Hold Me Close

by Megan Hart

  “Can’t you just be happy with what I can give you?” she cried, still not turning. “Does it have to be everything or nothing with you?”

  Heath didn’t answer her. She heard the rustle of fabric and clink of metal—he was getting his coat from the hook that was his and only his, and would always be his. She turned, finally, unwilling to let him leave her this way one more time, with harsh words between them. She wanted to tell him she loved him and always would, but the look on his face stopped her.

  “The problem is, Effie, that you don’t give me anything. Not really.” Heath shrugged and opened the back door.

  “That’s not true.”

  Heath paused. “You don’t give me anything you don’t give a dozen other guys. Or maybe now, I guess, just that one.”

  That stung, and it wasn’t true. It had been true in the past, when she’d gone through men like wind through reeds, but was not now and hadn’t been for a long time. Effie’s chin went up, though. She wasn’t going to defend herself against him. Not about that.

  Heath didn’t smile. He looked at her with those green, green eyes and ran a hand over his too-short hair. “Thanks for the cut,” he said, and she didn’t know if he meant his hair or something else. Something deeper.

  In the end it didn’t matter, because he walked out the door, and she let him go without calling him back.

  chapter twenty

  Effie wakes with a pain down low in her guts. She’s grown used to pains like that. Sudden sicknesses. This is different, though. This is a deep and grinding pain deep inside, and though she feels as though she could possibly puke, this doesn’t feel like illness. It feels as if something’s wrong, though. With her hands on her belly, she sits up.

  Disoriented. Blinking at the faint light from the hallway through the door her mother insists on keeping cracked open, Effie swings her legs over the edge of the bed. Soft, clean linens, pillows, an unstained mattress. Her feet touch fluffy carpeting.

  She’s home, oh, God, she’s home, she’s home.

  It’s not a dream, this is real life, and she’d cry with the relief of it except that Effie is trying hard to unlearn how to weep. She listens for the sound of her mother hovering outside her door, but all she can hear is the faint noise of her father snoring. That noise is the background of her childhood and should soothe her, but something’s wrong now. Maybe nothing will ever be right again.

  Standing, Effie grunts at the force of a cramp. She needs the toilet, and fast. Halfway there, something tugs itself free from inside her, soaking her cotton panties, and begins an inexorable slide down her thighs. She knows it’s blood before she even gets to the bathroom. She doesn’t turn on the light. She fumbles with the toilet seat lid with its fuzzy yarn cover, something she also remembers from her childhood but that brings no comfort now. All she can think about it is how dirty that cover must be, how impossible to clean and how her hands have probably stained it.

  If she doesn’t turn on the light, she doesn’t have to know. She doesn’t have to see it. If she sits here in the dark with her sopping panties around her ankles, she can pretend she’s had an accident. Embarrassing, but nothing she’s never dealt with before. She will sit here until the cramping fades, and she’ll take a long hot shower and clean off. She’ll put her soiled clothes in the laundry and hope her mother doesn’t notice.

  But Mom notices everything.

  It’s been six weeks since Effie came home, and in that time, there hasn’t been a single thing Effie’s done that Mom hasn’t seen. Effie ought to be glad she’s home in her soft, warm bed, a fridge full of food she can’t quite bring herself to eat, loving and caring parents. Yet this constant scrutiny, the lack of privacy, the way everyone stares at her no matter where she goes, all have left Effie sometimes dreaming of the basement’s darkness. She misses Heath’s warmth in bed beside her. A legion of stuffed toys could never take his place. Her mother won’t allow Effie to see him alone. She sits with them at the kitchen table while they drink hot cocoa and play cards, or in the living room when they try to watch a movie. Heath is not Effie’s boyfriend. He’s more to her than that, so much more. Her father seems to understand at least a part of that, but her mother never, ever will.

  Except now Mom will know everything that went on. She won’t be able to pretend she doesn’t. No more denying. The truth of what happened in that basement won’t be hidden anymore, unless Effie can figure out a way to get herself up and off this toilet, clean herself up. She needs to take care of this. But even as she tries, her hands pressing to her cramping, aching belly, she wants to weep at the loss.

  She didn’t want to be pregnant at seventeen, but she hadn’t wanted to be abducted by a crazy guy and kept in his basement for three years, either. The baby is not a surprise. Effie’s long known about how babies are made. You couldn’t fool around without risking pregnancy, and she and Heath had been anything but careful.

  “Effie? What’s going on in there? Are you sick?”

  “I’m okay,” Effie manages to say. “Just ate something that disagreed with me.”

  Mom raps lightly. “Let me in.”

  “No, I’m fine. I’ll be...” Effie rasps a groan.

  “Let me in, Felicity!” Mom knocks harder. “Phil! Something’s wrong with her!”

  “No, no, no,” Effie says under her breath, but it’s too late.

  The knob rattles. She locked the door, but it doesn’t matter; her father has one of those little metal tools that pops the lock. The door opens. The light comes on, too bright, and Effie puts up a hand to cover her eyes.

  Mom screams. Effie wants to get up and tell her to stop, it’s all right, there’s nothing she can’t take care of, but in the light there is blood. So much blood. It’s splashed all over her legs, the floor, the toilet seat. Her hands. Effie clenches her fists, feeling the stickiness there. That small life, lost now.

  “Oh, my God,” Mom cries. “Phil, get out of the way. She needs to get to a hospital.”

  “No ambulance,” her father says at once, and Effie wants to hug him, but she can’t. “We don’t want everyone in the world finding out.”

  Effie says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Shh, kiddo. It’s all going to be okay.” Her father grabs a couple towels from the shelf and wraps them around her waist.

  Together, they get into his car, Effie in the front seat and Mom muttering over and over from the back while her father drives. By the time they get to the emergency room, Effie expects the entire car to be overflowing with what’s coming out of her, but it seems to have slowed. Her father has given her his trench coat to cover her so that nobody in the waiting room even really knows what’s going on.

  She’s taken to a room at once. Settled onto a gurney. Feet in stirrups, her body opened and probed and examined while her father holds her hand tight on one side and Mom on the other dabs at Effie’s forehead with a damp cloth until Effie asks her to stop. Then Mom mutters something that makes the nurse standing between Effie’s legs frown and ask her to leave the room.

  “I’m very sorry,” the nurse says when her mother has left in a huff. “You’ve lost the baby. I... Did you know that you were pregnant?”

  “Yes,” Effie says.

  Her father makes a small, sad noise, but his fingers grip Effie’s tighter. A doctor comes in. He does some things that hurt, but they’ve given Effie some pain medication in an IV drip, and she doesn’t care what’s going on anymore. The nurse cleans her up. They give her a gown to wear. They take away her stained nightgown and the towels.

  “Mom’s gonna be mad,” Effie slurs. “About the towels.”

  Then there’s a far-off humming and she sleeps for a bit until someone shakes her awake. She’s in a hospital bed and she sits up, terrified, not sure what’s going on, because the last time she was in the hospital, it was after the b
asement, and yes, there’s Officer Schmidt again.

  “What’s he doing here?” Effie remembers now why she’s there.

  “I called him,” Mom says. “He’s going to need to take your statement. About what happened. It’s for the case, Effie. So we can make sure that man never hurts anyone ever again.”

  Officer Schmidt has nice blue eyes and blond hair carefully combed back from his forehead. He has a nice smile. “Hey, Effie. I just need to get some information from you, okay? Do you feel up to it?”

  When the questions begin about Daddy, and how often he touched her, Effie looks for her father, but he’s gone. Sent for coffee, Mom says. Effie shakes her head, still woozy with the drugs. Now there’s pain again, dull and aching deep inside her, but she’s not sure if it’s from what they did to her or if her body is somehow simply mourning. All she knows is that they want her to say that Daddy did this to her, and that’s not true.

  “No. It wasn’t. He didn’t.” The words are thick in her mouth. Her tongue clumsy. Lips dry. She looks for water, which Mom gives her in a cup with a straw, and she gulps it too fast and then feels sick.

  “Effie,” Mom says quietly, without even a glance at Officer Schmidt. “If it wasn’t that man who did this to you, if you’re going to tell me it was that boy, well... You’re underage. He’s an adult. There will still be charges made.”

  Against Heath. Who is nineteen but not an adult; he’s still a kid, like her, only neither of them are kids anymore. Not really. Effie feels about her childhood the way she feels about movies she saw or dreams she had. It existed, somewhere, but not for her.

  She looks at her mother. At her father, standing in the doorway with two paper cups of coffee in his hands and a look of such strained grief that Effie can’t stand it. She looks then at Officer Schmidt with the nice blue eyes and the big strong hands and the uniform, and Effie speaks.

  “Yes,” she says. “It was Daddy.”

  chapter twenty-one

  The plan had been to go to the movies, but after looking at all the choices on the marquee, both Effie and Mitchell had agreed that nothing was tempting enough to waste their time on. That’s how they’d ended up back at his place with a pizza and some wine and a movie streaming on Interflix. She could’ve blamed the movie, which had sounded great in the description but had been a total snooze fest. She could’ve blamed the wine. But in the end, she had to admit that it was her own curiosity that had shifted her closer to Mitchell on the couch so that he could put his arm around her.

  She’d gone to bed with men on the first date, or without a date at all, and she and Mitchell had surpassed that a few weeks back. Yet something made her shy when he turned to look at her with the shadows of black and white from the TV screen flashing over his face. When he leaned to kiss her, she turned her face, just enough.

  “No?”

  Effie laughed. “Not no. Just...slow.”

  Mitchell tugged a strand of her hair that had escaped the low bun at the base of her neck. He moved closer, a hand on her thigh, but not pressing upward. He nuzzled at her cheek, then lower to her neck, and there, yes, okay, that was good. Like that. The soft brush of his lips on her skin, the heat of his breath. Now if only he would use his teeth...

  Mitchell pulled away. She thought he would speak, but he only smiled. It was the right choice. Words would’ve meant she had to answer him with some of her own, and it was always so much easier to talk with her body than her voice.

  She kissed him, harder than he had her. His mouth opened under the pressure of her lips, and when her tongue slid along his, Mitchell let out a low, very gratifying moan. Effie moved onto his lap, straddling him, her hands cupping his face. His went at once to her ass, gripping hard through the denim.

  “So much for slow,” he murmured into her mouth, which gave her pause.

  “I...”

  “Shh,” Mitchell said. “It’s fine. It’s great.”

  They kissed for a long time. Slow, fast, hard, soft. She learned that he liked it when she sucked his tongue, but that it seemed to surprise him how much. She did not like the way he didn’t move his hands around her body and kept them firmly planted on her ass—but she chalked it up to that politeness he’d shown her from the start. Maybe he was waiting for her to give him the go-ahead.

  “Touch me,” Effie breathed against Mitchell’s throat as she rocked against him. He was hard, that wasn’t an issue, for sure. Yet something in the hesitant, embarrassed way he laughed a little at her request made her sit back. Again pausing, trying to figure him out.

  Mitchell leaned back against the couch. His eyes looked a little glazed. His mouth wet. He licked his lower lip, and she watched him, wondering what he would do if she leaned forward to take that soft flesh between her teeth. He wouldn’t like it, Effie thought. He would not like that at all.

  “Maybe we should go upstairs?” Mitchell offered.

  “To your bedroom?”

  He laughed. “Yes. To my, um, my bedroom.”

  She got off his lap and held out her hand. “Yes. Let’s go.”

  Before he took her hand and stood, several seconds passed. Was he going to turn her down? Just before she withdrew her hand, Mitchell grabbed it. He pulled her into his arms for another kiss.

  “C’mon,” Mitchell said.

  Upstairs, his bedroom was no shock. White walls, linens, decorative pillows on the king-size sleigh bed. Spare and sterile artwork in perfect frames on the walls. He had a fireplace, the mantel bare but for two matching vases on each end. Through a door she caught sight of a bathroom as blandly neutral as the bedroom.

  “So clean,” Effie murmured and looked over her shoulder at him as she went to the bed to sit on the edge.

  Mitchell looked at her. “Umm...yeah, well... So, maybe we should... Do you want to pull the blankets back?”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” She stood to allow him to take off the pillows and watched him pile them neatly on the bench at the foot of the bed, where clearly they were meant to be piled instead of tossed haphazardly on the floor.

  “Would you like to shower or anything?”

  Shit. Was he being polite or was he asking her to shower first because he expected her to? Effie glanced toward the bathroom, uncertain. This wasn’t going the way she’d imagined, but to be honest she hadn’t spent a lot of time fantasizing about fucking Mitchell. At this point, it was beginning to seem as if one thing had led to another, going faster than it should have.

  “I could...or...are you going to?” Effie asked.

  “I could if you want to, or...”

  She laughed, not because any of this was funny, but because none of it was. Mitchell joined her after a second. He shook his head and stripped back the covers and stepped back from the bed.

  “I’ll turn out the lights,” he said.

  She was glad for the darkness. It made it easier for her to strip out of her clothes, folding them neatly and putting them on the chair because she felt too self-conscious to do anything else. It made it easier, too, to slip into the clean sheets smelling faintly of lavender. She heard the click of Mitchell putting his glasses on the nightstand. She waited for him to touch her.

  She waited.

  The first touch came, finally, on her hip. His hand moved to her belly. He rolled to face her and kissed her mouth; there was a tangle of arms and legs and the brush of his cock, thank God it was still hard, against her side, and she reached to touch him, but he twitched when she did, so she let her hand rest on his leg instead.

  She waited for him to kiss her.

  He did, at last, and it was better than it had been on the couch. He touched her, his hands finally roaming. Exploring. Mitchell’s touch was not tentative, but still softer than she liked or needed. When she moved beneath him, he went slower, not harder. Not faster.

  She had to
ld him to go slow, after all. Concentrating, Effie willed her body to respond. She wasn’t used to passivity during sex and yet found herself unable to do much more than allow Mitchell to make all the moves.

  He was patient, she gave him that. And had stamina. Inside her, appropriately sheathed, of course, he moved in a steady rhythm and stayed with it, until yes, yes, yes...

  “There,” she said. “Oh. Fuck. Yes, right...there...”

  Orgasm. Small but genuine. He followed her into it with a low grunt and some faster pacing, some harder fucking, and that would’ve sent her over the edge again if he’d kept it up, but it lasted only a few seconds more before he shuddered and buried his face against her neck. Moments after that he withdrew before he was even soft. He took care of the condom in silence and slid back beneath the covers next to her.

  “That was...unexpected,” Mitchell said after some more silence had passed.

  Effie had been dozing, but now her eyes opened wide. She rolled to face him, a hand beneath her cheek on the pillow. She thought about snuggling close to him, but she didn’t.

  “Was it?”

  He turned his head. In the dim glow from the night-light in the bathroom, she could still see the gleam of his eyes and teeth when he smiled. “It was great. I mean it was just a surprise.”

  She was afraid to ask why, not sure if he meant that he hadn’t expected them to do it at all, or that he’d thought it would be better than it had been. Or that it had been better than he’d imagined. It was not the worst sex Effie had ever had, by far, but it was far, far from the best. She wasn’t going to share that opinion, though.

  “Surprises can be good,” she said instead. “Can’t they?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  They both slept after that, but Effie woke with a start and a gasp that fortunately didn’t wake Mitchell. She crept from the bed and used his bathroom. She was gathering her clothes when his voice curled toward her out of the dark.