Hold Me Close. Megan Hart

none of your business.”

      “Has he met Polly?”

      She’d met her date on LuvFinder. He’d messaged her first. They always did. Since signing up about six months ago, Effie had gone on a bunch of first dates, and this one would make it a baker’s dozen. “Of course he hasn’t.”

      Heath released her. “Are you going to fuck him? Oh, wait. That’s why you invited me over. So you wouldn’t have to.”

      She slapped his cheek. Lightly, not enough to turn his head. He didn’t flinch. She cupped his face in her hands and stared into his eyes.

      “Fucking you now won’t make any difference in what I do tonight.”

      Heath put his hands up to circle her wrists without pulling her hands from his face. “You’ll do what you want to do, Effie. You always have. All I can do is wait for you. Right?”

      “I wish you wouldn’t!” Effie cried and pulled herself free of him. When he grabbed for her again, she was ready for him and danced out of his grasp. Backing up, she hit another of the bar stools with her foot and stumbled.

      Heath caught her by the upper arms, holding her tight until she stopped trying to get away. “But I do. You know I do, Effie. I always do and always will. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

      “You have to stop,” Effie said.

      This time he was the one who went to his knees. He yanked down her cotton pajama bottoms and her panties, and when she tried to slap him again, to shove him away, Heath held her wrists at her sides. He pushed himself between her legs. The swipe of his tongue opened her to him.

      She struggled for a moment, her wrists aching in the cuffs of his fingers. The right had been broken and left too long without proper setting. It hurt more than the other one, and his grip was looser. Because he knew. Heath knew everything about her. But he didn’t let her go, even when she pulled. He pressed his mouth against her, his tongue finding her clit without hesitation.

      She didn’t climax so much as she unravelled. Sharp and fierce, the pleasure overtook her until she gasped and sagged, her knees weak. Heath let go of her wrists to support her as he looked up at her. He licked his lips.

      “I will never stop loving you,” he told her. “If we live a thousand lifetimes, I will never stop.”

      Effie disengaged herself from him, pulling up her panties and pj bottoms and stepping back. She wanted him to get off his knees, but he stayed there. She turned away so she didn’t have to look at him.

      “We don’t have a thousand lifetimes. We only have one, Heath. Only this one.”

      He stood then. She continued refusing to look at him. She thought he might touch her, and she braced for it, but he didn’t.

      “Then this one has to be enough, doesn’t it?”

      She’d told him to leave a dozen times or more in the past. She’d screamed it at him. Begged him. She’d been polite and cold. None of it worked, not in the long-term. He came back to her, or she came back to him, one the waves and one the shore. So this time she said nothing, letting the silence grow between them until he had no choice but to sigh.

      “Tell Polly I love her. I’ll call her later. Maybe take her to the movies. If that’s okay with you,” Heath said finally from the doorway, and when she wouldn’t answer him, “Effie.”

      Still she said nothing, not trusting herself to find a voice that didn’t shake and break under the weight of her emotions. She waited until he left, not slamming the door behind him but letting it shut with a slow, solid and undeniable click.

      Heath’s love for her had been as solid and undeniable as the closing of that front door for almost twenty years. The problem was not that Effie didn’t believe him when he told her that he would never stop. The problem was that she did.

       chapter three

      “Don’t eat that.” The boy standing in the doorway is too thin for his height. Shaggy dark hair falls over his eyes and almost to his shoulders. He wears a pair of raggedy jeans, holes in the knees, and a dirty flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows to expose bony wrists. A black T-shirt beneath. “He puts stuff in it.”

      “Like what? Spit?”

      “Sometimes. Or worse.”

      Effie can’t imagine something worse than spit in the small bowl of thin, cold oatmeal she’d found on the wobble-legged table next to the bed. The oatmeal had been waiting for her when she woke up, a scribbled note next to it saying EAT. No spoon. Later, she will understand just how awful the man can be, but for now, the idea of spit is enough for her to set the bowl aside. After all, she’s not starving.

      Yet.

      She should’ve been startled when the boy spoke, but everything right now still feels hazy, as if even if she blinks hard over and over, she is unable to entirely clear her vision. It’s the weird orange light from the wall sconces, but also the lingering pain in her head. She stares at the bowl in her hands. Then at him.

      “Where am I?”

      “You’re in a basement.”

      She looks around, then sets the bowl back on the table and rubs at her eyes. The hazy feeling is fading. On her right thigh is a bruise that hurts when she presses it. Vaguely, she remembers a needle, and she closes her eyes for a moment. “He gave me a shot.”

      “Yeah. He likes those. Sometimes it’s pills, ground up. But he likes the shots, too. They last longer.”

      The boy comes through the doorway. The ceiling in this room is so low he has to hunch to stand, but although there’s a chair in front of her, he doesn’t sit in it. He looks around the tiny, dank space, then crosses his arms. When he looks at her, his face is a puppet’s. Blank, yet somehow menacing.

      “How’d he get you?” the boy asks.

      Effie doesn’t want to say. She feels so stupid now. She knew better than to believe the man when he asked if she wanted to see the cute puppy in his van. She knew never to trust a stranger. It hadn’t mattered, though, when she tried to run, because he’d caught her within half a minute. Her stupid shoes, the new ones her mom had insisted she wear, had given her blisters. She’d been limping. She could’ve run fast and gotten away, except for those stupid shoes.

      “He told me my mom was in an accident,” the boy says. Too casual. As if he’s setting Effie up for a joke, but there doesn’t seem to be a punch line. “He said she’d been taken to the hospital and my dad sent him to get me.”

      “That was stupid of you to believe him.”

      The boy looks at her with bright green eyes through the fringe of shaggy dark hair, and incredibly, he laughs. Really laughs, as if she said the funniest thing he’s ever heard. As if Effie is the one telling jokes.

      “No shit, right? I mean, my dad wouldn’t give a flying fuck if my mom was chopped into little pieces, and she sure as shit wouldn’t bother to tell him if she was in an accident. Even if he found out, he wouldn’t have sent someone to get me. I haven’t seen my dad in eight years. He wouldn’t even know what I look like now.”

      Effie blinks. She has a few friends whose parents are divorced, but most are amicable with each other, at least enough. She doesn’t hang around with the sorts of kids whose parents don’t see them.

      Her own parents must be frantic by now. She’s not sure exactly how long it’s been since the guy with the van grabbed her and put her in this room, but her mom goes into panic mode if Effie is even fifteen minutes late from art lessons. It has to be so much longer than that by now.

      She rubs her hands on her pleated skirt, but they’re still sticky and gross. “So...why’d you go with him, then?”

      “Because