Page 40 of The Strike Zone

Scout was running down the staircase by the elevators.

“Dude, what did I just say?” Ace nudged an elbow into my rib.

Instead of freezing on the spot, I jogged over to her quick enough to catch one of those little smiles cross her face as she spotted me.

“Hey, Davison, you know how much shit I’ve gotten since you posted that goddamn coffee order?” I stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “EvenLate Nighthas been talking about it. You know how hard I’ve worked to cultivate my reputation as being cool?”

She shrugged with an innocence no one was buying. Or at least I wasn’t. “I couldn’t leave it out. It was part of the video we shot.”

My eyes narrowed. “I think you could have left it out.”

“Yeah? What you gonna do about it?” she challenged. “You mock my coffee order, you need to handle the consequences. Why do you think I don’t share it with anyone?”

“You shared it with me.”

“Huh.” Her blue eyes held mine and she sucked in her cheek. “I guess I did.”

I kept my smile to myself, stepped in a little closer, and lowered my voice. “Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind?”

“About what?”

“Dating me.”

The hesitation right before she answered was all I needed to bring my good mood back in full force, and it wasn’t just good. It was excellent.

Her bottom lip curled into her mouth, eyes scoured my face before they rolled to the sky. “See you later, Parker.”

I watched her walk off down the corridor.

That smile I’d kept to myself was now beaming out for anyone who wanted to see.

TEN

SCOUT

“What’re looking at?”

I spun in my chair, coming face to face with a pair of high-tops crossed at the ankle on my desk. Ankles and high-tops belonging to Alice. I pushed them off.

“Nothing.”

“Oh yeah?” She leaned around me and peered out of the window by my desk. “You sure do have a good view of nothing. In fact, d’you wanna swap desks? Yours is obviously sooo boring here. Mine’s far too distracting.”

I peered over to hers, easily the messiest in the office. Piles of magazines, stacks of paper she’d printed out and not dumped in the recycling, empty cans of Diet Coke—you name it, it was on her desk. The cleaning staff had long given up trying to tidy around it.

“I’m not sitting over there.”

She turned to me with a grin. “I was kidding. There’s no way I could sit next to a window like this. It’s not even a window. It’s a wall of glass. No, it’s like one of those walkway things at the Empire State or whatever where you’re standing directly above a mile high drop. You know if the window breaks there’s nothing stopping you from falling out.”

She shuddered dramatically.

“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen then,” I replied. “Are you going to tell me why you’re interrupting me? What do you want?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. Just noticed you’d been staring out the window for twenty minutes instead of working. Obviously, I wanted to know why, and now I do.”

“No, you don’t,” I answered way too quickly.

“You’re not staring out the window because Parker King is down there at practice waggling his cute little butt?”

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