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virgin.”
    â€œShe’s not?” Jack smiles, raises eyebrows in fake astonishment. Frankie’s jeans were tight and low enough on the hips to showcase two inches of pale, flat belly.
    â€œNo-oo.” Mona slips a hand between his dress shirt buttons; even through his undershirt, he can feel her hands are freezing. “Frankie’s like a total sexual predator.”
    â€œYou’re
sure
your parents are cool with you moving in?”
    Mona looks up at him, pupils blotting out the color from her eyes.
    â€œSure,” she says. “My parents lived together before they were married.”
    On her wrist sticking out of his shirt, Mona wears the tennis bracelet he gave her when they exchanged gifts last night. He got it the week before at a Chagrin Falls jewelry store owned by the father of his first girlfriend. Anna, the ex-girlfriend who had married an area doctor, was working behind the counter, stomach swollen with her first child. When he said he needed a gift for his girlfriend, she’d laughed deep and from the back of her throat. “A ring, perhaps?” she’d asked.
    â€œNo,” he had told Anna. “Anything but a ring.”
    Jack hears himself saying something to Mona—maybe “Okay,” or “I just wanted to make sure they knew.”
    â€œDon’t worry.” She grabs his ass. “If you’re a good boy, you’ll get some tonight.”
    But her room is so oppressively girlie with its dust ruffle and throw pillows, the collection of Sweet Valley High paperbacks stacked above the desk. It’s the last place in the world he wants to have sex.
    â€œSure,” he says, brushing her long hairs out of his face.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Long red hair in thick braids, Melanie—the ghost of Mona future—is reading from a very fat book at the kitchen table, seemingly oblivious to trays of iced wreath- and present-shaped cookies drying around her.
    Jack has never met Mona’s older sister before, but knows she’s getting a Ph.D. in Russian literature at Johns Hopkins, that she’s slept with more than one married professor, and she’d made Mona feel stupid when they were kids, which Mona isn’t over yet.
    â€œYou must be Jack and Jack’s brother,” Melanie says without getting up. In her cat-eyed black glasses, she comes from central casting to play a role: embittered intellectual in her late twenties.
    â€œ ‘Jack’s brother’
is
what it says on his birth certificate.” Jack smiles, shoulders loosening; he’s known girls like Melanie all his life—in advanced placement calculus classes, at law school, at Jones Day—her he can handle.
    â€œHis name is Connor,” Frankie says with more authority than the eight minutes she’s known his brother should warrant. “My sister Melanie.”
    Melanie nods, and Frankie ladles eggnog from a giant copper pot on the stove into green plastic cups for her and Connor. She offers Jack a glass, but he shakes his head.
    â€œSo what is your drink then, son?” Mona’s father has one hand on Jack’s back, the other around a tumbler of amber alcohol the same color as his daughters’ eyes. “Scotch? Brandy?”
    The closest thing Jack has to “a drink” would be the gin and tonics he orders at business lunches if clients are drinking. “Coffee?” he asks, noticing the half-full pot in the machine next to bottles of red and white wine for the post-dinner party Mona warned about.
    â€œBaileys and coffee?” Mona’s father asks hopefully.
    When Jack agrees, her father actually winks at him. But in the Lockridge house, there’s an incredibly skewed ratio of Baileys to coffee—a strange upper-downer combination. It warms his lungs and chest as he sits in the empty chair next to Melanie. Mona rests her butt against his knee, a display of affection Jack isn’t sure about, not