Page 8 of Spiral Lies

I shrug instead of answering, which makes him grimace.

"Give me a chance, angel," he murmurs, his voice a gritty rasp. "Just one chance to make it up to you and prove that I can be more than just a grouchy asshole."

"Can you?" I ask, genuinely curious because he isn't just a grouch to me. He's a grouch to literally everyone.

"Yeah." His lips quirk into a smile that makes my stomach flutter. "If you let me, I can be your grouch."

"You are never going to believe what happened today," I cry, sliding into the seat beside Nova at the baseball stadium. Her brother, Nathan, is playing. We aren't here to watch him, though. We're here to watch Huxley Saint, the man Nova swears she hates.

"You and Stone finally went at it like rabbits on top of his desk?" Nova says, grinning as she passes me a foam finger and a bag of popcorn. "Because if one of us isn't getting laid, this whole reality is done for."

"We did not have sex on his desk," I growl, earning curious looks from the couple in front of us. My cheeks turn pink, but Nova just smirks at them and waggles her brows until they quickly turn back around.

"What a waste of a perfectly good desk," she mutters, deadpan.

"He's no longer my boss."

"What?" Her eyes fly open wide. "What the fuck? He got fired?"

"Nope."

"Holy shit. Did you quit?"

"No. He—"

"That bastard fired you?" she growls, hopping to her feet with murder in her gaze.

I grab her arm, yanking her back down into her seat before she decides to go hunt him down and bury him under home plate. "Will you listen?" I whisper-hiss.

"Fine," she grunts. "But if the next sentence out of your mouth is that he fired you, I'm killing him. Emelia and Ava are helping, so we're going to need a lot of bail money and excellent lawyers. I'm also going to need you to pack everything in my apartment so my psycho roommate doesn't try to sell it off to the highest bidder."

"You really need to move." If the devil had a sister, I'm pretty sure it'd be Nova's roommate, Larissa. The woman is just pure evil. But Nova is stubborn, and she refuses to let her win, so she won't move. They're in this weird stand-off.

"We're talking about your drama, not mine."

"Fine. He didn't fire me. He found my MASH board."

"What?"

"The stupid game of MASH I played that weekend," I growl. "He found it. Actually, I accidentally gave it to him. It was on my desk, and I grabbed it along with his schedule."

"Hold the phone. Why the fuck did you have it at work?"

"I forgot it was in my purse," I mutter.

"You little liar!" She jabs me in the arm. "You've been looking at it, haven't you?"

"What? No." Not even the armies of hell could torture that truth out of me. "I just forgot about it."

"Uh-huh," she smirks. "I'm sure you did. And then you accidentally gave it to him."

"That was an accident!"

She pops a piece of popcorn into her mouth, still smirking. "So…he knows you have a thing for him now, and he asked Hector to be your supervisor? At least he didn't fire you."

"That's the thing," I mutter, still trying to process how I ended up in this alternate dimension. "He, uh…he might have asked me out?"

"Shut the front door!" She's on her feet again, staring at me like I just hit a homerun. "Holy shit."