Page 66 of Dropping the Ball

She copies me, and we both stare at the vaulted ceiling, not that I’m seeing it. I’m lost in thought. I don’t have any genius arguments here.

“Katie.” I nudge her leg with mine. “You can date me. It’ll work.”

She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Does it help if I say I wish I could?”

“It’s already working. This is our fourth date.”

“What are you talking about? Are you high on sugar? Zombies get your brain?”

“Lunch at the warehouse. That was our first date.”

She drops her hands and turns to look at me.

I keep my eyes on the ceiling. “We went dancing for our second. Trick-or-treating was our third. Watching the movie wasnumber four. To be honest, I usually like a kiss after the third date, but you made up tardy points by blowing my mind with technique.”

She elbows me. “How is it possible you beat me in math? Oranything? That’s bad logic and worse counting.”

“Is it though? I planned for us to get to this point.”

“You did not.”

“I did. I knew as soon as I realized who Madison was when she hired me for the project that this was a possibility.” I straighten and turn so she does too, and we form a perfect reflection, each of us with one foot tucked under us, our knees touching, heads propped on hands braced against the sofa as we study each other.

“You thought you and I would date even though we hadn’t spoken since high school?”

“I said I knew this was a possibility.” I gesture between the two of us. “If any of that old chemistry was there and you were single, this was a probability. There is and you are. And here we are.” I squeeze her knee lightly.

“I call BS. I wanted to punch you, not kiss you, when I ran into you.”

I let go of her knee to rub my chest, remembering the impact. “Maybe you wanted to do both.”

When she starts to object, I press a hard, fast kiss to her mouth. “I wasn’t sure until you invited me to the hospital.”

“Madisoninvited you to the hospital.”

“She wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t want me there.”

She can’t deny that.

“Even though you seemed cool with me by then, it was still next to impossible to even get you down to the warehouse to be sure. To see if the probability would become a reality.”

“Because I’m so busy. That’s the whole problem.”

“I had a feeling you were avoiding me more than you needed to. But I could also see your schedule is pretty tight for real, so I came up with a plan to show you that you didn’t need to worry.”

“Your plan was to date me without telling me?”

I’m trying to decide if she’s tipped from being incredulous to getting mad. “Did you feel like you wasted any of those trips to the warehouse? Or did you leave feeling like you had a good understanding of how the installation is going?”

She frowns.

Not mad yet. “Did you also leave each time feeling like you understood me better? Learned something new about me, maybe?”

Her face says yes, but her mouth says, “You can’t trick people like that.”

“I didn’t. I brought you down for business. We conducted business. You deciding to stay for anything else was always up to you.”

“But it’s not a date if we don’t agree it’s a date.”

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