Chapter 15 – Bin A Long Time Coming
Ididn’t move for what had felt like hours. He and I sat on the floor of my janitor’s closet. I had come in on the weekend, as we had devised. No one else is here but me, him, and the howling wind and rain outside. It is a perfect backdrop for what had been a very emotional story.
I take a deep breath as if I had held the air in my lungs the entire time. I rub my eyes; they were dry from not blinking.
Eddy had just…told me everything.
Not just in words, but in a sort of psychic data dump with full surround sound. Tragic lightning. Overdramatic musical score. And bonus trauma projections.
He showed me who he once had been when he was alive. What he became. And what he had to do to get here.
I am half-wrapped in my janitor’s overalls; the arms are tied at the waist. Covering my chest is just a thin singlet. It is quite warm in the janitor's office, even for a dreary day.
He stands up across from me now. Tall, hot, and glowing in the dark in a low-budget afterlife kind of way. He truly is from the seventies. He is still the same bin-dwelling spirit to me, still moving like one. But something about him had shifted.
The weight on his shoulders had gone. The quiet around his eyes is now full of noise.
He looks like he has finally let it all go. And I knew from my own burdens that telling someone is the first step in forgiving yourself.
“I am glad you got to speak to him,” I murmur.
Eddy tilts his head. “About what?”
“All of it. The slap. The murder. The forgiveness. It was very much the trash prince redemption arc you obviously needed.”
Eddy pauses, then grins at me. “I didn’t even think it would work.
I went into it wanting to make his life a living hell.
But he wasn’t the villain after all. Don’t get me wrong, he was an asshole, and if I could do it all again, I would never have let him fuck me. But hindsight is a beautiful thing.”
“So does this mean you’re free?” My voice dips, a little too hopeful.
Eddy glances around the room. “Almost.” He looks contemplative. Like he is plotting something.
I let it hang in the air. It is thick with everything we had not yet said. It’s the silence you only get after a storm, or a séance, or a cosmic therapy session conducted via bodily fluids.
After some time, I break the silence.
“Something that has me wondering…”
“Yes?”
“What happened to… Grumble, was it?”
Eddy smiles and hangs his head down. It is an actual smile, one I can be in front of forever.
“He is now the King of the Rot.”
“…you’re making that up!”
“Nope!” he looks proud of himself. “He earned it too. After Mark’s dog Muffin spotted him, he ran and accidentally fell through into the sewer kingdom, and he defeated the reigning Toad Emperor in a game of Trash Chess.
“That also sounds made up.”
“He sent me the postcard. Invited me to be his right-hand man.”
I raise an eyebrow. “A postcard from the King of the Rot?”
“It was mushy, banana-scented.”
We both snort and, just like that, whatever tension left between us breaks.
He comes to sit beside me. Not touching, just close enough that I can feel the heat from his form.
And for the first time since I’ve met him—since he haunted my bin, since he showed me the worst of himself—he looked ready.
Not to scare. Not to seduce. Not to possess.
Just to leave.
Eddy says nothing at first. Just stares at the closed janitor’s door like it holds the answer to something neither of us were ready to ask.
Then he turns to me, a flicker of concern threading through his expression.
“There’s still your curse.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Right. Yes. The whole reason we’re here. I was kind of enjoying the not-talking-about-it part of this evening.”
He ignores me.
“It’s tethered to a moment,” he says. “A memory. A core imprint of shame, or pleasure, or both, that’s where most bin curses bind. To break it… you need to go back. Deep. Find it. Unlock it.”
I blink. “You want me to… memory dive?”
He nods.
“And how exactly am I supposed to do that? Visualise my trauma while licking a pizza box?”
Eddy looks at me sideways. “No. That’s more of a Monday thing.”
“…Then how?”
He hesitates.
I squint and realise what he wants to do. “No. No. Whatever it is, I already hate it.”
Eddy runs a hand through his ghoulishly green curls. I notice that it’s not actually green–he’s a dark brunette–but his ghostly glow makes it look so. “To form a link strong enough to open the anchor memory, I need a tether.”
“Define tether.”
“A bodily fluid.”
“Oh, gods.”
“It worked with Mark—”
“Don’t you dare say—”
“—and I could technically enter your mind through your—”
“Nope!” I jump up so fast my back cracks. “You are not dream-walking through my cum, thank you very much!”
Eddy, unbothered, grins. “We could just kiss?”
I pause. “…That also sounds like a trap.”
“It’s not.”
“Feels like one.”
“You’re cursed,” he points out.
I sigh. “Fine. But if this ends with me drooling into a memory vortex while you rifle through my brain pantry, I’m revoking your closet privileges.”
He tilts his head. “You have a brain pantry?”
“Metaphorically.”
Eddy steps closer, his gaze warm now. Gentle. Steady.
“It won’t hurt,” he says. “But you have to let me in.”
I swallow.
The room feels too quiet again.
His hand brushes mine, ghost-light and careful.
And I realise… I wanted to let him in.
Even if it means facing whatever memory I had buried so deep it turned me into a walking garbage hard-on. Even if it means trusting a Bin-Spirit who makes friends with used Q-tips and empty vodka bottles. Kissing him with my curse still clinging to my core may be my only hope of breaking it.
Because somewhere along the line today, I had stopped seeing him as a spirit and had seen him as someone I can love. Someone I had fallen for.
Eddy’s lips touch mine like a match to kindling. It isn’t gentle, but it isn’t forceful either; it is inevitable. As if the moment had been circling us all this time, and we had finally stepped into it.
The taste is strange. Not bad. Just… old. Like smoke and rust and the warmth of summer rain on hot concrete.
His hand cups my jaw. Our tongues meet and massage each other. I am so lost in his kiss that it takes me a second to realise the lights in the room are flickering.
And then the floor drops out under me.
We’re now standing in a different version of me. Not with me, but inside me. Inside my memories.
We are in my old flat, my one-bedroom that smells like mould and burnt rice. Where every surface is a monument to my lowest point.
I recognise the exact night.
My ex had just left, stormed out for good. He had said I’m pathetic. Said I’m warped. Said I got off on the wrong things.
He had not been entirely wrong.
I’m–my memory-version of me - is kneeling beside the laundry basket. Still breathing hard. Face flushed, body trembled.
‘My’ hand is wrapped around his jockstrap, which is sweat-soaked, threadbare, stanching of his musk. I had pulled from the hamper like some guilty treasure. Memory-me is pressing it to his face, breathing in what is left of my-our-ex. Memory-me is wearing it like a mask.
My pants are down. My shame is louder than the moans. As I stroke myself faster, huffing in Marcus’ scent.
Eddy says nothing beside me. Just watches.
Then the door rips open, slamming as it swings and hits the wall.
Marcus stands there, his aura flaring like static, hair dishevelled from a night out. His eyes blaze as he sees memory-me. I pull the makeshift jockstrap-mask off one eye and stare at him.
“You sick fuck!”
I flinch. Not past-me, me. Here. Watching it.
“I told you,” he snarls, fists shaking. “You can’t keep doing this! I thought you wanted connection, Oscar—not just objects!”
Memory-me mumbles something useless, broken. About not wanting to be kink-shamed.
That’s when he curses me.
He didn’t need a circle. Didn’t need a spell book. An Etsy witch was much more skilled than any you’d read in a book or watch on a TV show.
Just rage. He points his finger at my heart, and it’s as if time had stopped. The room goes dark… the lights subtly flickering.
“Let your lust rot with what you crave most. May trash be your forever hunger.”
The jockstrap in memory-me’s hands glows with an eerie shimmer, then it disappears into a million particles of green light. The specks fly up and then enter my body.
Memory-me gasps, then collapses.
The curse hits like fire, honey, and filth. They tangle into one.
Everything blurs.
I moan—and remember I had liked it and I cum all over my stomach, the jockstrap still on my face. I realised in that moment I had been cursed not just by magic, but by my belief that I had deserved it.
My memory shifts yet again. Eddy tightly grips my arm, his face already paling.
In front of us is my old share house. At this point in my life, I had been kicked out of everywhere I lived because of my sick desires.
The room is bare, aside from a mattress on milk crates.
Fast-food wrappers crunch underfoot with every step.
The air reeks of weed, sweat, and something worse. Desperation.
There are… objects. Things I hid under the bed.
Plastic wrappers. Grease-stained boxes. Half-melted takeaway containers I had fashioned into makeshift rubbish flesh-jacks I had used on myself.
God, I had forgotten. I’ve buried all of this.
Since I had been cursed, I had found new ways to pleasure myself.
Then, I couldn’t resist the call for attention that most trash gave me.
Eddy turns slowly. His face changes with every object he sees. The lube bottle beside the McMuffin wrapper. A condom that had been filled with bin juice, that may have once been frozen for something I won’t repeat. The filthy sock I'd named "Henry", yes after my HR Manager. Don’t shame me.
I want to scream. Run from my embarrassment.
“I didn’t mean…” I croak.
Eddy stares at me. His eyes look lifeless. Vacant.
And then something snapped.
Not in the memory.
In him.
His memory-figment body recoils as if he’d been hit. His outline shimmers, corrupted. The soft aura he carries with him—the spirit shimmer that makes him, Eddy—crackles with static and turns jagged. Splintered bin-light shoots through the room.
“No, no, no, no—” I desperately try to hold him.
But he’s already falling apart.
We tumble back into the real world with a crash.
Eddy staggers backward, clutching his head and shouting.
His eyes are wide, black with gold rings around his irises. They shimmer with rot.
“Eddy?” I say slowly, not sure what was happening.
He doesn’t answer. His back arches. His form stretches, then convulses. Eddy’s skin peels like sodden, mouldy wallpaper. His fingers elongate into clawed slivers. His clothes tear down the seams, but what emerges isn’t naked.
It’s grotesque.
Sludge-clung ribs. Mismatched teeth like bottle caps. A glistening crown of coffee lids and drain hair. A shield shaped like a wheelie bin forms around his torso, with holes for his legs to push out of.
“Eddy!”
He hisses—hisses—spitting bin juice out his mouth, then bolts away from me.
He scuttles across the ceiling with a lurching, centipede-like grace, then crashes through the door.
A spray of wood shatters across the ground.
I chase after him. A window shattered, and the sound came from the fire escape stairs.
I followed and could hear the rain and thunder still battling for dominance.
Joining them was my one chance to break my curse.
My shoes crunch the glass shards as I step through.
The door didn’t budge. My only option was climbing up and out through the window.