Hold Me Close. Megan Hart

      “She’s not wrong,” Effie says a minute or so later when they’ve passed the joint back and forth a couple times. They’re alone here in the picnic pavilion, but the park is officially closed. This is a risk, but then so is being here with him at all, even without the weed. “You know she isn’t, Heath.”

      “She hates me.”

      Effie shakes her head, already swimming from the pot. “She doesn’t... She’s only trying to protect me.”

      At that, Heath pinches off the joint and tucks it away. “From me.”

      “From everything,” Effie says.

      “Where was she when you were getting pulled into the back of a van?” Heath’s voice is low, hard, sharp. Knife-edged. “Or when you were kept like a dog in the dark for days on end, or when you almost died? Who protected you then?”

      He is angry. She can’t blame him. She understands why, but she understands why her parents worry, too.

      “What does your dad say? Oh, right. He goes along with whatever your mother says.” Heath sneers.

      Effie frowns. “Look, your parents might not give a damn about you, but mine do.”

      He doesn’t flinch, but she knows she’s poked him someplace tender. It should make her behave more sweetly toward him, knowing she’s being hurtful, but there’s something dark with the two of them that makes her only want to hurt him more. It’s that dark thing her mother worries about. To be honest, it’s scares Effie, too.

      “I’m only seventeen, Heath. What do you want me to do? Run away from home? Live on the streets? I’m going to college next year. I’m going to make something of myself. Not like you.” Her voice rises. Her fists clench.

      “You think I’m nothing.”

      She doesn’t. Effie thinks, in fact, that Heath is everything. He is too much to her and she to him. Even at seventeen she knows it. The girls in her class, her “friends,” are worrying about who will ask them to the prom, and none of them have any idea what it’s like to love someone so much you’d die for them. Literally die.

      Heath rakes a hand through his dark hair, which has been cut shorter than she’s ever seen it. He told her he was going on job interviews again. Without a high school degree, without the hope of getting a further education, there isn’t much out there for him. Gas station attendant. Stock clerk. It’s been a year since they got out of the basement, and Heath’s quit or been fired from a dozen jobs. He can’t make anything stick. Nothing but Effie, anyway.

      “I have to go,” Effie says. “I told my mom I was going to the library. She thinks I was going to write you a letter instead of telling you in person.”

      “Why didn’t you?” He paces a little, hands shoved in his jacket pockets. His boots are scuffed, and the way he kicks at the gravel shows how they got that way. He won’t look away from her.

      “I wanted to see you.”

      Something small and hopeful glimmers for a second in his gaze before vanishing. “You should’ve written a letter. It would’ve been easier.”

      “I don’t care about it being easy,” Effie says.

      Then he is kissing her. Hard and hot and leaving her breathless. His hands on her. Over her clothes, cupping her breasts, then under her shirt to touch her bare skin.

      Last weekend Effie went to a slumber party with some girls from school. She’d been best friends with a couple of them in middle school, but they’re not close anymore. She pretends they are, hoping maybe it will become the truth. They all played Truth or Dare and the biggest question was about who’d “done it” and who had not. None of them had.

      Effie had lied and said she hadn’t, either.

      “But I thought—” Wendy Manning had started to say before Rebecca Meyers shushed her.

      Effie knew what all those girls thought. In the year since she’s been home, the rumors have flown fast and thick. But Daddy had never touched her. Not like that. He’d done a lot of things, but he’d never done that. It was a lie to say Effie was a virgin, but faced with that solemn-faced group of girls, Effie was not about to say anything else. They still giggled about touching “it” or French kissing. None of them understood sex at all.

      When Heath pushes a hand between her legs now, Effie pulls away. “No.”

      She hasn’t slapped his face, but she might as well have. Heath frowns. He reaches for her, but she dances out of his grip again.

      “I said no!”

      “You don’t have to worry. I brought something,” Heath says. “We’ll be careful this time.”

      Effie’s lip curls. “You want me to fuck you right here on the picnic table? Classy.”

      “I want to be with you, and I want you to feel safe, not worried about anything happening again. But you know if it did, I’d take care of you.”

      Effie hops off the picnic table. She doesn’t want to talk about what happened. She doesn’t want to think about it. “No.”

      “You don’t love me,” Heath says.

      This is too much. All this time and all that happened with them, and now he wants to tell her that he loves her? What is it supposed to mean, what is she supposed to do about it now, when everything has changed?

      “I already told you how I feel about that,” she snaps. “It’s easy to love someone when they’re all you know.”

      “Effie, please...”

      “No.” She holds up a hand, backing away from him. “We can’t go back to where we were, Heath. Don’t you get it? What happened to us, it was totally fucked up. Okay? We had a super shitty thing happen to us, but we got out of it, we made it through, and now...it’s over. You can’t hold on to it. It’s not normal. It’s crazy. It’s wrong between us. You have to let it go. You have to let me go.”

      “I don’t think I can.”

      “Not wanting to and not being able to are not the same things!” Effie wants to punch him with her fists but settles for hitting him with her words, forcing him back a few steps.

      Heath holds up his hands. Turns his face. He stops moving so that if she keeps advancing she will be pressed against him, and she stops herself from doing that. They stand less than an arm’s length apart. Close enough she can see the throb of his pulse in his throat.

      “Loving you has nothing to do with choice,” he says.

      “Because we never had one!”

      Heath is silent.

      Effie lifts her chin. “You’ll find someone else to love. We’re still kids. You never find the one you’re supposed to be with forever when you’re a kid.”

      “There is no forever for me without you,” Heath says, and Effie knows he means it. “If I never see you again, Effie, there will still never be anyone else but you.”

      She’d learned about sex, but whatever she’d believed she knew about love shatters in that moment, leaving her broken in its wake. Shaking her head, Effie says nothing as she backs away. Three, four steps take her to the driver’s side of her father’s car. She’s behind the wheel a moment after that. Staring straight ahead at the road, wondering what would happen if she drives herself straight into a tree.

      She unbuckles her seat belt.

      She puts her foot on the gas.

      But in the end, Effie is not about to die for love. Not again. Not ever.

      When she walks in the front door, her parents are waiting for her. So are two uniformed policemen who exchange looks when her mother flies up off the couch to grab her. Effie recognizes one of them. He was the one who found