AITA? A Modern Fairy Tale (Special Edition Hard Cover)

“Logan, does it have to sit on our coffee table?”

The Delectably Demonic summoning kit looked like a cross between one of those canisters they had for larger fireworks around the fourth of July and a ridiculously large caliber rifle bullet. The top unscrewed and everything you needed to perform a “quality” summoning was inside: the salt, the spells, and the measuring tape, so you could create the lines you needed quite precisely.

Cheaper summoning kits—where you knew you were only going to summon up a succubus for long enough to get a handy, according to the “research porn” I’d looked at—were made of cardboard, and had little succubi holding pitchforks printed along the sides winking saucily with their hips cocked out.

This one was comparatively tasteful. It was made of burnished, forest-green-colored metal, and if you didn’t know better, you could pretend it was a work of art, which was something I would know—I worked at an art gallery.

I counted out ten heartbeats, waiting for him to respond. It was habit I’d recently picked up to try to calm my nerves now that I wasn’t drinking, to try to get me more conscious of my own presence in my body. “I mean really, Logan,” I went on, and he looked up at me from in our kitchen, where he’d been portioning out tomorrow morning’s coffee into the machine.

“What?” he asked, like he hadn’t heard me.

“Does it have to sit here?” I repeated.

He pretended to consider things. “Oh, you’d rather me put it on the bookcase? Or maybe the mantel, beneath the TV?”

“You know what I mean,” I told him.

“I do. But I also know what you said. Y-E-S,” he spelled out, before giving me a grin.

I sighed. “This is bullshit and you know it.”

He laughed, finishing setting the coffeemaker’s dials. “I’m not a jerk, Becky. I’m never going to make you do anything you don’t want to. I just think our relationship’s strong enough to handle this is all. Don’t you?”

I looked between the summoning kit and him. We were getting married in two weeks—I’d better be sure of him. “Y-E-S,” I spelled back. “But right now? When I’m hip-deep in wedding planning?”

“That’s why my mom got you a wedding planner,” he said, ever so reasonably.

“Uh, no, your mom got herself a wedding planner,” I muttered. It’d been pretty clear that marrying into the Graff family, my opinions on my actual wedding were extraneous. I just hadn’t cared, because, well, his mom cared so much, and my parents weren’t alive anymore, anyhow.

“Well, if it’s a timing thing, then all the more reason we should do it sooner than later. Then, poof, it’s gone, out of the way—and off the table.” He put his hands on the back of one of our dining room chairs and lounged over it sexily. 

Logan Graff was, for all intents and purposes, a hunk. From his chiseled face with his inquisitive eyes, his leanly muscled arms and washboard abs—I knew when I first spotted him on the campus quad that he would be a catch—then he’d walked over, and somehow, I had caught him.

And now his great-grandmother’s diamond ring was on my finger, there was a demon summoning kit in my living room, and it felt a little bit like all the walls were closing in.

“I just . . .” I began, my voice drifting, entirely unsure how to explain how I felt to him. I loved him. I loved our life. I loved our apartment. I loved our dog—okay, we didn’t actually have a dog yet, but we had the kind of lives where we could have a dog, and it felt like that should count for something.

We were perfect on paper. Logan was the tab A to my slot B, and I knew, quite viscerally, that I didn’t want to be alone in the world: after my parents died, shit had sucked.

He was good to me, and I liked that.

It would be so stupid of me to walk away—especially when I didn’t have anything else to walk toward.

“Tonight’s clearly not the night,” he said, cutting me off with his usual congeniality, and then he raked his eyes over me with a look. “Bedtime?” he suggested with intent.

“Y-E-S,” I spelled in relief.

Anything to get away from that thing—and to pretend that everything was good.