Hold Me Close(32)
“Next time, I’ll come out there. I’ll tell her who I am. She’ll have to help us—”
“No!” Then softer, “No, Effie, you can’t. He will kill her. I know he will.”
Heath doesn’t say anything more. So she holds him, quietly, until they both sleep. She wakes when the bright lights come on. The sailing song filters through the speakers, and disoriented, she struggles out of bed to find herself alone. Heath is in the living room, fully dressed.
Daddy comes with food. He is wild-eyed and frantic with hilarity, telling joke after joke. He praises Effie. What a good girl she is. What a good, good girl.
He’s brought soap. He’s turned on the water in the bathroom so they can shower. He’s brought books, magazines. Chocolate candy. It’s like Christmas morning, and he’s some kind of demented Santa. He focuses on Effie, ignoring Heath, and by now she knows it’s better to laugh when Daddy tells a joke, so she does, even though it feels like glass grating in her throat.
Daddy has brought her a dress, pink with ribbons and bows, appropriate for a much, much younger girl. White stockings. The outfit would be complete with black patent leather shoes, she thinks, but of course there are no shoes down here.
“Go take a shower, Sister. Be Daddy’s pretty girl,” he tells her with that wide, horrible grin that wrinkles his face and makes him a troll.
The hot water feels so good she stays in the shower longer than she should, taking more of her turn than is fair, but it feels so freaking good to be clean, really clean, that she can’t help herself. When Effie comes out of the bathroom, Daddy is gone. Heath stays in the bathroom even longer than she did. When he comes out, his eyes are red-rimmed.
They don’t talk about what happened. Together, without a word, they sort the goodies Daddy left, hoarding the things they know they’ll need later. At the creak of the floorboards overhead, they both look up. Heath shakes his head.
“He won’t be back down for a while.” From next to the bed, he pulls a box Effie hadn’t noticed before. “Here.”
“What is it?”
Heath shakes his head. “Just open it.”
It’s an art kit. Paper, brushes and a watercolor palette. Stunned, Effie stares at him. “What is this?”
“I told him to bring it for you.”
“When?” Effie asks.
“Last night.”
She doesn’t understand. “Why would he...?”
“Because,” Heath says in a dull, expressionless voice, “he always brings me what I want. After.”
“And you asked him for this, for me?” Effie, an only child, is used to getting almost everything she’s ever wanted from her parents. Christmas and birthdays were sometimes embarrassing, she got so much loot. She’s never had anyone do something like this for her, though. Never.
Effie closes the kit’s lid. She thinks about the wealth Daddy had brought them this time. “Heath...what did you have to do?”
In reply, he turns away, and Effie doesn’t ask again.
chapter fifteen
Effie hadn’t been active on LuvFinder in months, though she hadn’t hidden or deleted her profile. She simply didn’t answer the messages that pinged her inbox three and five at a time from men who obviously liked what they saw. She took a good selfie, that was all she could think when she scrolled through the “Hey” and “Hello, there” and paused occasionally to read a “Hi, Gorgeous.” She had made herself invisible for the chat function, though, so nobody would bother her in the few minutes every couple of weeks that she bothered to check in.
She’d logged in now to show Dee how easy it was to use the site. “You can chat, like instant message, right here on the site. You can set yourself to invisible. That’s what I did. Otherwise, you’re getting pinged nonstop while you’re trying to do other stuff.”
“Or you’re not,” Dee said ominously.
“You’re a female. You’ll get pinged.” Effie laughed. “If there’s a green dot next to the username, that person is online. Pretty standard. And here’s where you see who they match you with, but you can also do custom searches. And here’s where you see who you’ve been chatting with, and you can keep track of your dates and rate them. Privately. They can’t see your rating and you can’t see theirs. Thank God.”
“Ugh, can you imagine?” Dee said. “I wouldn’t want to see my rating.”
Effie shook her head, scrolling through her own ratings. “No, me neither... Oh.”
Mitchell was online. Two nights ago, he’d kept her up until just after one in the morning, making her laugh. They’d planned to go out again soon, and he texted her at least every other day, though he hadn’t yet today. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder if maybe he was still dating a lot of other women. Effie tried to think if it bothered her, the idea that she wasn’t the only woman he was pursuing. It wasn’t as if she had the right to be upset. She was glad now, though, that she’d set herself to invisible, so he couldn’t see that she was online.
Quickly, before she could dwell, Effie logged out and pulled up a new page so Dee could start filling out her own profile. The other woman had about ten different selfies to choose from for her LuvFinder profile picture, but none of them were quite right. Effie took up her phone and started snapping, asking Dee questions to get her reactions. Snap, snap, snap.