The Wanting Man a "Wanting Hour Series" Story
by Wesley Doyle
Copyright© 2026 by Wesley Doyle
Romance Sex Story: A man in Hazel Dell buys twelve candles—and starts summoning Cora's incubus to do the one thing he refuses to do: reach into a woman's mind and make her want him. When the man won't stop, Cora's whole chaotic family goes to war, armed with a binder, a casserole, and an actuary. A steamy paranormal rom-com about consent, found family, and the difference between being wanted and being used. Book One of the Wanting Series.
Caution: This Romance Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual .
The card transactions arrive on a Thursday, and Margot brings them over in a way that requires two trips from the car.
“It’s a hundred and twelve buyers,” she says, setting down a box. “Fair Denise sent a CSV. I printed it.”
“You printed a CSV.”
“I put it in sleeves, Cora.”
“You put a spreadsheet in sheet protectors.”
“Each page,” says Margot, “in its own sleeve, in a three-ring binder, tabbed by county. Fair Denise emailed it as one file and I have made it into a document.” She sets the box down with the reverence of a woman delivering evidence to a grand jury. “You’re welcome.”
Priya comes in behind her with a laptop and the expression of a woman who has been in the passenger seat of this for four days. “She also made a spreadsheet,” she says. “The spreadsheet is genuinely good. Do not tell her I said that.”
“I heard you.”
“I know.”
“She color-coded it,” Priya adds. “In the car. On her phone. While I drove.”
“Purple is reconciled,” says Margot, “green is responded to the email, and red is—”
“Margot.”
“Red is has not yet responded to the email, Cora, it’s not sinister, stop looking at me like that.”
So that’s the Thursday: my sister, her fiancée, my mother on speakerphone from her kitchen because she now attends these, and a demon at my dining table with a hundred and twelve color-coded names in front of him.
“What am I looking for?” Margot says.
“Repeats,” says Ash.
Everyone looks at him.
“People who bought more than one,” he says. “That’s the only thing in that list that means anything. A candle in a house is an accident. Four candles in a house is a person who liked the smell.” He turns a page. “Or a person who’s found out.”
“Found out what?” my mother says, from the phone.
Ash doesn’t answer that.
✦ ✦ ✦
There are nine multiples. Seven of them are obvious — a woman who bought six on the last day of the fair, which Margot says is what people do when a booth is closing out. Two are gift-shaped: a pair, a trio.
The ninth is a man in Hazel Dell who bought twelve.
“Twelve,” Priya says.
“Twelve,” says Margot. “On the Saturday. One transaction.”
“Maybe he has a large family,” my mother says, without conviction.
And I’m looking at Ash, because Ash has gone still. Not the stillness that means he’s moved. The other one. The one where the room gets a little colder and everyone in it notices without knowing why.
“Ash.”
“Read me the address,” he says.
Margot reads it.
He closes his eyes.
“Ash.”
“Four times,” he says.
✦ ✦ ✦
Here is the fight. I’m putting it in because it happened and because leaving it out would make both of us look better than we are.
“Four times what.”
“I’ve been to that house four times.” He says it evenly, hands flat on the table. “Twice in the last week.”
“You’ve—” I have to stop. “You woke me. Every time. You kept the deal.”
“I kept the deal.”
“You woke me up at three in the morning and said someone’s calling and you came back and you told me about a college kid in Gresham and a woman in Beaverton and a man who wanted to know if his dog was happy—”
“All true.”
“—and four times it was the same house and you didn’t mention it.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because you’d have done exactly what you’re about to do,” Ash says.
And there it is, in the middle of my dining room, in front of my sister and her fiancée and my mother on a speakerphone: the same thing again. The subtraction. He agreed to stop protecting me by taking things out, and he stopped taking out the goings, and he went right on taking out the part that mattered.
“Get out of my apartment,” I say.
“Cora,” says Margot.
“I don’t mean it. I mean I need him to not be looking at me for ten minutes.” I’m up, I’m at the sink, I’m running water for no reason. “You promised me.”
“I promised to wake you.” His voice hasn’t changed. “I did. I’ve done it eleven more times since your mother’s house and I’ll do it tonight, and I’ll keep doing it, and I am telling you now, at this table, with all of them here, that if you ask me again tomorrow whether there’s a thing I’m not saying, the answer will probably still be yes.” He spreads his hands. “That’s not a defense. It’s a weather report. I’ve been keeping people from knowing things for nine hundred years and I am very good at it, and six weeks with you is not going to undo it, and you should know that about me instead of finding out four times a year for the rest of your life.”
Nobody says anything.
“Well,” says my mother, from the phone, “that’s the most honest thing anyone’s said in this family since 1996.”
✦ ✦ ✦
What the man in Hazel Dell wants is his ex-wife.
Not back. Ash was precise about this, and the precision is the part that made my skin crawl.
“He doesn’t want her back,” he says. “He wants her to want him. Those are different, and he knows they’re different, and the second one is what he asks for. Every time.”
“And you say no.”
“I say no.”
“And then?”
“And then he asks again.” He turns his glass on the table. “The first time he was drunk and I thought it was grief. The second time he’d written it down, because he’d worked out he had about ninety seconds of me being polite. The third time he offered me money.” He looks up. “The fourth time he asked me what I would take.”
“Jesus.”
“He’s not a monster, Cora. That’s the thing I can’t get people to understand about this. He’s a man in a rambler with a good job and a mortgage and a photograph of a woman on the hall table, and he has decided that the reason his life came apart is that the universe made a clerical error, and he has found a way to make something arrive when he asks.” Ash sets the glass down. “He’s got eight candles left. He’s rationing them.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he told me,” Ash says. “He was proud of it.”
✦ ✦ ✦
I want to say something about the discipline here, because I think it’s the only thing standing between my life and something much worse.
He could end this. Any time.
He told us in this apartment three weeks ago: he can put a want in a person. One want, small, and they’d walk out of a room and never know why. He can also stand in a room and see straight through everyone in it, and he decides, every single day, not to say what he sees.
He has been summoned to a stranger’s house four times by a man who wants him to reach into a woman’s head, and every time he has said no, and every time he has left that man exactly as he found him.
“You could make him stop wanting it,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You won’t.”
“No.”
“Because you couldn’t give it back.”
“Because I couldn’t give it back,” Ash agrees. “And because the day I decide I’m allowed to reach into someone and tidy them up for my own convenience, I’m what he thinks I am. And then it’s just a question of how long before I do it to someone I like.”
✦ ✦ ✦
He gets called at 7:50 on Friday evening.
I’m at the stove. He says my name and I turn around and he’s already going, and what he says — the last thing, and he gets it out fast, which he has never had to do before — is:
“It’s the house.”
Then nothing.
I turn off the burner. I look at the clock.
He is usually back inside forty minutes. He has never once been longer than four hours.
At nine I call my mother.
At ten I call Margot.
At eleven the three of them are in my apartment — Margot with the binder, Priya with the laptop, my mother with her car keys still in her hand — and nobody is pretending this is normal, and I am standing at the window doing arithmetic I don’t want to be doing.
Because here’s what I know, and I’ve known it since story got told at a kitchen table in Milwaukie:
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.