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Yulia was sitting on Hollis’s front stairs, bundled up warm.

She met their gaze as they opened the gate.

“Hollis,” she said, frosty.

“Yulia... are you all right?”

She was having difficulty looking at him now, staring beyond him to the sun lighting up the grass.

Walt held up two fingers.

“Thanks for coming. Hollis missed you. He’s worried.”

Yulia bit her lip.

“I don’t trust you,” she said.

That, they understood.

“I’m sorry—” Hollis started.

“But you didn’t trust me first,” Yulia interrupted. “And that’s the main problem. I’ve just been thinking all this time about the opportunities you’ve had to try to figure this out with us. Walt’s a stranger, he doesn’t know us, but you do. When you got close enough to get some control, you should have called me or called Annie and talked to us. We could have figured this out together. Found a way to... help him move on to someone else.”

Hollis closed the gate behind them, crossing his arms.

“Yulia, I don’t want him to move on to anyone else,” Hollis said. “I want him here. That’s harder to explain than what you’re describing.”

He leaned against the fence, a fence he had put up himself a few years ago. Stamped each post in hard, covered in sweat while Annie and Yulia watched and mixed up Kool-Aid on the porch.

“How would you have handled that, Yulia? By the time I was able to decide to call you about it, I knew him. One couldn’t exist without the other: knowing him is getting the freedom to leave, but to know him is to... not want what you’re wanting for me.”

Yulia made a face. She walked down Hollis’s steps, closer and closer until they were sharing air. Then she leaned up and clasped his cheeks between her two hands. She turned his head this way and that, looking at him closely.

“It’s not that I didn’t trust you,” Hollis said. “I’ll always trust you. I’m trusting you now. We trust you.”

Yulia bit her lip.

“I don’t like demons, Hollis. I don’t like this and it’s not from a lack of familiarity.”

He didn’t correct her.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Yulia pressed their foreheads together, up on her tiptoes to close the few inches that separated their height.

“Why do you like him, Holly?”

“We’re... so similar. He...”

Forgive me.

“It’s like... having someone inside you seeing everything that you are. All of it. The good parts, the bad parts, the disgusting parts, your weaknesses. All the things you’re afraid of, all the things that turn you on. Everything you’re ashamed of, everything that you wish for, every part.

“And they hold these pieces up to the sun, in the light. And it’s so bright that no part of it goes unexplored. Nothing can hide. And you’re there. You. Not the you that you are at school or the you that you are for your parents, or the multitude of other yous that exist for everyone that knows you. There’s just you. As you are.

“And they tally everything up, and they just kind of... accept it. Walt looked at what I was and said, ‘It’s fine. This is okay.’

“You don’t know how much that meant. And yeah, it’s selfish and weird and fucked-up and definitely supernatural, I guess. But I feel... lucky. I don’t feel cursed, and I don’t feel possessed, I feel lucky,” he finished.

He held her back. Tucked his arms around her fluffy puffer coat, and Yulia let him.

“He has nowhere else to go,” Hollis said against her cheek. Like he rarely did, like she rarely let him. “I wouldn’t want him to if he did.”

And Walt stood back, silent.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.

Hollis swallowed hard.

“You’re my best friend, Yulia. The only thing that hurts has been the past forty-eight hours without getting to see you. I’m sorry I kept this a secret. You deserve better than that and I won’t do it again. How can I fix this?”

Yulia pulled back and looked at him hard. Took in the dirt scrubbed across his face and Walt’s brown eyes.

“Christmas cookies,” she said, very serious. “I want six different kinds; I want them tonight, and I don’t want you to skimp on toppings. I want you to come with me to the winter fair this weekend and carry all my bags. I want you to—”

Hollis scooped her up and swung her around, let her heels dangle and ignored the ache in his arms and back. Held her close because she was precious.

“Anything, Yulia. Anything you want.”