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was going on below his waist. “Men aren’t allowed in the Virgin Vault.”
    â€œApparently exceptions can be made for dashing young med students who come bearing restaurant reservations.” He glanced at his watch. “Which we’ve now missed.”
    â€œOh, Jesse, I’m sorry. If you’d called me sooner I could have changed my schedule.” Which would have been immensely preferable to the mess I’d created in the cemetery. “Where were we going to go?”
    â€œIt was too late to get a reservation anywhere decent,” he said. “And besides, I couldn’t afford it on my impoverished student budget. So I was going to take you on a picnic at the beach, to watch the sunset.”
    I felt even worse. “Oh, my God. Were we going to snuggle under a blanket next to a bonfire?”
    â€œYes. Although considering this storm, which seems to have come out of nowhere, I suppose it’s just as well my plans fell through.”
    I refrained from mentioning that I’d caused the storm, the torrential rain from which I could still hear pelting my window. Well, not me, but my client, who’d gone from being merely non-­compliant to murderous.
    Was it wrong of me suddenly not to care? From what Mark had said, it sounded like Zack Farhat deserved what he had coming.
    Okay, yeah, this was wrong of me.
    â€œIt was going to be very romantic,” Jesse was saying. “I even brought champagne. Well, not real champagne, since I can’t afford that. It’s sparkling wine, from California—­”
    â€œI prefer sparkling wine from California,” I interrupted. “California is the state of your birth.”
    â€œBut now,” he went on, lifting a bottle from the far side of my bed, “it’s warm. It wouldn’t fit in your miniature refrigerator. You have too many energy drinks in there. Susannah, you should stay away from those things. You know they’re full of—­”
    â€œMinifridge,” I corrected him. “It’s called a minifridge, not a miniature refrigerator. And I like warm champagne.”
    â€œNo one likes warm champagne, Susannah, even when it’s from the state of my birth. Now, why don’t you change out of those wet things, and—­”
    â€œClimb into bed with you?” I asked. “That sounds like a really, really good idea.”
    â€œâ€”­and stop lying to me about where you were tonight.”

 
    Cinco
    I FROZE, MY shirt halfway over my head.
    â€œWait. How could you tell I was lying?”
    â€œYou can’t even balance your checkbook. Who would ask for your help with Statistics?”
    I tossed my shirt to the floor. It was slightly disconcerting that he hadn’t even noticed I was wearing only a bra (and jeans), but that’s one of the downsides of dating someone who’d lived with you for years, even if he’d been in spirit form at the time and chivalrously only materialized when you were fully clothed. I’d always imagined he’d been too irritatingly faithful to his Roman Catholic upbringing—­and his Victorian-­era roots—­ever to have considered spying on me, but now I wasn’t too sure.
    Except of course that since I’d managed to reunite his soul with his body a few years ago—­another skill of mine that, sadly, cannot be measured by the SATs—­he refused to go further than second base (third on the rare occasions he drank more than three glasses of wine) with me out of “respect” for what he thinks he owes to me—­and my family and Father Dominic and the church—­for all we’ve done for him, giving him a second chance at life, blah blah blah blah.
    Sometimes I get so sick of hearing about it. All I want to do is bone , like a normal ­couple.
    But we can’t, because we aren’t normal (although normal isn’t considered a therapeutically beneficial term),