Everyone's done stupid shit, right? I did. Your friends? They did. And you, seriously, seriously did. But hey, you were younger then, in the throes of puberty, obsessed with My Chemical Romance, way too much eyeliner, and a half-formed occultism informed by Wikipedia articles on Aleister Crowley and "absinthe" that was just green food coloring in the cheap beers you'd smuggled from your dad's stash.

So the whole incubus deal sounded pretty good, I'm sure- tall, dark, and handsome, with curling horns and demonic dash and, probably, a big ol' dong to suit your inflamed appetites.

The bit with the candles (birthday-type) and the pentacle drawn with sidewalk chalk was a bit much, really, but I'll give you credit, the Latin chants were about as good as one could expect. Overall, a solid ritual for something done by in a basement when your parents were out of town, and the whole posturing about a "desirous pillar of infernal flesh" was a little... eh. Flattering, really.

But that was several years and a fair bit of life ago, and the teenage crush on men with too much eyeliner has faded with your own taste for excessive makeup of the black variety, and your comic foray into the occult has been buried beneath the weight of time and school and work, a failed fling with that one dude who said all sorts of nice things, and the other shit that happens between then and a more hard-headed now. It's just another embarrassing story you'd only tell when you were really, really drunk. Not like anyone listens to that stuff, not in the way that matters.

Still, having a drink at the end of a long day helps, so here you are, seated at the bar as the rain patters outside, the sound of Taylor Swift's latest blaring over cheap speakers and Halloween decorations up way too early.

That shit you're drinking probably doesn't have much of a kick to it, but after a long dry spell and too much on your mind, you don't need any more kicks.

We all fantasize, sometimes. That we'll get a raise, that we'll play the hero, that a handsome stranger with golden eyes, a silver tongue, and a black leather jacket will slide onto the stool next to you and whisk you off to-

Oh.

Hello there.

The shitty plastic jukebox seems to have slipped from T. Swift to Ain't no Grave in the blink of an eye, and the candles flicker a fresco on the wall, now. If you look at me, just out of the edge of your gaze, you swear you can see horns, just for an instant, and the glimmer of hellfire in my eyes.

You can feel the heat already, can't you?

Someone was listening, after all.