Liz thankfully didn’t play dumb. “Eh. This hurts a bit, but nothing I wasn’t prepared for.” She patted his arm with her free hand. “I’ll be fine. Really.”
They had a light dinner together. Neither of them really wanted to separate, so Matt hung out with her as she started to talk to the other teams. He tried to ingratiate himself with them as well, but it took effort, and he wasn’t half as good as her.
Liz walked up to nearly any group, and after a little introduction, was chatting as if she had grown up with them. Once she did that, it was easy for him to talk to them as well. But when a second group sat next to the one they were talking to, Matt’s attempts to do the same yielded lukewarm results. Where Liz got a firm yes to her proposal, he got maybe’s.
When he asked her, Liz said, “Y
