The Darkest Embrace by Megan Hart

fingers with him. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed the knuckles, one by one, before pressing his palm to her mouth. She closed his fingers over the kiss and smiled at him.
    “You’re so beautiful,” Max blurted. “You know that?”
    Jessie pretended to preen. “Oh, yeah, I know.”
    He kissed her mouth, holding her close, breathing in her scent and taking her warmth. He’d kept everything inside him locked up for so long he wasn’t sure he could let go. But he knew that if he didn’t tell Jessie everything about what had happened with Patty, he’d never be able to.
    “It could’ve been worse,” he said. “The thing with my sister. The pictures were blurry, and we found them and got them taken down really fast. What made it so bad wasn’t that she’d conned Tina into taking pictures like that and sending them to a stranger, but that Patty had taken the pictures herself. She’d stalked her, peeking through the windows, following her into the changing room at the lake when Tina went swimming with her friends. That sort of thing. She tried to make my sister’s life hell because I broke up with her.”
    Jessie’s lip curled, but she kept her hand linked tight with his. “What a bitch.”
    “Yeah. I had no idea. I mean, I knew she was a little...off, but not like that.”
    “When did she try to run you over with her car?”
    “The day I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore. I didn’t break up with her the best way, I know that.” Max swallowed another rush of bitterness at the admission. “I could’ve been nicer about it.”
    “Oh, Max, there’s no good way to break up with someone.” Jessie kissed his hand again, pressing it to her smile as she shook her head. “And I can’t imagine you ever being anything but nice.”
    “I told her I thought she needed to get help. And I did think that,” Max added. “I mean, I really thought she needed like, serious psychiatric care. I should’ve helped her. Taken her to a doctor maybe....”
    “Did she want to go?”
    Startled by the question, he blinked. “What?”
    “Did she want to go for help?”
    “No. She said she was fine, that I was the crazy one. I hadn’t called her crazy, not to her face,” Max said. Shame heated him at the memory. “But she might’ve overheard me saying it about her.”
    Jessie nodded but said nothing.
    “That’s when she tried to run me over with the car. I jumped out of the way in plenty of time. There wasn’t a chance she could actually have hit me.”
    “But she tried.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, she tried.”
    “After I found out what she’d done to my sister, I went to her house to confront her. She lived in this big old place that had been her grandparents’ house. Even when we were together, I never went over there. She always came to my place. Or—” he paused, remembering, feeling sick “—hotels. Places like that.”
    He sneaked a peek at Jessie’s face, expecting her to look angry or annoyed or at the very least, carefully neutral in the way he’d learned over the years usually meant a woman was actually pissed-off. She only looked concerned. Still, he hated saying this to her. Hated having her know.
    “I’d never been inside, but once I got in, I could see why she’d never invited me over. It was trashed on the inside. Papers and garbage everywhere, furniture overturned. It stunk like cat pee, though I didn’t see any cats, and she’d never mentioned having any pets. I was pissed off, and I went into the kitchen, calling out her name, trying to get her to come out. That’s when she hit me with the frying pan.”
    “Oh. Ouch. Oh, God, your poor face.” She touched it gently as though that could take away the pain.
    “She missed, mostly.” Somehow, Max found a grin for her. “Glanced off my head and hit my shoulder and back. I was lucky. She definitely might’ve killed me. Good thing she had such bad aim.”
    “Good thing.” Jessie kissed him softly. “No wonder you never