Hold Me Close(54)

More lube. Slick fingers. She needed more. Rolling again, Effie pulled out the small glass plug and eased it into her ass. It stretched, hurting, but oh, f*ck, yes, like that, so full, it felt good. She clenched on it, rocking as she f*cked herself faster. Harder. Pinching her clit between her thumb and forefinger, she jerked it like a tiny cock.

Heath was the only man who’d ever f*cked her in the ass. She thought of that now, being stretched and filled, his cock moving inside her while he f*cked her cunt with his fingers. She thought of how once he’d spanked her clit at the moment of climax, how it had hurt but made her come so hard she saw stars.

She thought of biting him.

More than once, how she’d drawn blood.

How he begged her to hurt him, and she did, and he hurt her. Over and over. Desire and suffering, all wrapped up together in a way only the two of them could understand.

Carried by these memories, her ecstasy overtook her and left her shaking. Effie sobbed out a low cry, limp in the aftermath of her orgasm. Her body felt pounded, sore, aching.


So did her heart.





chapter twenty-five

“Mom...” Polly tapped her pencil on the table, then put it down. Her brow furrowed. “I have to talk to you.”

Effie looked up from the sketch pad she’d been balancing on her knees. She’d been drawing Polly, smooth lines for her blond hair, rounded curves for the slope of her shoulders. Black and white, smudgy lines. She was no portraitist, but it was turning out better than she expected.

“Sure.” Effie let her pencil shade another line and gave Polly a sideways glance. “What’s up?”

“I did something bad.”

At this, Effie set the sketch pad aside. “Uh-oh.”

Polly’s lower lip quivered. “I went on the internet.”

Oh, shit. What had she seen? Effie flashed to some of the worst stuff she’d had the misfortune to stumble across, and she was an adult who could presumably filter out that kind of horror.

“What was it, Pollywog?” Effie leaned forward, bracing herself.

“It was about you.”

That was shit of a different color. Effie sat back. “Ah.”

Polly frowned and picked up her pencil again to tap it rapidly on her math homework, a habit that usually drove Effie nuts but which she ignored at the moment. Polly looked at her mother, mouth working. Finally, she put the pencil down again and shook her head.

“I found this website that talks about you.”

“Oh. That.” Effie bit the inside of her cheek for a second. She should’ve known this discussion wasn’t over with gossip from bitchy tween girls and their mothers. “Honey, those people...”

“There was a lot of stuff on it. They talked all about you and Heath and how that guy kept you in the basement and stuff.”

The conversation between them was still fresh in Effie’s brain, the details she’d given and the ones she’d kept still secret. Polly had listened and taken the story well, better than Effie had expected. Clearly, Effie had been wrong.

“Yes,” Effie said. “I’ve seen that website.”

Polly let one small fist pound the table. “They talk about you like they know you. But they don’t!”

“No. They don’t. They like to think they do.”

“But...why?” Polly gave Effie a confused, agonized look.

Effie went around the table to sit next to her kid, putting an arm around Polly’s shoulders and squeezing her. “Because people like to think they know stuff. I don’t know why, honey.”

“They’re stupid.”

“Yeah.” Effie laughed. “But, Polly, sometimes stupid pays the bills.”

Polly looked confused again. Effie chucked her under the chin and got up to get some milk from the fridge. From the cupboard she took the cocoa powder and sugar. A saucepan. Polly loved hot cocoa, and if there was ever a time to drink some, it was now.

“A lot of those people buy my paintings.” Effie looked over her shoulder for a second before pouring the milk. “They like thinking that they know me somehow, which makes them like the art better. I don’t know, kid, it’s messed up. But you have to realize, they don’t know me. They don’t know you. Or Heath.”

“Isn’t some of what they say true?”

With the milk heating on low, Effie turned. “Some of it is. Yes. But there’s a lot of what they call speculation. Which means they don’t know, so they make it up based on what they do know. It’s stupid.”

“Yeah.” Polly frowned. “Mom...”

Effie smiled. “Yeah?”

“It was bad. Wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, honey. It was bad. But it happened.” Effie paused. “And my father told me that even the bad things make you into the person you are. So I try really hard not to let that bad thing that happened keep hurting me.”

Polly got up from the table to tackle hug her mother. Effie hugged back, hard. She stroked Polly’s corn-silk hair. Love washed over her, fierce as fire.

“How do you stop it from hurting, Mom?” Polly’s voice was muffled against Effie’s stomach. Her arms tightened.

Effie had only one honest answer for that. “I don’t know, Polly. I just try hard, every day.”