Page 69 of Witch Please

I don’t want to do this. Not because she’s blackmailing me.

“Are you seriously threatening to hurt Titus if I don’t break up with him?” That wasn’t the right word since they’d never even had the “we’re exclusive” talk, but it hardly mattered at this point. Rage frothed in her brain like a Keurig gone rogue.

Gram set her coffee cup down with an audible clink, though her voice stayed quiet. “It’s not a threat, Danica. You know perfectly well what I’m capable of. I will do whatever I think necessary to safeguard you and protect your future, to preserve the power you seem entirely too willing to throw away.” Gram’s tone turned dark and bitter, practically seething with vitriol.

She closed her eyes, hating this with every fiber of her being. But hadn’t she known it would come to this eventually? It didn’t matter what she wanted. It never had. And more importantly, she absolutely couldn’t permit Gram to go after Titus, to injure him or destroy what he’d built to prove a point.

I have to protect him.

She bit her lip. “Okay, yes. I’ll…Iwillend it. I was planning to anyway. Just…give me some time to do it gently so I don’t hurt him unnecessarily.”

“I can offer a grace period,” Gram said. “But I’ll need something in return. A show of good faith, if you will.”

Ugh, what now?

Stifling a sigh, Danica said, “I’m listening.”

“Those Bindr profiles? All those witches are local and willing to meet immediately. Choose one. You’ll get together for coffee right here if you like. If this doesn’t occur within the week, I can’t guarantee what might happen to that mundane.”

Fuck.She’d laughed at these bachelors with Clem, assholes who quoted Baudelaire and pretended they spoke fluent French. Despondently, she recalled their pictures and attributes, like she should think of them as potential sperm donors. She’d never come closer to hating Gram than at this moment.

Swallowing her outrage, Danica clenched a fist beneath the table. “Deal. I’ll agree to coffee, but anything else is up to my discretion and on my timetable.”

“That’s fine, dear. Just keep an open mind. Any of them would give me lovely grandchildren with a bloodline that any witch would be proud of.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak, barely keeping her tears in check.

As Gram marched out of Java House, Danica imagined how Titus would feel when she left with no satisfactory explanation, and she cried like she would never, ever stop.

***

For days after Titus got back to St. Claire, he tried to fight his growing unease.

Danica hadn’t exactly ghosted him, but she was…elusive. She replied to his texts after some delay, but there was distance in her answers that hadn’t been present before. That was a weird thing to intuit from texts, but she wasn’t joking or using emojis. Her answers came across as…brusque, and he didn’t know what to make of it.

Stop thinking about it. Don’t be obsessive.

Tonight, he was hosting the poker game, and Trevor had just arrived to help him make the multiple pizzas that his buddies would devour. The others thought he was extra for making them instead of ordering, but no pizza joint in town could compete with Titus’s recipe. His crust was delicious, and he splurged on the freshest toppings.

“Do you think she’s mad?” he asked Trev as he dumped the yeast into the warm-water-and-sugar mixture.

“Who, bro?”

“The woman I’m seeing.”Was seeing? Who the hell knows.

“Oh, remind me about the details.”

Sighing, Titus ran through the situation, ending with, “Things have been different since I got back. I haven’t seen her at all.”

“Huh. Maybe she is? You did leave town with only a text. I haven’t had a girlfriend in five years, but I think theydoget pissed about stuff like that. Before Sarah left that last time, she told me we needed to ‘work on our partnership’ and that she wanted to be ‘consulted on important decisions.’”

Titus had no idea why Trev was using air quotes when Sarah had literally said those things. Maybe he didn’t know how air quotes were meant to be deployed? But overall, it was a sad day when Trevor made sense and gave surprisingly decent relationship advice.

“Think I should apologize?”

“Do it in person, dude. With flowers. Or chocolate. Maybe both? If that doesn’t solve it, I’m out of ideas.”

“Flowers are a good idea.” The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. “Maybe I made her feel like she’s not important to me?”

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