Hold Me Close(72)

Elisabeth spun in her chair to look at the photo on the wall. “You should tell him, Effie. Even if he doesn’t love you back. Trust me on this, you’ll regret it if you don’t.”

The problem had never been about Heath loving her back. Effie pointed to the photograph on the wall. “Did you tell him? The guy who gave you that picture?”

Elisabeth looked at her. “Yes, I did. More than once.”

“Do you still love him?”

“Yeah,” Elisabeth said. “Still.”

Effie frowned. “And what happened?”

“Nothing,” Elisabeth said. “But at least I can take comfort in the fact he knows. No matter what else happens, he will always know it.”

“Even if you can never be together?”

“Especially then,” Elisabeth said, and after that the conversation moved to other things.





chapter thirty-one

“Fucking you is like f*cking a skeleton,” Bill says. “Jesus, Effie, what the hell’s going on with you?”

“Thin is in.”

She’s drunk. She raided Bill’s liquor cabinet the second she came through his door. He didn’t try to stop her, even with her being underage. Some cop. She lifts the bottle of whiskey in offer to him, and Bill takes it from her.

“You’ve had enough. Let me make you a sandwich or something. Christ. Are you going to puke or anything? Go to the bathroom.”

Effie’s not going to puke. She feels good, glowing, happy, full of...something, she doesn’t know what. It’s summer. The sun takes forever to set. She doesn’t have to be in the dark for hours.

“I graduated,” she tells him.

Bill looks at her over his shoulder. He’s still naked, and something about that makes Effie giggle. He frowns, brandishing the mustard-smeared butter knife.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Your butt has dimples.” Effie giggles again. “Hey. Hey, Bill. Hey, Officer Schmidt. I graduated. I f*cking made it.”

“Don’t curse, it’s crude.”

Effie rolls her eyes. She wears Bill’s T-shirt and nothing else, and she pirouettes in place. Points her toes. She’s a terrible dancer, but she’s trying to make him laugh. She and Heath laugh together until they can’t breathe, but she and Bill...they hardly ever laugh at all.

“I didn’t know if I could, you know? Like, all that time I missed, right, but I worked hard and I managed to make it happen, and I did it. I graduated with my class. Aren’t you proud of me, Bill?” She dances closer, letting the hem of that shirt ride up on her thighs.

His gaze drops there, and to the shadow between her legs, and his gaze also shadows. Effie lifts the hem higher. Higher. She wants him to look at her. She wants him to see her.

“So what’s the plan now? Go off to college? Get married, get the white picket fence, have a couple of kids?”

Effie’s buzz is wearing off. She’d applied to the local college on the advice of her guidance counselor, who said she could take two years of interim classes before she’d have to think about applying someplace else. Two years to Effie feels like a very long time. “I don’t know. I’m just glad I did it. I guess I can think about what happens next later. Maybe after you f*ck me again.”

He tells her not to be crude, but it excites him. She sees it in the way he licks his lips, the way he shifts from foot to foot. Fucking Bill is everything anyone would ever say is wrong, but Effie can’t manage to stop herself from doing it, because f*cking Bill makes her feel as though possibly, maybe, there’s a chance for her to do something with her life exactly like what he just described.


“And what’s wrong with getting married or having kids anyway?” Effie spins again, slower this time. She pauses with her back to him so she can look over her shoulder through the filter of her hair. “Haven’t you ever thought about it?”

“Yeah, sure. Doesn’t mean I want to do it.”

“No?” Effie grins. “I could be a nice little housewife. Cook and bake and f*ck...”

Bill laughs, sharp and hard. “You? You’re eighteen years old. You have a whole life ahead of you. The hell you want to think about getting married for?”

“It feels safe.” Effie frowns. Her stomach has started hurting, and her head, and the soft warm glow she had earlier from the way Bill kissed and held her is almost gone.

“Well,” Bill said. “There’s nothing safe about it. Eat your sandwich, and I’ll drive you home.”

There’s a bit more to it than the sandwich, several hours of it as a matter of fact, but when it’s over Bill does drive her home. He drops her off a block from her house so she can walk to her front door without her parents seeing them together. She made it home just as night is falling, so there’s no reason why they should be worried or waiting for her, but someone is there on the front porch. The sight of that long black trench coat, the dark and spiky hair, stops her heart from beating for a long second before her pulse thumps hard and fast in her throat and wrists.

Heath has taken to lining his green eyes with black. He runs with a bad crowd. Effie hasn’t seen him in months, because the last time they were together, he’d been drunk and high and argumentative. They’d fought about something so stupid she can’t even recall what had prompted it, just that in the end he’d spat out a bunch of insults that Effie had returned with an even fiercer venom.