Hold Me Close Read online

  With a low, muttered cry, Heath stood, lifting her with one arm around her waist to hold her. The other hand swept the table clean, sending the cardboard bakery box thumping to the floor. The mugs clattered, shattering. She was on her back seconds after that. Heath yanked her hips to bring her to the edge of the table. He tore her panties halfway down her thighs, then with another hard tug, all the way off.

  Effie lifted her hips, offering herself to him. Heath opened his belt and undid the zipper of his jeans with the same swift desperation. Gripping his cock, he pushed inside her but did not thrust. Instead, he took her clit between his thumb and forefinger. Locking his gaze with hers, he pinched her sensitive flesh. Released. Again. Over and over until she was losing her mind.

  “Fuck me,” she breathed.

  “No.” His cock deep inside her, Heath refused to move anything but his fingers in the steady, inexorable squeezing of her clit.

  Effie arched her back. Her shoulders pressed the table’s hard wood. She would ache later, but oh, fuck, it was so good right now that anything that came after would be worth it. She gripped the table’s edge, then her knees as Heath pushed them upward. The new position opened her deeper to him, but no matter how she begged, he still would not move.

  “Shut up,” he muttered. “Just shut up, Effie.”

  “Tell me how you hate me.” She focused on his face, watching for the flare in his eyes. She gave a sobbing, breathless laugh. At the next slow tweak of her clit, she writhed, made helpless in her pleasure.

  “Shut up!”

  “Fuck me like you hate me,” Effie said.

  With a groan, Heath withdrew. He took his cock in his hand and rubbed the head of it over her slick, engorged clit. “No.”

  The torturous squeezing had been bad enough, but now this steady, rhythmic stroking of his cock head against her, sliding through her folds and up over her clit but never, never inside... He was going to kill her with this, and she would willingly die.

  She came, then again, hard on the still-rippling edges of the first. Floating, distant, Effie was aware of her low, endless cries but could do nothing to hold them back. Nor the helpless, frantic shaking of her entire body. She looked between them to watch as Heath came all over her belly, and one final shudder of pleasure racked her. Heath, however, came in silence, not so much as a gasp or a whisper or a single syllable of her name.

  When it was over, he moved away from her and went to the sink to dampen a clean cloth and wipe himself off before pulling up his jeans. Effie watched him, her elbows hurting from pressing the wood. So did the edge of her ass. She didn’t want to pull her blouse down over the mess he’d left, but she did cover her bareness with the hem of her skirt. When he came to hand her the cloth, Effie reached to pull him down by his shirtfront for a kiss. She held him there longer than she needed to, and when he made to pull away, she kept holding him until he acquiesced and stayed still. Then she let him go, took the cloth and wiped him off her.

  She had told him she was sorry, but that wasn’t quite the same as asking him to forgive her. Effie rinsed and wrung out the cloth, formulating the words. So many hours, so many times they’d never needed to speak at all, and now she found herself unable to think of the right things to say. Heath knew her inside and out, upside down, frontward, backward, side to side. There wasn’t a thought in her head he wouldn’t have been able to determine without so much as a single uttered vowel.

  So why, then, did she find it so hard to simply tell him how much she loved and wanted him?

  “It does kill me,” she told him, finally.

  He turned. “So what, then? You’re a ghost? Because that’s how it feels to me sometimes, Effie. You’re a fucking ghost, and all you do is haunt me.”

  “I don’t want to!” she cried, then lowered her voice. “Don’t you understand? That’s why it’s no good for us to be together. All we do is remind each other of the past. It will keep us both...crazy.”

  “I would rather have you haunt me, driving me mad, than have you leave me.”

  From his front door came a brief, timid rapping. Effie looked at Heath, who shrugged, unsmiling but also unapologetic. She had herself put back together by the time he opened the door, and Effie had put a blank smile on her face, expecting a neighbor, a delivery person, a stranger.

  “Hi,” Sheila Monroe said in her breathy, low voice. She pushed past Heath and was already in the kitchen before she looked up to see Effie, which stopped her short. Sheila gave Heath a startled look.

  “Hi, Sheila,” Effie said.

  Heath went to the fridge and pulled out several plastic containers of food that he put into a cooler bag with an ice pack. He added some bottled water and a loaf of sliced bread. Sheila shifted from foot to foot as she watched him, every so often flicking a glance toward Effie. She also took in the doughnuts and dishes on the floor. When Heath finally handed the bag to her, Sheila’s scrawny arm shook with the weight of it.

  “Let me take that out for you.” Heath looked her over. “Did you drive?”

  “Reggie gave me a ride. I don’t got my license back yet. He’s waiting for me in the parking lot.” Sheila gave Effie another uncertain, wavering smile that was more like a grimace. “How are you, Effie?”

  “I’m great, thanks.”

  Sheila nodded as though she’d expected nothing less. “How’s your little girl?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “She’s, what, ten now? Eleven?”

  “Almost twelve,” Effie said. “If you can believe it.”

  “I can’t.” Sheila’s laugh was bolder than her smile had been. She was missing a tooth toward the back. She hefted the bag of food over her shoulder and hesitated before opening her other arm to Heath for a swift hug. “Thanks, Heath.”

  “I’ll talk to you next week, okay?” Heath walked her to the front door and followed her out, closing it behind him enough to keep Effie from seeing or hearing what they were doing or saying.

  Not that it was any of Effie’s business. She gathered her own belongings. Coat, purse. Slipped into her shoes. She brushed her hair off her face, wondering if Sheila had seen the evidence of their fucking on her face and not only on the floor. She decided she didn’t care.

  When Heath came back inside, Effie was ready to go. Heath watched her button her coat without saying anything. She waited for him to ask her to stay. He didn’t.

  “Well,” Effie said stiffly. “I guess I’ll get going.”

  Heath cleared his throat. “She needs help. She has nobody else. She doesn’t take care of herself right. She lost her license for a DUI and is having a hard time getting hours at her job. You know it’s not... I’m not...”

  Effie held up a hand to stop him. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

  “You don’t want one, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to tell you.”

  She shook her head, not meeting his eyes, not wanting to fight with him again, not about this or anything else. Moments ago she’d been ready to ask him to...what? Move in with her and Polly? Make a life, a family, try to see if they could make things work? Right there, knocking on his door, was the reason why that could never happen. Why they could never forget their past. Not in any way that could ever be good for either of them.

  “Polly asked me if I could live with you guys,” Heath said.

  Effie looked at him. “Yes. I know.”

  “Effie.” He sighed, and his bland expression twisted into sadness.

  “Hold me close,” she whispered.

  He had her in his arms then, and she didn’t want to leave him. She clung to him, cheek to cheek. They held each other in silence for a long time, until at last she stepped back and out of Heath’s embrace. She kissed him gently on the corner of his mouth.

  “Haunt me,” he whispered. “Make me crazy for the rest of my life. But