Hold Me Close. Megan Hart

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       chapter eight

      “My mother says I’m not allowed to see you anymore.” The words come easier than Effie had thought they would. She’d practiced them in front of the mirror at home for an hour, every time stuttering, but now they sound as casual as if she were asking Heath about the weather. “She says it’s not healthy for us.”

      Heath stares at her with large, hollowed eyes. He’s been smoking. He stinks of booze. There’s a blossoming bruise on one cheekbone that Effie didn’t put there. She’s sure it came from his father or another kind of fight, not from another girl, but that doesn’t matter. It makes her want to kiss him and also to slap him harder on the other side to make one to match it. It makes her want to hold him close.

      Still without a word, Heath pulls a joint from the pocket of his denim jacket. He licks the end and tucks it into the corner of his mouth. The Zippo lighter comes from his jeans pocket, and the sight of it makes her mouth dry. That lighter had been Daddy’s. She hadn’t realized Heath had kept it. All these years later, and seeing it is still...it’s hard.

      “Say something,” Effie demands.

      Heath shrugs and lights the joint. He offers it to her. She should refuse. She doesn’t even like weed. It makes her sleepy and sometimes anxious. It reminds her of those hazy, blurry basement days when neither of them had the strength to get off the bed because Daddy had dosed them up with something to keep them from trying to get away. Yet the joint had been in Heath’s mouth, it will taste of him even if only the barest amount, and this could be the last she’ll ever have of him.

      “She’s not wrong,” Effie says a minute or so later when they’ve passed the joint back and forth a couple times. They’re alone here in the picnic pavilion, but the park is officially closed. This is a risk, but then so is being here with him at all, even without the weed. “You know she isn’t, Heath.”

      “She hates me.”

      Effie shakes her head, already swimming from the pot. “She doesn’t... She’s only trying to protect me.”

      At that, Heath pinches off the joint and tucks it away. “From me.”

      “From everything,” Effie says.

      “Where was she when you were getting pulled into the back of a van?” Heath’s voice is low, hard, sharp. Knife-edged. “Or when you were kept like a dog in the dark for days on end, or when you almost died? Who protected you then?”

      He is angry. She can’t blame him. She understands why, but she understands why her parents worry, too.

      “What does your dad say? Oh, right. He goes along with whatever your mother says.” Heath sneers.

      Effie frowns. “Look, your parents might not give a damn about you, but mine do.”

      He doesn’t flinch, but she knows she’s poked him someplace tender. It should make her behave more sweetly toward him, knowing she’s being hurtful, but there’s something dark with the two of them that makes her only want to hurt him more. It’s that dark thing her mother worries about. To be honest, it’s scares Effie, too.

      “I’m only seventeen, Heath. What do you want me to do? Run away from home? Live on the streets? I’m going to college next year. I’m going to make something of myself. Not like you.” Her voice rises. Her fists clench.

      “You think I’m nothing.”

      She doesn’t. Effie thinks, in fact, that Heath is everything. He is too much to her and she to him. Even at seventeen she knows it. The girls in her class, her “friends,” are worrying about who will ask them to the prom, and none of them have any idea what it’s like to love someone so much you’d die for them. Literally die.

      Heath rakes a hand through his dark hair, which has been cut shorter than she’s ever seen it. He told her he was going on job interviews again. Without a high school degree, without the hope of getting a further education, there isn’t much out there for him. Gas station attendant. Stock clerk. It’s been a year since they got out of the basement, and Heath’s quit or been fired from a dozen jobs. He can’t make anything stick. Nothing but Effie, anyway.

      “I have to go,” Effie says. “I told my mom I was going to the library. She thinks I was going to write you a letter instead of telling you in person.”

      “Why didn’t you?” He paces a little, hands shoved in his jacket pockets. His boots are scuffed, and the way he kicks at the gravel shows how they got that way. He won’t look away from her.

      “I wanted to see you.”

      Something small and hopeful glimmers for a second in his gaze before vanishing. “You should’ve written a letter. It would’ve been easier.”

      “I don’t care about it being easy,” Effie says.

      Then he is kissing her. Hard and hot and leaving her breathless. His hands on her. Over her clothes, cupping her breasts, then under her shirt to touch her bare skin.

      Last weekend Effie went to a slumber party with some girls from school. She’d been best friends with a couple of them in middle school, but they’re not close anymore. She pretends they are, hoping maybe it will become the truth. They all played Truth or Dare and the biggest question was about who’d “done it” and who had not. None of them had.

      Effie had lied and said she hadn’t, either.

      “But I thought—” Wendy Manning had started to say before Rebecca Meyers shushed her.

      Effie knew what all those girls thought. In the year since she’s been home, the rumors have flown fast and thick. But Daddy had never touched her. Not like that. He’d done a lot of things, but he’d never done that. It was a lie to say Effie was a virgin, but faced with that solemn-faced group of girls, Effie was not about to say anything else. They still giggled about touching “it” or French kissing. None of them understood sex at all.

      When Heath pushes a hand between her legs now, Effie pulls away. “No.”

      She hasn’t slapped his face, but she might as well have. Heath frowns. He reaches for her, but she dances out of his grip again.

      “I said no!”

      “You don’t have to worry. I brought something,” Heath says. “We’ll be careful this time.”

      Effie’s lip curls. “You want me to fuck you right here on the picnic table? Classy.”

      “I want to be with you, and I want you to feel safe, not worried about anything happening again. But you know if it did, I’d take care of you.”

      Effie hops off the picnic table. She doesn’t want to talk about what happened. She doesn’t want to think about it. “No.”

      “You don’t love me,” Heath says.

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