“You want to tell me?”
“No. Not yet. I’m not ready.”
“All right. I get it. Secret squirrel stuff.”
Ramsey’s mouth curled to one side in a half-smile. “Something like that.”
He chuckled. “Thereissomething I’ve been wondering.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Our tickets tonight. How’d you manage to get those seats? You know someone?”
“If you’re wondering what the Ridge pays me, it’s not nearly enough. I was the twenty-first caller on WRKS during one of their promotional contests. I had to answer some silly questions, my name went into a drawing, and I won two tickets to a summer concert of my choice. I didn’t know if I’d collect them, thought about giving them to Briony and Maggie, but then you and I sort of happened, so it worked out.”
“Good deal, then.” He paused. “Still, I’d like to pitch in toward the cost of the evening. Like you said, the Ridge doesn’t exactly keep you flush. I invited you to my cousin’s wedding. Except for suffering Aunt Kay, it was free to me.”
“You rented a car, as I recall.”
He ignored that. “And then I took you shooting. Again free. Worse, you tipped the jar because Anna wouldn’t accept my money.”
“Do you keep some kind of weird score card in your head?”
“In my back pocket.”
“Of course,” she said dryly. “Look, the concert was my idea, and it was free. I’d really rather not take your money.”
“I’d really rather you did.”
She sighed. “It’s important to you?”
“Yeah. It kinda is.”
“Twenty bucks, then. Beer money.”
“Ramsey.”
“All right. Thirty. That’s my final offer. If you still feel like a kept man after shelling out thirty, then that’s on you.”
He laughed with genuine amusement. “Kept man? Wasn’t any part of my thinking. I simply wanted to share the expense. Is that wrong?”
“No. I guess not.”
“This is the second time tonight that you don’t sound certain.”
“It’s just that going Dutch doesn’t make tonight seem like a date. It’s what two people do when they’re not sure, when they’re still trying to figure out if they want to go on a date. I thought we were surer than that.”
“You’re making this way too complicated. Here I was thinking we were comfortable enough with each other to share.”
She was silent, considering that. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am making this complicated.”
“Dating’s complicated already. I said you were making it way too complicated.”
“You know, Sullivan, you need to figure out when to stop. I conceded that maybe you were right. You should have picked up that ball and run with it, taken it to the end zone and done your happy dance.”
“I didn’t play ball,” he said, straight-faced. “I was a swimmer. No end zones. No happy dance.”
Equally expressionless, she asked, “Then what explains your brain injury?”
