster Natasha had wreaked this time, the smoke cleared almost immediately. Natasha, eating licorice, draped across the couch with her legs dangling over the armrest, waved at me. Her head was resting on someone’s lap. A very hot someone.

​

      Not like. A hot person. I mean, they were physically hot, but I don’t mean hot as in level of attractiveness. I mean, like, temperature wise. Because this dude was smoking. Literally. Not that he was attractive. Which he still was . . .  I guess. I mean he was actually smoking, smoke was coming from his skin.

​

      Moving on.

​

      He was very clearly a demon. I had rarely seen one in person, mostly because I never went outside and demons didn’t really hang with English majors. I had watched enough cop shows to recognize a demon when I saw one. They were infamously tall and ripped (which he was) with ebony horns (which he had) and they were notoriously well-dressed. He was wearing what could have been a designer suit, and it fit like a glove. It was a stereotype that all demons either went into law enforcement or became club bouncers. This guy looked like he could do either without trying. 

​

      “Hey Stace,” Natasha said, not moving from her seat. “Are you okay?”

​

      “I’m fine,” I snapped. “Can I talk to you? In private?”

​

      “Sure.” There was an awkward pause where she seemed to dramatically notice the demon’s presence, which I did not buy for two reasons: one, her head was resting on his crotch, and two, Natasha didn’t miss anything. Ever.

​

      “This is Eric,” she said, entirely unapologetic. Eric nodded at me, smoke curling out from the base of his horns, the cuffs of his suit jacket, his nostrils, the pores of his crimson skin. I looked away.

​

      “Hey,” he said.

​

      “What’s up?” Natasha asked, innocent.

​

      “Bedroom. Now.” I coughed on Eric’s smoke. 

​

      “Straight to the point, I see.” Natasha stretched like a cat and jumped off the couch. “Lead the way.”

      Eric watched us all the way into Natasha’s bedroom up until the door shut. 

​

      “What are you doing? Do you know what will happen if my landlord finds out my apartment is smoking? I’ll get kicked out of my apartment for disturbing the other tenants. For the smell.”

​

      Natasha perched on the edge of her bed, picking rosemary out of the black silk sheets. The entire room was lit by candles with deep red hearts, and there were bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beams. “You mean our landlord. Our apartment.”

​

      “Yeah, whatever. Why is he even here?”

​

      “Eric?” Natasha shugged, taking another bite of licorice. “I summoned him.” She gestured vaguely to the corner of the room by her closet, where she had pushed back a chair and her desk to make room for a circle of blue candles and intricate chalk symbols. 

​

      “Why? And isn’t that . . . rude?”

​

      Natasha gave me an irritated look. “It’s an exchange of services. Demons have pacts, you know, and laws. If they don’t fit a summoning quota by the end of each year they get called into court. They’re like genies. Demons have pacts made with powerful entities in exchange for some superhuman abilities. In return, they do the bidding of those with the abilities and knowledge to summon them, as long as that person is reasonable and polite. I’m that person.”

​

      “And this is for class?”

​

      Natasha shook her head. “Fun. Practice. Curiosity. Are we good?”

​

      “No, we’re not good!” I snapped. “No more demons, okay? I don’t care whether Eric’s perfectly happy to be here or not, I’m not getting kicked out because the landlord thinks I set the apartment on fire.”

​

      I turned and stormed towards the door, but I strayed too close to Aurora’s tank. The lobster rose up, triumphant, her claws glittering evilly in the candlelight. A freezing wall of water hit me in the face, soaking my clothes to my skin. There was a long, terrible silence. I spat out a piece of aquarium gravel.

​

      “Natasha,” I began, very slowly and calmly. “I am going to go out into the hall to get our groceries. When I come back, I would like the demon to be gone. Is that clear?”

​

      “Okay,” Natasha said, hovering. “But he’s probably going to run into you in the hall.”

​

      “He’s some powerful demon, but he has to use the elevator to leave?”

​

      “Yeah.”

​

      I shook my head. “Fine. But make sure he leaves.” 

​

* * *

​

      Eric did leave, very compliantly. He seemed to be a far more reasonable soul than Natasha, who gave me the silent treatment for a good two days only to warm up all of a sudden. Natasha could never be mad for long, her attention span was far too short and her moods were far too unpredictable. In any case, there were no more demons and no more summoning, and all was well. 

​

      Except, like I said, Natasha’s attention span was far too short to stay occupied in basic classroom witchery for long. 

​

      One afternoon, coming home from class with a strong headache that may have been related to the head cold I had acquired earlier that week or perhaps the class itself. I was ready to sink onto the couch with a bowl of canned soup and a blueberry muffin from the box in the fridge. 

​

      I knew something was wrong the moment I stepped inside. 

​

      The entire apartment was pitch-black, and every surface was covered in candles. 

​

      “No.” I blurted. Whatever had happened, I was certain that it had something to do with Natasha and her smoking hot demon friend. Which, perhaps, is a testament to how very little I trusted Natasha to listen to me. Though it was unlikely that our landlord would actually kick us out for a little smoke and the outrage building up inside of me was probably related more to my irritation at Natasha’s unreliability, I felt like I was justified in being upset. I asked her. And there, across the living room, was the shut, gently smoking silhouette of her bedroom door.

​

      I burst through the door to find the room lit by small patches of flame from the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling. Natasha was at the center of the room, lying on her stomach on her bed as smoke lingered across the floor in an atmospheric fashion. There was Eric, standing beside her, massaging her lower back with some sort of red-gold oil that drew mystic symbols across Natasha’s large amount of exposed skin. 

​

      Eric nodded at me, then returned to the massage. 

​

      “What did we say about summoning demons to the apartment?” I said angrily. “Why can’t you just do your work in the lab like everyone else?”

​

      “This isn’t an assignment. It’s just for fun, like I said.” Natasha sat up in her underwear. “You can go now, Eric. Thanks for the rub.” 

​

      Eric nodded curtly, edging past me with an awkward shuffle before leaving. He shut the door behind him with one lone “Bye, Stacy. It was . . . nice to see you again”

​

      Natasha rolled over onto her back in her underwear, sitting up with her back against the head of her bed. Red and gold oil dripped down her skin. I had almost had a laughing fit when I saw her headboard for the first time, when she was moving it in; it was carved from pitch-black wood in the shape of a crow’s wings. There was a candle holder on each wingtip. As I stared at it and Natasha stared at her bare legs, and then I had to stop myself from staring at her bare legs, I felt an overwhelming wave of exhaustion. I didn’t have the energy or even desire to yell at her this time. 

​

I shook my head, coughing at the smoke that filled the room in Eric’s wake.

​

      “What’s burning?”

​

      Natasha crossed her legs. “Deadly nightshade.”

​

      “What? Isn’t that poisonous?”

​

      “It’s medicinal.”

​

      I covered my mouth with my shirt. “It says deadly in the name, Natasha.”

​

      “Oh?” Natasha shrugged. “I guess.”

​

* * *

​

      The topic of demons and landlords were successfully avoided in the following days, and I started to think that I wouldn’t be seeing Eric in our apartment again. One day after work, sweaty and exhausted, I was already half-undressed by the time I reached the bathroom. I should have probably noticed the heat much sooner, but I was distracted, and exhausted. All I wanted to do was sink into a hot bath and turn my brain off. It was only until I was completely naked, stripped down to the skin, clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor, that I turned around. I immediately regretted my foggy preoccupation and screamed.

​

      Natasha and Eric were wrapped around each other in what had once been our bathtub, and was now, somehow, a small pool, filled to the brim. Not with water, but with lava. Natasha and Eric were almost, but not completely submerged in it and didn’t seem to mind the heat rising off of it or what was showing above the surface. A few drops splashed over the edge and onto the bath mat, where it sizzled into the floor.

​

      I screamed again.

​

      “What’s wrong?” Natasha asked, innocent. She was pressed up against Eric’s bare chest, playing with the lava as it bubbled around her bare skin and sent up little geysers of molten rock and flame. I sputtered angrily, grabbing for a towel.

​

      “Can you give us a minute, Eric?” I snapped. Eric sighed and sank into the lava. A minute later I could hear the apartment door shut behind him as he left. 

​

      Natasha slid out of the lava, completely naked. I averted my eyes, but she didn’t seem to mind her nakedness. “I asked you to stop summoning demons to our apartment, Natasha.”

​

      Natasha shrugged. “Oh. I didn’t think you cared about that anymore.”

​

      I sank onto the edge of the tub, which was shrinking back to its normal size by the second. The lava was already draining away. “Of course I care! I don’t want to get kicked out, Nats.”

​

      “This was never about Eric.”

​

      I pulled my face out of my hands. Natasha was standing by the door, her shoulders tight. 

​

      “What?”

​

      “This was never about Eric. This was about you, and me, and your problem with me.”

​

      “My problem with you?”

​

      “Yes. You never liked me, did you? I just fooled myself into thinking you were anything more than someone who tolerated my presence in your home? Anything more than—” She stopped.

​

      “Like you?” I stood up, wrapping the towel around myself. “You wreck my apartment every day of the week! You made my life a living nightmare in my own house! Everything you do inconveniences me and makes everything a thousand times harder! I don’t know what to do with you. How can you expect me just to know what to do? You’re just a fucking disaster.”

​

      Natasha shrank back against the wall like a cornered cat, her eyes shining brightly under her dark, wet hair. It was plastered to her shoulders in a sleek, shiny mat. Without her hair’s usual volume, she looked like a drenched animal; vulnerable and pissed. “Glad to know I’m just an inconvenience to you,” she spat. 

​

      I said nothing.

​

      “That’s all you’re going to say to me?” Natasha straightened up. I could see now that the lava had really just been water all along; the heat and look of it had been a rather cheap glamor charm laid over a bubble bath. The hot rivulets of water ran down her bare legs and dripped a puddle on the tiled floor.

​

      “I guess I’ll go, then.” Natasha’s knuckles were white against her towel. I looked away. 

​

      And she left.

​

* * *

​

      On the first day after Natasha walked out of my apartment, some of her friends from school dropped by to pick up her things from her room. It took a good part of the day. I just lay in my bed on the other side of the wall, listening to them shift things out until the room was bare. Later, I found one of her witchy magazines in the bathroom, but the friends had already gone, so I just put some television manuals on top of it and tried to forget it was there. I just couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.

​

      On the second day, I considered boxing up her candles and putting them in the empty bedroom, but I left them alone. It seemed too cold to move them from their places on the fireplace, the kitchen table, the counters. The cabinets. The coffee table. The floor. They were everywhere she wasn’t. And yes, she had spent time sitting in all of those places. Natasha was a cat, impulsive and elegant and self-absorbed, prone to spending time in odd places and scratching when sulky. Soft, attention-seeking, a constant presence that molded herself against the couch and my side, a warm, sleek creature of cuddling and movie marathons that ran late into lazy Saturday evenings. 

​

      Feeling sulky myself, I retreated into my bedroom and remained there for the rest of the day, shrouded in a blue-white glow of the laptop screen in my dark bedroom.

​

      On the third day, I called my sister, Amanda, in Chicago. My head was dangling off the front of the couch with my knees hanging over the back as I waited for her to finish removing molding clay from her two-year-old’s mouth.

​

      She talked about Elijah’s new day care and the passive-aggressive customer who came into her flower shop three times a week and a lot of other things I didn’t absorb fully.

​

      “And what about you?” she asked.

​

      I told her. When I had finished, she called me an idiot.

​

      “What?”

​

      I could feel her exhalation through the phone. “Stacy, you obviously like this one. You didn’t skip class three days in a row when Chuck moved out.”

​

      “Chuck was gross.”

​

      “You also didn’t have feelings for him.” Amanda had her multitasking voice on. She was probably folding laundry while she was bullying me about Natasha. “Face it. This person isn’t just a roommate if you’ve spent this much time sulking over her. Especially if she was as difficult to live with as you say.”

​

      “I’m not sulking.” I was absolutely sulking.

​

      “Talk to her, Stacy.”

​

      “She hates me.”

​

      Amanda sighed like a donkey. “So fix it. And take flowers.” She hung up.

​

      That was very typical of Amanda. Three years of working at a flower shop and she thought orchids were the solution to absolutely everything.

​

      Thirteen hours into the third day, a very witchy number that Natasha would have approved of, I got in my car and drove to her best friend’s apartment on the other side of town, the only place Natasha was likely to be that I knew of. Not because of Amanda, but entirely of my own free will with no outward influences whatsoever. I also took a box of Natasha’s candles in case things went horribly wrong and she was straight and dating my brother and I needed a cover. 

​

      I wasn’t being paranoid. That had happened to me. Twice.

​

      I rang the doorbell, and waited. There was no answer; the door didn’t open, there wasn’t a sound from inside. I stood on the doorstep and waited for another minute, until six red-brown autumn leaves had fallen onto the box of candles and three more had gotten stuck in my hair. And then I turned around and left. Either Natasha wasn’t here, or she didn’t want to see me. Either way, I should just go home.

I was halfway down the walk when I hear the door open behind me, and Natasha’s voice called.

​

      “Sorry, I didn’t hear the bell, I was blasting music and I—Stace?”

​

      I turned around sheepishly. Natasha was standing in the door in sweatpants and a crop top that said ‘eat the rich’, which was so very Natasha that I almost cried. She had added electric blue streaks to her messy, curly black hair and it clashed horribly with everything around her. I loved it.

​

      “Hey. I . . . I was just . . .” I panicked, and thrust the box of candles towards her. “Returning these. Your friends left them at my place, so . . . “ 

​

      Was that a flash of disappointment? She hesitated, maybe. Looked at me. At the box. Looked away. Back at me. Her eyes darted back and forth, and again, she looked like a cornered animal. The same vulnerability shined through for a moment, then it was gone. She turned cold.

​

      “You can keep them. I have enough already, Stacy.” Natasha turned away, pulling the door shut behind her I watched it close in slow motion, already beating myself up over my cowardice.

​

      “Wait,” I blurted.

​

      Natasha turned. 

​

      My window. My mind went blank. I panicked. What was I supposed to say? Sorry for all the horrible things I said to you? I’ve been in love with you the whole time but I didn’t even realize it because I’m as dense as a brick when it comes to my own emotions? I chose one. 

​

      “I’m sorry. For everything I said to you. I should have tried to understand.”

​

      Natasha frowned, the coldness replaced by confusion. “Stace—” 

​

      “Understand . . . anything, I guess. I’ve always been terrible about figuring things like this out on my own, you know? I’m hopeless at it. Just ask all my exes.” I started to stammer. “Not that I have a lot of exes—I mean, well I have a few but not like, more than a normal person—”

​

      “What?”

​

      “The point is,” I said, then stopped. Natasha was staring at me and suddenly the stupid candles were incredibly heavy. I panicked.

​

      Natasha waited for me to speak, and then looked away when I stayed frozen. “I think you made yourself quite clear before, Stacy. Now, I think you should g—”

​

      “Actually, I didn’t,” I blurted. Natasha met my eyes. “I mean, about making myself clear. I didn’t. There are quite a few more things I would like to make clear to you before you shut the door and I go home and everything goes back to being horrible again.” I took a deep breath.

​

      “First of all, you are a shitty roommate.” I laughed nervously. “It’s true! You leave dishes in the sink and you play music without headphones while I’m studying and don’t even get me started on that fucking lobster. You can’t cook to save your life and my parents want to know why my apartment smells like weed, which is your fault, by the way because of your fucking candles, not to mention they’re a fire hazard. Also, you’re entirely too covetous of your Netflix password. Roommates are supposed to share, you know.

​

      “Second of all,” I said, softly. “I’m a terrible friend. I never even thought about what you meant to me until you were gone, like the dumbass I am, and then it was too late. I didn’t know what I had, and I am truly, deeply sorry for the way I treated you for the very selfish reason that I am sad without you and your stupid lobster making my life way more complicated than it needs to be.

​

      “Thirdly.” I paused, trying to read her expression. “I’m not going anywhere. I would ask you to be my roommate again, but that doesn’t feel right. I’d say I want to be friends, but that’s not what I want either. What I want . . . what I’m trying to say is . . .” I paused, loathing the silence. “I want . . .”

​

      Natasha kissed me. It caught me completely off guard; I had planned another good minute of embarrassed rambling before I got any sort of reaction out of her, good or bad. And this was good. Very good. Extremely good. I melted into stunned putty for a good five seconds before my brain kicked in and I kissed her back, my hands coming up to grip at the back of her crop top as the box of candles fell, forgotten, breaking all over the sidewalk. Natasha cupped my face in both hands, her eyelashes brushing my skin as I inhaled sharply and leaned into the kiss, pressing my fingers into her back. 

​

      When she pulled away, her hands stayed, framing my face. Mine came up to wrap her wrists as I stared at her, and she stared at me, and I blushed until my face burned where her hands touched my skin.

​

      “Y-y-you taste like that god-awful licorice,” I managed.

​

      Natasha smiled, and the sight was so terribly, excruciatingly welcome that I sighed into her touch. “You didn’t seem to mind so much a minute ago,” she breathed.

​

      “I don’t mind now, either.” I stepped closer and wrapped my arms around her waist until our noses were touching. “I really really really really don’t mind at all, unless you won’t kiss me again, and then I will mind very much.”

​

      “Don’t worry,” Natasha said, leaning in. “I plan to kiss you quite a bit more.”

​

      We stayed there for quite some time; for, while I was very bad at realizing when girls were flirting with me, I was easily much, much better at kissing.