The Wanting Aisle (a Promise Between a Man and a Warehouse)
Copyright© 2026 by Wesley Doyle
Chapter 1
Humor Sex Story: Chapter 1 - He feeds on wanting. She takes him to Costco. Five weeks after Cora accidentally summoned a nine-hundred-year-old incubus with a candle, he wants one thing: a warehouse membership card with his name on it. What he doesn't expect is what a store full of people wanting things does to a creature who's spent nine centuries being wanted for darker reasons—or that a free sample from a woman named Deloris might undo him completely.
Caution: This Humor Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Fiction Humor Paranormal Demons
“Explain it again,” Ash says.
“It’s a store.”
“You said that.”
“It’s a very large store where you pay an annual fee for the privilege of buying more of something than you could ever reasonably use.”
He turns in the passenger seat to look at me. We’re four minutes from the Costco on Halsey and he has been asking questions since we merged onto the highway.
“You pay,” he says slowly, “to be allowed to want things.”
“ ... Yes.”
“Cora.” He puts a hand over his heart. “That’s the most human sentence anyone has ever said to me.”
Five weeks. That’s where we are now. Five weeks since I lit a candle my sister mailed me and got a nine-hundred-year-old incubus instead of a personality change, and in those five weeks he has: fixed my garbage disposal without being asked; developed a rivalry with the man in 4B over a parking space, which he is winning through means I have declined to investigate; read the entire Multnomah County library website, including the staff bios; and this morning, at seven-fifteen, woken me up by putting a Costco membership offer on my chest and saying, “Today.”
“There are rules,” I say.
“There are always rules.”
“These are important.” I pull into the lot, which at ten on a Saturday is less a parking lot than a slow-moving hostage situation. “One. Do not tell the membership desk what you are.”
“Consulting.”
“Two. Do not do the thing with your eyes at anyone in a red vest.”
“I don’t do a thing with my eyes.”
“You do a thing with your eyes.”
“That’s just their structure,” he says, wounded.
“Three.” I put the car in park and turn to face him, because this is the one I’ve been building toward. “You’re going to need a name for the form. A whole one. First and last.”
He goes still. It’s the same stillness as the flyer in the kitchen, the same as what do you want to be called, and I watch it cross his face — the fact that a form is a thing that exists, that a form can have you on it, that being written down is a category of existence he has spent nine centuries outside of.
“Right,” he says.
✦ ✦ ✦
The membership desk is staffed by a young man named Trevor who has the specific dead calm of someone forty minutes from a break.
“Two cards or one?” Trevor says.
“One,” I say. “Plus a household member.”
“Household member.” Trevor’s fingers hover. “Relationship?”
Ash and I look at each other.
“Roommate,” I say, at the exact moment Ash says, “Partner.”
Trevor waits. Trevor has clearly waited before.
“Partner,” I say.
Ash doesn’t look at me. He looks straight ahead at the wall of tire displays with an expression of enormous and completely fake interest, and there is a gold flicker at the edge of him, just for a second, like a filament testing a current.
“First name?”
“Ash.”
“Last name?”
And there it is. The pause. Trevor’s fingers on the keys, the fluorescent hum, a line of four people behind us with flatbed carts, and beside me an ancient thing who has been called a hundred words in a hundred languages and never once had a surname, because surnames are for people who belong to somebody.
He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.
“Delaney,” I say.
Trevor types it. It takes him under a second. It makes a sound like nothing at all.
“Photo,” Trevor says. “Step on the line.”
Ash steps on the line. He is not looking at Trevor. He is looking at me, and his eyes have gone entirely amber, no human left in them, and the camera flashes and Trevor frowns at his screen and says, “Huh. Let’s do that again.”
“Sorry,” Ash says, and blinks, and puts the human back on like a coat.
The second photo works.
The card prints — that hot plastic-and-toner smell, the little clunk of the machine — and Trevor slides it across the counter, and Ash picks it up with both hands like it’s an artifact under glass.
ASH DELANEY. My address, underneath. A photograph of a face that is going to cause Trevor problems later, when he’s trying to fall asleep.
“Member since 2026,” Ash reads.
“That’s how they date it.”
“Member since 2026,” he says again, and it is not a joke, and I have to go look at the tire display myself for a minute.
✦ ✦ ✦
Here is what I did not adequately prepare for.
The party, two weeks ago, nearly took him apart. A hundred people in a room, all of them wanting things at once, and he had to hold a railing on the back patio to keep from fixing everyone’s marriages. So I braced for that. I watched him, going in through the doors, past the greeter, into the vast concrete cathedral of it.
He stops dead about twenty feet in.
“Oh,” he says.
“You okay?”
“It’s not the same.”
“What’s it like?”
He turns slowly in a circle. Around us, eleven hundred people are pushing carts the size of golf carts through a warehouse stacked forty feet high with everything, all of it, more of everything than anyone has ever needed, under lights that never turn off.
“The party was a bakery,” he says. “This is a forge.”
“Meaning?”
“Cora, nobody in here wants a person.” He says it with something close to awe. “It’s not — it’s clean. It’s the purest want I’ve ever stood in and none of it has anything to do with anybody. That woman wants a chair. That man wants sixty pounds of rice, and he doesn’t need sixty pounds of rice, he wants to be the kind of man who has sixty pounds of rice. That child wants a churro with an intensity that would frighten you.” He shakes his head. “I’ve never been anywhere like this. I feel like I’ve been drinking wine my whole life and someone just handed me a battery.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s fascinating.” He grabs a cart. He grabs it the way a man grabs the wheel of a ship. “Where do we start.”
✦ ✦ ✦
We start, as everyone starts, with the samples.
I don’t think about the samples. Samples are just a thing that happens to you at Costco, like the smell or the sudden urge to buy a kayak. I watch him take a paper cup of some kind of chicken sausage off a tray, and eat it, and stop.
“How much,” he says.
“How much what?”
“How much is it.”
“It’s free.”
He looks at the woman behind the sample cart. Her badge says DELORIS. She has the sturdy patience of someone who has explained the concept of a sample four hundred times today.
“It’s free, hon,” Deloris says.
“For nothing,” Ash says.
“For nothing.”
“You just — give it to people. You stand here, and people come, and you give it to them, and they don’t have to—” He stops. He looks at the tray. He looks at Deloris, who is a fifty-something woman in a hairnet holding a pair of tongs and has absolutely no idea that she is currently detonating nine hundred years of theology.
“Sweetheart,” Deloris says gently, “do you want another one?”
He says yes. He says yes in a voice that isn’t entirely steady.
We stay at Deloris’s cart for eleven minutes. He asks her about the convection oven. He asks her whether people are nicer in the morning or the afternoon (afternoon, she says, but only until two). He asks whether anyone ever says thank you, and she says not really, and he says thank you, and Deloris — I watched this happen — Deloris puts down her tongs.
When we finally leave she gives him four extra sausages in a stack of cups and tells him to come back before four because they’re doing the potstickers.
“I like Deloris,” he says.
“Everyone likes Deloris.”
“No,” he says, “you don’t understand. I’ve been offered a great deal in nine hundred years, Cora. Everything I’ve ever been given was a trade.” He eats a sausage. “That woman gave me a sausage for no reason and told me to come back.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The middle of the trip is where it gets away from me.
I want to be clear that I had a list. The list said: paper towels, coffee, olive oil, chicken, the good sourdough, rotisserie for tonight. Six items. I have shopped at this Costco alone for four years and left with roughly eight items every time, which for Costco is basically monastic.
Ash has opinions.
“Forty-eight,” he says, holding a package of toilet paper the approximate size and density of a hay bale.
“We have a one-bedroom apartment.”
“Cora, it’s a better price per unit—”
“Where does it go—”
“There is a shelf above the washing machine that you have never once used—”
“Because it’s nine feet up—”
“I’m nine feet up,” he says, which isn’t true but is directionally accurate, and puts the hay bale in the cart.
Then it’s a jar of pickles the size of a toddler. Then it’s thirty croissants, on the grounds that they freeze, which is a fact he learned this morning from a website and has been waiting all day to deploy. Then it’s a rotisserie chicken, which is correct and on the list, and then it’s a second rotisserie chicken, which is not.
“It’s four ninety-nine,” he says.
“We are two people.”
“It’s four ninety-nine, Cora, it costs them more than that to make it, they lose money on every one, it’s a loss leader designed to draw you into the store and I refuse — I refuse — to let them get away with it.”
“So your position is that you’re punishing Costco.”
“My position is that I’m taking two chickens.”
And then we hit the seasonal aisle, and I lose him entirely.
It’s the gazebo. Of course it’s the gazebo. Twelve feet by twelve, powder-coated aluminum, mosquito netting on all four sides, floor model assembled under the fluorescents with a fake wicker loveseat inside it and a sign that says CREATE YOUR BACKYARD RETREAT.
He stands in front of it for a long time.
“You don’t have a backyard,” I say.
“I know.”
“You don’t have a yard.”