Proposal (The Mediator, #6.5)(8)

“Oh, 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?”

“It 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?”

“Yes. 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.

“It 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—-”

“I prefer sparkling wine from California,” I interrupted. “California is the state of your birth.”

“But 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—-”

“Minifridge,” I corrected him. “It’s called a minifridge, not a miniature refrigerator. And I like warm champagne.”

“No 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—-”

“Climb into bed with you?” I asked. “That sounds like a really, really good idea.”

“—-and stop lying to me about where you were tonight.”





Cinco


I FROZE, MY shirt halfway over my head.

“Wait. How could you tell I was lying?”

“You 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), and my boyfriend has post--traumatic stress from being dead. And is also Catholic and a century and a half years old, of course, even though he doesn’t look a day over twenty--six.

“I happen to be making a B in Statistics, Jesse,” I said. “That’s above average. And no one balances their checkbook. No one even has a checkbook anymore, except for you and Father Dominic.”

“Stop avoiding the subject, querida.” He regarded me impassively from the bed. “And stop thinking you’ll distract me from it, too, by undressing in front of me.”

Damn.

“Fine.” I snatched a dry shirt from my school--issued dresser. “If you must know, I was at the cemetery.”

He raised one dark eyebrow—-the one with the scar through it, a perfect crescent moon of brown skin where dark hair should have been. “Cemetery?” he echoed.

Then indignation swiftly replaced bewilderment.

“Was that what I felt earlier?” he demanded, rising from the bed. “I thought it was because you were out there driving in this storm. But that wasn’t it, was it? It was because you were chasing a ghost, alone, in a cemetery, at night.”

I’d begun peeling off my boots. I know he’d asked me not to undress in front of him, but my jeans were soaked. I needed to change them.

Okay, they might have not been that wet. But I needed time to come up with a reply that wouldn’t enrage him. This was an evasive maneuver.

“Jesse, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean, what you felt earlier?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. We may no longer have a ghost--mediator connection, Susannah, but I can still tell when you’re feeling afraid, and earlier this evening, you were very, very afraid—-”