Hold Me Close

by Megan Hart

  “It’s very old-fashioned,” she explained to him over a plate of decent pasta with garlic and olive oil. “That’s all.”

  Mitchell grinned. “What can I say? My mama raised me right.”

  “She did.” Effie returned his grin, which was surprisingly naughty, considering what a gentleman he was claiming to be. “It’s nice. Just...”

  “Makes you uncomfortable?”

  She nodded after a second, her grin twisting slightly to become a grimace. “I’m sorry...”

  “It’s okay. But I like to,” Mitchell said. “In case you think it was a pain in the butt or something. It’s not. I like to do it.”

  “It makes me feel helpless,” Effie blurted and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Mitchell looked surprised, then concerned. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Forget it.” Effie twirled the pasta on her fork, pressing it into her spoon’s deep bowl. It was an old trick, to make an elaborate show of eating to hide the fact she’d taken no more than a couple bites.

  “No. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable with me, Effie. I’m really sorry if anything I did made you feel that way.”

  Shit. Now she’d gone and done it. Brought out the white knight in him.

  “It’s just a thing I have. It’s...really... I don’t want to talk about it. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  Mitchell sat back in his chair with a frown. “Okay.”

  She changed the subject, effortlessly, she thought. They ordered dessert. She wanted coffee but sipped a mug of hot tea. She’d demurred about cake, saying she was stuffed.

  He hit her with it in the car, the ignition running but still in Park. “You didn’t eat. You said you were full, but you didn’t eat anything.”

  “I ate.” She heard the defensiveness in her voice and softened it. “I wasn’t that hungry.”

  The loud growl of her stomach at that inopportune moment proved she was a liar. Effie pressed a hand to her belly and looked Mitchell straight in the eyes. Daring him to comment.

  Most men would’ve let it pass, but she supposed most men wouldn’t have noticed. Mitchell tapped the wheel, looking away from her. He sighed.

  “My sister’s anorexic. She’s been hospitalized for it a couple times. I know the tricks.” He looked at her. “I noticed it the first few times we went out, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to make you feel weird about it, and you don’t look... Shit. I know that you don’t have to look any certain way, but...”

  “I don’t have anorexia. Or bulimia.” The words came out with the sharp edge of an addict swearing she didn’t need the high. Effie pressed her lips together for a second before adding, “I have a thing about food. Yeah. But it’s not an eating disorder, at least not the kind you’d think.”

  “I see.”

  He could not see, of course. Not without a long and detailed explanation that Effie was in no way ready to provide. She put her hands in her lap, fingers linked, and stared straight ahead. It had begun to rain again.

  “We might never get any more snow this winter,” she said. “Maybe it will all be rain from now on.”

  They didn’t say much of anything on the way to her house. Mitchell turned on the radio, which should’ve been a relief but made the silence only all the more obvious and awkward. When he pulled into her driveway, the house was blazing with light. Her mother threw a fit if you left a light on in any room you weren’t using, but only in her own house. Apparently, Effie’s electric bill wasn’t of her concern.

  Mitchell put the car in Park but left it running. He did not, as he’d done every other time, get out to go around and open her door for her. Of course she missed it as soon as he didn’t do it. Of course she couldn’t say so, not without sounding stupid.

  “Well. Good night. Thanks for dinner.” Effie put her hand on the door.

  “Effie...wait a minute.”

  She half turned. He’d apologize again now. Or try to get her to talk about “it,” whatever the it was in his brain that he thought needed discussion. She should’ve just fucked him on the first date, Effie thought. Found out what was inside those khakis and been done with it. Moved on. What had ever made her think she could be anything like normal?

  “I’m a good listener,” Mitchell said.

  Effie’s eyebrows rose. “Okay?”

  “Out of all the women I’ve met on LuvFinder, you’re the only one who doesn’t really seem to like to talk.” Mitchell gave her another of those bad-boy grins that ought to have been at odds with the rest of his persona but somehow fit him just right. “It’s kind of making me a little crazy, to be honest.”

  Effie laughed. “Oh, yeah? You like talkers?”

  “It’s not that I like them. I guess I just got used to it. We’re all on that site to find someone, right? So you get paired up by whatever algorithms they use to show you profiles, or you hunt around, stalking, until you see something you like. And you can only hope that the other person likes you, too, at least enough based on whatever clever stuff you used to fill out your profile, and then, wow, if you do get someone to say yes to a date, well...” Mitchell pushed his glasses up on his nose and shrugged. “You can only pray that you like them enough to want to ask them out again. And that they like you, too.”

  “That’s pretty much how it goes. Yeah.” On Effie’s front porch, her mother’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. “She’ll flash the light next.”

  “I guess I should kiss you quick, then,” Mitchell said and leaned across the center console before Effie could stop him.

  She let him kiss her, though, and it was as sweet and nice as it had been the other times. She wasn’t expecting him to cup the back of her head, nor for his hand on her knee, high up and higher before she put a hand on his to stop him going any higher. The kiss got harder when she did that, only for a second or so before he broke it. He didn’t move away from her.

  “That night we spent together...” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I think about it all the time.”

  Surprising heat washed over her, painting her cheeks and throat. “You do?”

  “Yeah.” His fingers inched upward, teasing. “All the time.”

  Effie kissed him again. She put her hand on his and moved it higher. His fingertips brushed between her legs, and she let out a sigh before pulling away.

  “I want to see you again,” Mitchell said.

  “Even if I don’t talk enough?”

  Mitchell smiled. “Yeah. Maybe because you don’t. It makes you mysterious. Like you’re full of dark secrets that maybe I can get you to tell.”

  “If I told you my dark secrets,” Effie said, “they wouldn’t be secrets, would they?”

  * * *

  “I thought you were never going to come home,” Mom complained when Effie at last came through the front door. “It’s late, and the weather’s getting worse. I was getting worried.”

  “I know you saw me sitting out there, Mom. You couldn’t have worried too much. I was in the driveway.”

  Her mother huffed. “I know what you were doing out there.”

  “Kissing,” Effie said to get a rise out of her. She shrugged out of her coat and hung it in the front closet. “Tongues and everything.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Felicity. For the whole world to see!”

  “They couldn’t see anything. The windows were steamed up.” Effie grinned and waggled her brows at her mother, then gave her an impromptu hug. “Thanks for watching Polly. If you don’t want to drive home, you can stay over. We can make pancakes in the morning.”

  “I like to sleep in my own bed. And I need to let the dog out.” Her mother shook her head, then gave Effie a sideways glance. “You like him?”

  “He’s ve
ry nice. By that I mean, like, nice, nice. I told you he was nice. You don’t believe me?”

  Her mother rolled her eyes. “A nice guy wouldn’t sit in the driveway with his mouth and hands all over you.”

  “No,” Effie said, “I guess he’d come inside and fuck me on the living room carpet in front of my mother.”

  Her mother scowled and shook her head. Then she laughed, at first softly and then a little as if it choked her. “Okay. Okay, I get it.”

  “I’m an adult, as crazy as that might sound and as insane as that makes you,” Effie said. “And I know I’ve done my share of giving you trouble, Mom. But I’m trying to get at least some things in my life in order, okay? I really am. And if that means a guy like Mitchell...”

  “What’s wrong with a guy like Mitchell? You said he was nice.” Her mom gathered her coat and slipped it on, then pulled a knit cap over her hair.

  “He is. He’s too nice.” Effie rubbed her hands together, then found a hair elastic in her pocket and pulled her hair up on top of her head into a twisted, messy bun with a sigh of relief. Getting the weight of it off her neck was relief akin to taking off her bra, which was the next thing she intended to do. And after that, a bowl of soup from her freezer. She was starving.

  “How can someone be too nice?”

  “He’s good. That’s all. Too good.” Effie caught sight of her mother’s face. “What?”

  Her mother shook her head again. “Oh. Effie. Never say that.”

  Effie swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat. “I’m hungry. Do you want something to eat, or are you really leaving?”

  “I’m leaving. But, Effie...” Her mother paused, then came closer to take Effie by the shoulders. “You listen to me. No man is too good for you. It’s the other way around. And I have other news for you, too. Your life is in order. I look at you, what a wonderful mother you are to Polly, and I could not be more proud of you. You’re a talented, creative woman with a good heart and never, ever let anything ever make you feel any different.”

  They hugged, and Effie clung for a moment or two longer than she normally would have. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Eat,” her mother said. “You’re getting too thin.”

  “You can never be too thin.”

  Her mother patted her rounded belly through the padding of her coat. “Don’t argue with your mother.”

  Effie waited until her mother had pulled out of the driveway before she turned off all the lights. In the kitchen, she pulled a container of soup from the freezer and heated it in the microwave. Heath’s soup, made in the university kitchen but brought home for her because he knew she would trust him enough to eat it.

  She’d set her phone on the table while she went to the bathroom and had missed the message that came through. It was from Mitchell. No words, just a smiley face emoticon and one word: Goodnight

  Alone at her kitchen table, Effie put her face in her hands and cried.

  chapter twenty-eight

  It’s the first time Effie’s ever taken a pregnancy test, though not the first time she’s ever counted the days since her period was due, praying for a miracle. The instructions say she needs to wait three minutes, but she’s hovering over it, watching for the plus sign she already knows will be there. She’s felt this before, all the signs, and she knows she was stupidly not careful enough.

  Sure enough, the clock ticks past and two pink lines, intersecting, appear in the small white window. There’s no denying or ignoring it, no explaining it away. She is pregnant.

  Again.

  She’s never been regular. All the doctors she’s seen said women who don’t eat right often skip periods. It has never been strange for her to go a month or two, or even three, without bleeding. So why has she taken the test this time, instead of assuming she was just skipping a few months the way she so often had? Simple. She remembers how it felt the first time.

  In the mirror, Effie looks at her naked reflection. She turns from side to side, trying to see if there’s any kind of bulge. Her hip bones jut. Her belly is slightly less concave than usual. Her mother has been nagging her about the weight loss. In these last few months before Effie starts classes at the local college, the tensions between them have been mounting, but they don’t argue out loud. Her mother forces food on her, and Effie doesn’t eat it.

  Panic slaps her, and she drops to her knees in front of the toilet to dry heave. Nothing comes up but air and thin yellow bile. Effie presses her forehead to the cool tile floor and considers praying, but what god will listen to her now?

  Outside the door, Mom knocks. She’s never accused Effie of bulimia, but she has a way of lurking around the bathroom door when Effie’s inside for any length of time. Effie pictures her now, ear pressed to the thin wood.

  “I’m getting ready to go to the mall,” Mom calls out, all casual, as though she hasn’t been listening to the sound of Effie puking. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “I have homework.” She graduated on time, but barely, and has signed up for summer correspondence courses so she could forgo some of the lower level classes in college. Now, Effie thinks, she’ll never bother to finish a math problem again. It’s clear she already doesn’t know how to fucking count.

  “Effie.”

  Effie sighs and pushes herself up and off the floor to run some water in the sink. She wraps the pregnancy test in some toilet paper and shoves it to the bottom of the garbage can, hiding it beneath used cotton balls and tissues. She brushes her teeth to cover up the taste of bile.

  With a bright, fake grin, she opens the door so fast her mom has to step back out of the way. Mom has the grace to look a little embarrassed. In that moment, all Effie wants to do is collapse into her mom’s arms and be rocked like when she was young and had scraped her knee. She wants her mom to make her chicken soup and tuck her beneath a blanket and let her watch old episodes of The Patty Duke Show the way she had those first few weeks after Effie had come home.

  Effie hadn’t appreciated that then, but she would trade anything to have that time back now.

  Instead, she makes sure to look her mom right in the eyes, because the easiest way to tell a lie is to make sure you keep the eye contact. Totally throws the other person off. “I told you, I have homework.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here by yourself. I wish you’d come with me.”

  Effie keeps her expression neutral. All she can think about is those two pink lines making that plus sign. The rest of her life, summed up in the equation answered in that tiny little window.

  “Mom. I really can’t.” Effie softens her tone. “But if I finish all my homework, maybe we can watch a movie when you get home? Make some popcorn? I’m craving some.”

  It’s the promise of getting her to eat that persuades her mother to agree. Effie sees it on her face. A hint of relief, overlaid with a wariness Effie hates because it makes her feel so freaking guilty. Because she’s caused her mom so much grief and worry, and she can never, ever make it up to her, and because she’s about to cause her so much more.

  Later, after a bowl of popcorn that Effie personally popped and inspected to make sure it didn’t contain anything hidden, and a chick flick they got from the video store, her mother comes into Effie’s room. She’s carrying the pregnancy test, the handle wrapped in layers of toilet paper but nothing at all hiding that glaring pink plus sign.

  “It’s that boy. Isn’t it? You’ve been sneaking around behind my back, seeing that boy!” Mom throws the pregnancy test at Effie.

  It hits her in the face. Cringing, Effie knocks it off the bed, where it falls onto the floor, facedown. Her mother is panting, short sharp and hysterical breaths. Her eyes are wild. Her hair looks as though she’s stood in front of a wind turbine.

  Effie hasn’t seen Heath in almost a month. Hasn’t fucked him for much, much
longer than that. He wanted more from her than she could give him. He always does, most people do, but Heath is the only person Effie can’t bring herself to lie to. If anything, Heath is the only person to whom Effie can tell her every truth. He wants her to love him and only him, and she can’t do it. Every time she looks at him, she’s back in the basement. So they fight. They hurt each other over and over, and what Effie thinks is, she already knows that knife is sharp. Why does she have to keep slicing her fingers on it, just to be sure?

  “Kill yourself for good this time if you have to,” she’d snapped at his threats. “Maybe you’ll be better off dead than always wanting what you can never have.”

  It’s the cruelest thing she’s ever said to anyone. She still runs hot and cold with shame at the memory of it. Yet sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same. If you can’t give someone you love what they want, sometimes you give them what you need.

  “It’s not Heath’s.”

  Her mother’s face drains of all color. Her fists clench. Her mother has never, that Effie can remember, hit her, but it sure looks as if she’s about to now.

  “Liar. I know you’ve been sneaking off to see him. I can smell it on you when you get home. You stink of it. You think I didn’t know?”

  Effie’s lip curls. “I’m pregnant, Mother, but I’m not lying. It’s not Heath’s.”

  “Whose is it, then? Oh God, Felicity, oh my God, oh my God...” Mom’s hands rake up her cheeks and anchor in her hair. Her mother stalks to the phone on Effie’s desk. “I’m calling the police.”

  “For what?” Alarmed, Effie gets off the bed. Her toe nudges the pregnancy test. She scoops it up and tosses it into the garbage, and this time with no need to try to hide it, of course it sinks all on its own beneath the detritus of crumpled notebook paper and magazines.

  “You were under eighteen! He’s twenty. That’s... It’s rape. Or something. It’s statutory rape, and I’m going to make sure he pays for it!”

  “I’ve been over eighteen for months, Mom.”