Hold Me Close

by Megan Hart

  “If it’s going to be weird in the morning,” he said, “I probably should.”

  She thought about Polly having to face a stranger over the breakfast table while her overtired and possibly bitchy friends giggled and whispered. “Yeah. That’s probably best. I don’t want you to go if it’s not going to be safe, though.”

  “I have four-wheel drive. I’ll be okay.”

  They both stood without moving until Effie took the two steps toward him and Mitchell met her halfway. She kissed him. Slowly at first. Then harder when his mouth opened and his arms went around her.

  “You really shouldn’t go out in this weather,” Effie said.

  Mitchell studied her quietly for a moment. “I can take the couch.”

  “You don’t have to...” Effie paused at the look on his face. “I mean, I have a guest room.”

  Mitchell kissed her again, then hugged her close. He said against her cheek, “It’s not that I don’t want you.”

  Effie laughed and nuzzled against his neck for a second, thinking of kissing him again. Or nudging her knee between his thighs and sliding her hands down his sides to cup his ass. She could seduce him. She’d already done it once, right? But Polly was here, along with a bunch of other people’s kids, and Effie had long made a point about not fucking strangers with her child in the vicinity.

  “God, I really do want you,” Mitchell said before Effie could answer him. “But with the kids all here...”

  “We don’t have to have sex, Mitchell. You can sleep in the guest room or the couch, your choice. But the guest room is way more comfortable.”

  Down the hall, she showed him the spare room and gave him fresh towels. A toothbrush from her supply of extras. A pair of sweatpants that were too big for her.

  He kissed her in the doorway when she turned to leave, and Effie let it linger until Mitchell had backed her up against the wall and her breath caught in her throat. She closed her eyes, feeling his hands. His mouth. His tongue. And yeah, there it was, the press of heat and hardness on her belly.

  She opened her eyes. “Good night, Mitchell.”

  “Yeah,” he said after a second, his voice raspy rough. “Good night.”

  He left a note on her pillow in the morning, saying he’d snuck out before any of the girls could wake. He would call her soon. He’d put the borrowed sweatpants and the used linens in the laundry room. Mitchell’s handwriting was painfully neat and straight, nary a stray loop or slant. It was sweet, his intentions. His consideration.

  How long, Effie thought with a shudder, had he stood over her, watching her sleep?

  chapter thirty-five

  The house is big and quiet and, damn, she’ll admit it, lonely. Effie had insisted on having her own bedroom in the apartment, but it had been a pretense. She’d slept in Heath’s double bed or he in hers every night, waking in a tangle of arms and legs, often with Polly tucked up somewhere between them. In this house that her father’s death allowed her to buy, Effie has a king-size bed. She’d thought stretching out, waking up alone without an elbow in her side or stinking morning breath gusting over her face would be luxurious.

  All she feels is alone. She didn’t sleep well, either. Every small noise and creak had left her wide-eyed and straining in the darkness, trying to figure out the source of the sound.

  The worst had been the dreams. Back in the basement, the overhead scratch of Daddy’s footsteps, the orange light and then the glare. The sharp pieces of glass and ceramic stuck into the concrete floor. The stink. The fuzzy, blurry feeling in her head that had taken so long to get rid of.

  Effie has never been so happy to see the sun rise. She’s up and showered and making breakfast when Polly’s tousled blond head peeks around the kitchen doorway. The little girl carefully navigates the four steps down into the kitchen from the hall, biting her lip as she rubs her eyes and looks around the kitchen.

  “Where’s Heath?”

  Effie turns from the pan where she’s making scrambled eggs. “Pollywog, Mommy and Heath talked to you about this. About how you and I were going to live in this house, and Heath was going to live in his house. But you’ll still see him all the time.”

  Polly’s lip quivers, but she nods and doesn’t cry. She eats her breakfast more quietly than usual, though, and later in the afternoon she voluntarily takes a nap, something she hasn’t done in about two years. Effie pauses outside the door to listen to the soft huffing of her daughter’s breathing, and she gives in to tears she stifles with both hands clapped over her mouth.

  She and Heath have no formal custody agreement. He’s not Polly’s father. He and Effie weren’t married. Still, single parenthood has turned out to be harder than Effie ever imagined, and when Heath offers to take Polly for a weekend visit to give Effie time to work on her painting, she takes him up on it so she can have some time to herself. Polly looks so small next to Heath’s lanky, towering six-foot-five frame that Effie has to turn so she doesn’t watch them walk away.

  She spends Friday night and Saturday painting, working on finishing enough stock so she can open her Craftsy store with enough inventory to keep her from feeling stressed out. Optimistically, Effie hopes to have a steady stream of orders, enough so she doesn’t have to go back to working part-time jobs to support herself and Polly. It’s not vanity. She knows there are collectors who’ll be willing to buy her paintings. Maybe not for as much as that first one sold for, the one she actually drew in the basement, but these others will go. She feels it.

  By Saturday night, Effie’s hands are cramping and her head spins from the scent of the solution she uses to clean her brushes. She has paint grimed into every surface of her skin. She’s tired and thirsty and hungry and the paintings have stirred up an array of emotions she knows are probably good for the art but are hell on her sanity. If she were with Heath, she would take him to bed and slap his face and make him pull her hair while he fucked her. He would mutter her name in that pleading tone and she would come and come and come, and forget everything but that pleasure. She’d be able to get lost, at least for a little while.

  She can’t call him. Not for sex. They’ve only barely begun talking again after the fight about her moving out.

  Effie has slept with two men in her life. Heath, her first. Bill, her second. Tonight, she thinks, she would like to find a third.

  It’s both easier and more difficult than she expects. For one thing, she celebrated her twenty-first birthday nursing a toddler with an ear infection. Effie hasn’t spent a lot of time hanging out in bars, especially not alone. For another, she’s not very good at flirting. It’s like a complicated dance with a lot of fancy steps, and she’s stuck doing the back-and-forth shuffle.

  The easy part is finding a guy who offers to buy her drinks. The hard part is getting him to offer to take her home. Effie took a cab to the bar, a local divey sort of place, for the sole purpose of not having to worry about her car. But after three gin-and-tonics and a round of darts, her “beau” is showing no signs of wanting to get frisky.

  Finally, when the bartender is announcing last call, Effie decides to go for it. Jason, his name is, looks surprised when she asks him for a ride home, but then a sly sort of grin tips his mouth. In his car, when he asks her where to go, she gives him that same sort of grin.

  The sex is fumbling but adequate. Her orgasm comes at her own hand while he fucks her from behind, but she does manage one. After, Jason is gracious and offers the use of his shower.

  “You can’t stay, though. I mean, I’ll give you cab fare. It’s pretty late.” He runs a hand over his hair. His smile this time is guilty. “I...um... Look, I should’ve told you before. I have a girlfriend.”

  Effie doesn’t need his cab fare and she doesn’t want to sleep over, and she really doesn’t want to see him again. She frowns at his admission, though. “Oh.”

  �
�She’s out of town. We’re kind of on a break.”

  “For the weekend?” Effie asks as she slips into her panties and jeans and finds her bra.

  Jason coughs uncomfortably. Effie has no desire to make this easier for him. She’s kind of pissed off, to be honest, if only because of all the men in the bar tonight, Jason had been the first to buy her a drink and she might’ve found someone else if she hadn’t been so damned eager to just get this out of her system.

  “Listen, don’t worry about it. It’s cool. Thanks for the ride,” Effie says.

  “You want to give me your number?”

  She glances at him over her shoulder from the doorway. “No.”

  “Oh,” Jason says. “Okay.”

  She thinks about him all the way home, and in the shower when she scrubs away the scent of sex, and later in bed when she stares up at the ceiling and tries to figure out how she feels about what she did. When the morning comes, though, Effie doesn’t think much about Jason again. There will be many, many other men.

  Sunday afternoon, she goes to the apartment that still feels like home no matter how much she tries not to let it. She knocks on the door like a salesman. At the sight of Heath, a dish towel slung over his shoulder and a smudge of flour on his cheek, a surge of love sweeps over her in a rush so strong she’s sure, for a moment, that it’s going to send her to her knees.

  Together, they finish baking the sugar cookies Heath and Polly had been baking. He wraps a platter of them with plastic and Polly proudly carries it. Heath and Effie both watch her, waiting for her to stumble and drop them, but she makes it all the way through the front door without so much as a crumb being spilled.

  “You know,” he says to Effie as they very specifically don’t hug in the doorway, “you and Polly can always come back.”

  For a moment, she almost says yes, but the truth is, if Effie wants all of them to keep moving forward, looking back is not the way to do it. She kisses him instead of speaking, a brief brush of her lips on his cheek. It’s the last time she will kiss him for a very long time.

  * * *

  “I’m really doing it. A whole show. In the spring. So, yeah, I need to work on a lot of things. I’m going to pull out some older pieces,” Effie told Heath. “See if anything’s worth showing.”

  “I’m sure they’re all worth showing.” Heath had not taken off his coat. Effie noticed but pretended she didn’t. “Wog! Let’s go, we’re going to be late for the movie!”

  “Thanks for taking her,” Effie said.

  Heath shrugged. “You know I’m happy to, anytime. I’ve missed taking her on the weekends. It’s been a long time. I’ll have her back on Sunday before I have to head into work for an event.”

  “The show will be a lot of work.” Effie paced, already thinking ahead to the hours she’d have to herself over the next couple of days. How much she might be able to get done. Heath was right, it had been a long time since he’d had Polly for the entire weekend. Years, probably. “I’ve been making sketches. I have some ideas. But I won’t know until I start if I can really pull any of it off.”

  “Effie.”

  She stopped to face him. Heath’s smile, so familiar, so beloved, urged her own in response. “Heath.”

  “You’re amazing, and you’re going to make this happen. Wog! C’mon! I told Lisa we’d pick her up on the way!”

  Effie had been about to hug him for his support, but at his words, she kept herself still. Heath caught her look. They both stared.

  “It’s not serious,” he said finally.

  “Does she know that?”

  He shrugged. “We haven’t talked about it. She’s fun. You’d like her, Effie.”

  “I’m sure I would.” Effie’s chin went up, but only a little. She forced a smile. “You should bring her around. Maybe we could all have dinner or something.”

  “Sure. Me, you, Lisa, Polly. Mitchell,” Heath added lightly. “It would be awesome. Supercool. A big old family get-together. Invite your mom, too, she’ll have a great time.”

  Effie laughed. “Your sarcasm is showing, love.”

  Heath flinched. She couldn’t miss it, and it killed her. Again she thought of hugging him, and again she kept herself from it.

  “We are a family,” Effie said. “We’ll always be.”

  Heath nodded and called again for Polly, who hollered back that she’d be there in a minute. He cut his gaze from Effie’s. “You know what, Effie, I think I need to take a break from you for a while.”

  “Again?” was all she managed to say.

  “Yeah. Only this time, I mean it. I’ll still be here for Polly, of course. Always. But she’s old enough now that she and I can make any arrangements we have to. I don’t want you to call me anymore, or text me, unless it’s about her.” Heath’s voice had gone low but smooth, as though he’d rehearsed what he was saying.

  The thought of it, that he might’ve practiced this speech, slaughtered her into speechlessness. When Polly bounced into the kitchen with her backpack bulging and a wide grin, Effie managed to steer her toward the door with hugs and kisses and muttered words that sounded as if they made sense. At least enough that Polly didn’t even give her a curious glance as Heath told her to wait in the car. When she’d gone, he turned to Effie.

  “I want you to be happy, and if it’s with that guy, then you should go for it. And you can’t do that if I’m still hanging around, messing it up,” Heath said.

  Effie shook her head, still silent.

  Heath coughed into his fist, then straightened and looked at her, dead on. No more flinching. No more evasion. “You were right. We can’t move forward if we’re both hanging on to the past. We both got out of a really bad situation, and all we do is remind each other of it. We’re bad for each other. You’re right about that, too.”

  No.

  No.

  We’re not bad for each other.

  She shook her head again and put a hand on the back of a kitchen chair. Locked her knees so she didn’t stumble, though she wasn’t even moving. Every word was a stab in her heart, a slice in her soul, but there was nothing she could say to stop him, because she’d been the one to put this in motion, and now she had to live with what she had begun.

  “I want you to be happy, Effie. I do. But...I guess I’m a shit-heel son of a bitch, because I just can’t bear to watch it. It makes me want to fucking die. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said through numbed lips. “Yes. I understand.”

  “I’ll bring Polly home on Sunday.”

  Effie nodded, and they stared at each other in agonized silence until the sound of Heath’s car horn bleating turned him toward the door. Surely he would say something else, or hug her, or kiss her, even on the cheek. He had to, she thought, even after the door closed behind him without another word or even one more look.

  He had to, but he didn’t.

  chapter thirty-six

  Mommies and Margaritas. That was Dee’s clever name for the moms’ group. She’d sent Effie one of those funny e-cards with a line drawing of a Victorian woman holding up a glass and some joke text about how the only way to get through the day was by being drunk. Effie didn’t find jokes like that to be particularly funny. Yet here she was with a glass serving dish of chili cheese dip she’d made herself and a bag of tortilla chips, and why? Because it was that or sit alone in an empty house weeping into her glass of wine and making bad life choices, and she’d done too much of that lately.

  “Effie! Great, you came.” Dee looked surprised but pleased, holding the door open wide for Effie to enter. “Everyone’s in the den. You can put the food in the kitchen. Yum, that looks delish.”

  Effie followed her into the spacious, immaculate kitchen and set the glass dish on the waiting hot pad. Dee gave her a bowl for the chips, and Effie too
k her time filling it. She could see the sunken den from where she was. Lots of ladies with plastic margarita glasses filled with frosty green liquid. Low music played and the propane fireplace crackled. This was it, time to make some friends.

  It was easier than she expected to smile as she was introduced to Dee’s friends. She knew a number of the mothers from the years of volunteering for Polly’s classroom when she was younger. She’d done flash cards with a bunch of their kids. Chaperoned more than a few field trips. She’d held the hair of Amy Kendig’s daughter once when the bus ride had made her sick.

  “Hey,” Effie said with a nod at Amy, who lifted her glass in reply.

  Dee clapped her hands twice. “Everyone, this is Effie Linton. Polly’s mom. I finally convinced her to join us.”

  The greetings were effusive and seemed sincere. Effie accepted a margarita. She’d walked over here, just two blocks, and she suspected that after a couple of drinks the walk home would be a lot warmer than the one over had been. She took a seat on the couch next to a woman she didn’t recognize. Becky turned out to be Amy’s sister-in-law. She sold makeup, and since Effie had an unapologetic fetish for liquid eyeliner, they spent twenty minutes talking about how to do the perfect cat’s eye line.

  “I’ll drop off some samples,” Becky offered and shook her head with a grin when Effie protested. “Hey, first taste is free. After that, I hope you’ll buy more.”

  Amy brought over the pitcher of margaritas to refill their glasses. “I can’t even show my husband how much I spend with Becky every month. He’d kill me!”

  “But my husband loves you for it, especially when he’s ordering new parts for his Jeep.” Becky laughed.

  “I don’t have a husband,” Effie said, not meaning to be a downer, but it was the truth. At the sight of the other ladies’ faces, she realized, a little too late, that she was on her way to being drunk.

  “I have an ex-husband,” Dee piped up, and the moment passed.