Hold Me Close(48)

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.