Hold Me Close Read online

  “You wouldn’t think it was weird if I went out with one of them after you did?” Dee asked.

  Effie shrugged. “Would you?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. What if I meet someone amazing and we fall in love and get married and then you’re my maid of honor and you’d already slept with my future husband?”

  For a second, Effie started to protest that she hadn’t slept with any of the guys from the site, before she saw Dee’s grin. “You’d never make me your maid of honor.”

  “You never know.” Dee waggled her eyebrows and turned back to the computer. “So, should I send a message to any of them, or should I wait for them to... Holy shit. I just got...one, two...four messages in my inbox?”

  Dee looked stunned. Effie laughed. “Yeah, get ready. It is a little bit like tossing chum in the water. The sharks come out right away. Remember what I said. You don’t have to answer everyone.”

  Dee scrolled through her inbox and clicked on a profile picture. “What about this guy? He sent me a nudge.”

  “That means he’s interested, and if you are, you nudge back, and then eventually one of you gets the balls to send an actual email.” Effie laughed and took a seat on the lumpy futon in Dee’s office.

  Dee moved her mouse over the list of suggestions, pausing at one. “Oh, my God. Jon Pinciotti.”

  Effie remembered him. She’d had a crush on him in the seventh grade. He was a soccer player.

  “He was my first kiss. My first everything, really,” Dee said and spun in her computer chair to look at her. “Holy shit, he’s on LuvFinder.”

  “Send him a message!”

  “No. No way.” Dee shook her head. “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not? You could just say hello.” Effie leaned forward to try to get a glimpse of Jon’s profile.

  “Sure. To my high school boyfriend. My first love. Right. That’s going to work out so great.”

  “You never know until you try,” Effie said.

  Dee took a deep breath and put her hands on the keyboard. “Okay. Fine. I’m going to do it.”

  A half minute later, she let out a low hoot of triumph and spun her chair entirely around a few times before stopping herself abruptly to give Effie a scandalized look. “I can’t believe I did that. What if he doesn’t answer me? Oh, shit. What if he does?”

  “One step at a time,” Effie said with a laugh.

  Dee groaned, then giggled, her cheeks flushed. “Thanks, Effie. None of my other friends have done this.”

  “No? That’s crazy. It’s the age of internet dating.”

  “I should know,” Dee said, the gleam of giddiness in her eyes fading. “It’s where my ex met his new wife.”

  Effie frowned. “Sorry.”

  “Nah. It’s fine. He’s better with her than he ever was with me, and she can deal with all his shit now. I don’t have to. I just wish that Meredith had handled it better. He swore he wasn’t going to let his new family interfere with his relationship with her, but I guess his stepkids that actually live with him take up a lot of his time.” Dee’s voice rasped.

  “Sorry,” Effie said again, softer this time. “That sucks.”

  Dee wiped away the brightness in her eyes and gave Effie a sad smile. “How did you help Polly deal with it? Not having a dad, I mean.”

  “I guess I never had to, really. She’s always had Heath. We’ve been up front that he’s not her father, but...yeah. He’s always been there.” Effie’s smile felt sad, too.

  Dee spun her chair in a circle with her head back. “He’s very good-looking.”

  “Yeah.” Effie laughed lightly. “He is.”

  “You’ve been with him a long time,” Dee said.

  Effie nodded. “I’ve known him since I was thirteen.”

  “He was your high school boyfriend, then,” Dee said and looked stricken. “Shit, Effie, I’m sorry, that was a really stupid thing to say.”

  “No. It’s okay. It actually means you forgot about...it. The thing.” Effie made air quotes around the last word. “And you’re right. He was my high school boyfriend, if anyone was. He was my first kiss, and my first everything, too.”

  Dee looked solemn. “Kind of hard to get over it, huh?”

  “Not really,” Effie said lightly, the lie coating her tongue with the taste of copper and smoke. “Nothing’s that hard to get over, if you try hard enough.”

  chapter sixteen

  Effie had mapped Bill’s body over and over again. She knew every scar, and he had quite a few. There was the one running up the back of his calf from when he’d burned himself on a motorcycle pipe. There was a dimpled button in his lower right side from a stab wound. Not a knife, a fountain pen. Bill liked to joke he’d bled ink for weeks. He was always making jokes about the scars, as though they made him feel self-conscious but proud at the same time.

  This wound on his arm was new. She stroked her fingers along it gently, barely touching the angry black stitches around the red, sliced flesh. Dog bite, he’d told her. He had to take antibiotics and get a rabies treatment.

  “Seven shots in the belly,” he told her with barely a wince. “Fucking people who shouldn’t fucking own fucking dogs. I had to put it down. Right in front of...”

  Bill’s voice broke. He covered his eyes with one big hand. His shoulders shook.

  Effie pressed her mouth to his bare shoulder. She took his other hand. When he curved his fingers into hers, she lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed the back.

  There were few times when she’d ever been the one to offer him this kind of comfort. She felt ill-suited to it. For anyone, really, other than her kid. Effie had not often sought the solace of an embrace. A hard cock inside her? Oh, sure. But this softness, this consideration, was not as natural.

  “Right in front of the kid.” Bill swiped at his eyes and gave her an angry stare. He shrugged out of her grip and went to the small sideboard he used as a liquor cabinet. He poured himself a healthy slug of whiskey and tossed it back. Then poured another. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and contemplated the amber liquid in the glass. He shook his head. “Four, maybe five years old. The dog came after me. Bit the fuck out of my arm. I kicked it, and it went for the kid. I had to shoot it, Effie. It was going to maul that baby.”

  She got up and took the shot glass from his hand to drink it herself. She set down the empty glass and put her hand over it when he lifted the bottle. The last thing Bill needed right now was to get hammered. He was already taking painkillers, which, more than anything else, told her how bad he hurt. Bill had broken his ankle once and walked on it for two days before seeking treatment.

  “You did what you had to do,” she told him.

  After dropping off Polly with her mother, Effie had planned to spend the night working—she had to finish up one commission and had a new project that had been circling her mind, gnawing at it, for a week now. Ever since she’d had coffee with Dee. The idea had come to her as they usually did, in the faint light of morning when she’d woken but wished she were still unconscious. Instead of dancing sugarplums, Effie dreamed of a dark room lit by faint orange light and the lengths of shadows. In the light of day, the normal light of day instead of eye-searing brightness used to diminish and control them, Effie was almost always able to put aside the dreams, but sometimes they lingered long enough to become inspiration.

  It wouldn’t sell, of course. What she thought of as her “real” art never did. But she would paint it anyway, because if she couldn’t do something for herself once in a while, she’d lose her fucking mind.

  Bill’s text had come in when she was at the art supply store buying some new brushes and paints. The message had surprised her. She hadn’t heard from him in weeks. Like the painkillers, his text meant he was really hurting.

  Since seeing Mitchell online a