Free Grim Offerings (Aisling Grimlock Book 2) by Amanda M. Lee Page A

the past three hours.
    Griffin pushed my hand away and replaced my fingers with his, rubbing. I groaned appreciatively. “That feels good.”
    “Sit down on the floor in front of the couch,” Griffin ordered. “I think you’ve earned a shoulder rub tonight, and I think we need to talk.”
    I stiffened involuntarily.
    “Wipe that look off your face right now,” Griffin chided. “Sit down.”
    I did as instructed, kicking off my shoes and stretching my legs out under the coffee table. Griffin settled behind me, pressing my body between his knees as he started rubbing my neck. It felt heavenly.
    Griffin chuckled when I groaned. “If you keep making noises like that this is going to be a short massage.”
    I clamped my mouth shut.
    “I want you to tell me about Angelina,” Griffin said after a beat, digging his fingers into the tight bundle of muscles between my shoulder blades.
    “What do you want to know?”
    “All of it,” Griffin said.
    “It’s not a very interesting story,” I said. “We were in different elementary schools, so everyone was kind of thrust in each other’s worlds in middle school. She had this clique of little … harpies. They were horrible.
    “They went after Jerry that very first day,” I continued. “I’m not sure how to explain Jerry in middle school. He was … .”
    “Exactly the same as he is now?” Griffin suggested.
    “Kind of,” I said. “Jerry always knew he was different. His mother – you should meet her by the way – knew he was different, too. She encouraged him to be whatever he wanted to be.”
    “The way Jerry tells it, he took one look at you and decided you were going to be his best friend for life,” Griffin prodded.
    “He decided I was a fashion victim and that I needed him.”
    Griffin barked out a laugh. “Lean your head down.” He brushed my hair out of the way so he could kiss my neck, and then he proceeded to grind his fingers into my flesh. “What did Angelina do to Jerry?”
    “Typical stuff,” I said, moaning a little despite myself when he found a sensitive spot. “She tortured him by putting dresses in his locker. She would write hateful little messages with nail polish on his locker and in his books. She called him ‘Jerry the Fairy.’”
    “That must have been hard for him.”
    “He took it better than I did,” I said. “I … didn’t like the way she looked at him.”
    “Which was?”
    “Like he was somehow beneath her.”
    “So what did you do? Other than cutting holes in her pants, that is.”
    “Oh, I wrote her cellphone number on the bathroom wall at my dad’s Knights of Columbus meeting hall,” I replied. “I said she was always open for a good time, so she had, like, fifty old dudes calling her for a month straight.”
    Griffin snorted.
    “I put red paint on her pants in art class one day and told everyone she’d started her period,” I added. “It was typical kid stuff most of the time.”
    “Until?”
    “I don’t know when things really got out of control,” I said. “In high school, she’d go after every boyfriend I had. I didn’t have a lot of them. No one wanted to date me because of my brothers.”
    “I can see that.”
    “Then … well … maybe we should just stop now?”
    “Tell me,” Griffin urged.
    “I told the football team she had herpes and that she was trying to pass it on to all of them,” I said. “They all refused to date her, especially after all those pamphlets from Planned Parenthood fell out of her locker.”
    “Pamphlets?”
    “Venereal disease is very serious.”
    “Continue.”
    “She didn’t take it well, and when she decided to get back at me she was … inventive,” I said. “She had one of her friends tell me that Jerry was crying in the high school at the Homecoming game senior year. When I went looking for him, I didn’t find Jerry.”
    Griffin stilled his fingers. “What did you find?”
    “She’d told Shawn Lassiter that he was going to meet her, and he