The Darkest Embrace

His mouth opened wider, their teeth clashing just a little as she moved. His hand in her hair pulled harder as she dug her fingers into his shoulders with one hand, the other high on his denim-clad thigh. She shivered at the bunch and shift of his muscles under her hand.

The rap of something hard on Max’s window scared them both into breaking apart. Breathing hard, her heart already pounding from the taste of him, Jessie put a hand to the throbbing pulse at the base of her neck. Max had put out an arm to shield her, but relaxed a little at the sight of a black-and-red plaid shirt and a bearded face peering through the glass. The man on the other side of the window rapped again, a wide gold ring clinking on the glass.

“Sit back,” Max murmured. He cracked the window a little, smart enough not to open it more than half an inch. “Hi.”

“Youse okay?” The man leaned a little lower to stare across Max’s shoulder at Jessie from under bushy eyebrows that raised a little when he saw her. “How ’bout you, ma’am? You all right?”

“Fine. We’re both fine.” Max cracked the window a little more. “Almost hit a deer.”

“Yeah, they’ll try to run you off the road around here, that’s for damn sure.” He nodded and took a step back from the Suburban as he tapped the roof, then bent again to look in the window. “Where you headed?”

“We’re going...camping,” Max said with a pause.

“Oh, up at Romero’s, I bet?” The man’s grin showed white, even teeth too large for his mouth. Jessie had thought him to be a lot older until she saw that grin—now she’d have put him in his late twenties instead of forties, and the change was startling.

Max glanced at her, then back at the stranger. “You know it?”

“Yeah, I know it. It’s my brother’s place. It’s up the road a ways. You’ll have to take the next two lefts before you get to the lane. I can go ahead of you, if you want.”

“That’s okay,” Max said evenly. “We have a GPS.”

The man guffawed. “Good luck with that. We get shit service out here. Cell phones, too. Might as well use smoke signals for all the good they’ll do. But, hey, if you just take the first two lefts, you’ll get there. You can always stop in at Dave’s Meats if you need more directions.”

He thumped again on the roof and took another step back. He made a show of looking up and down the road, then at the SUV. “You didn’t hit the deer, did you?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Max shook his head, already moving to put the SUV in gear.

“Good.” The stranger’s voice dipped so low for a second that it was almost impossible to hear him through the window. “Good you didn’t hit it. Your tires, though. They look a little low.”

“Yeah? Damn.” Max craned his neck to look into the driver’s side mirror as Jessie did the same on her side.

She couldn’t see the tires, and she wasn’t about to get out of the Suburban and look—or let Max. There was something creepy about that guy, something she couldn’t put her finger on and was probably just her overactive imagination. Even so, there was going to be no getting out of the SUV.

Max must have had the same idea because he nodded at the guy through the window and put the truck in reverse, carefully executing a perfect three-point turn to get them back on the road in the right direction. As he pulled away, Jessie looked over her shoulder to watch the guy get smaller in the distance. That’s when she realized what had been so strange. The man had needed to lean down to look in the Suburban’s window, but the vehicle itself was huge.

“He must’ve been super-tall,” she blurted, twisting again to look behind her, but the stranger had disappeared. “And where’d he come from anyway?”

“Hell if I know,” Max answered as he took the first left. “But I sure hope he gave us good directions.”

* * *

Max should have known better than to trust the GPS. Now he was going to look like an idiot to Jessie when they couldn’t even make it to the cabin he’d spent so many hours carefully researching to find. He’d wanted this weekend to be perfect—romantic and sexy, just like Jessie herself—but it wasn’t off to the greatest start.

“There,” she said, pointing. “There’s Garden Stop. Oh, and there’s Dave’s Meats.”

It was a normal-looking gas station and convenience store with old-fashioned pumps out front but modern neon advertisements in the spotless plate glass window in the front. It also came complete with the obligatory sexless, ancient person in a rocking chair, smoking on a pipe. Max looked at the gas gauge and figured it was better to be safe than sorry. He pulled up to the pumps, but the sign said he had to prepay inside.

“No credit card payment,” he said ruefully with a glance at Jessie who was peering around him at the front of the store. “We’re really in the boonies.”

She laughed and unbuckled her seat belt. The click of it reminded him of how she’d slid across the seat to him before, which reminded him of the way her mouth had felt on his and how she’d smelled and sounded, and then his dick was starting to stir and he had to concentrate on something else so he didn’t embarrass himself.

“I hope they have a restroom,” she said as she got out. “And that it’s not too gross.”

They had more than a restroom—they had a full set of showers, available for only five bucks, according to the sign. HUNTERS WELCOME was hand-lettered on the faded sign. Jessie looked at it, her mouth quirked in the half smile that drove him a little too crazy for comfort.

“I’m sort of afraid to see what kind of shower they have in there.”

“I’ll go inside, pay for the gas. You need anything else?” he asked, thinking about the crash of glass from the back of the truck. He should check it out, see what had broken and what they might need to replace.

Ten minutes later, he’d paid for the gas inside. And while it pumped, he’d opened up the truck’s double back doors to assess the damage. The plastic crate he’d packed with a couple bottles of wine had tipped, and the rich earthy smell of the good Bordeaux he’d picked because Jessie liked red better than white hit him in a wave. Shit.

The damage got a little worse when he tried to pick up the glass and promptly sliced his thumb at the base. Bright blood welled to the surface, just a bead at first but then a rapid gush as he cradled it to his chest. Jessie came around the back of the truck just then, her mouth open to say something that she stifled at the sight.

“Max, what happened?”

“It’s nothing. Just a flesh wound,” he joked, knowing she’d get the reference to Monty Python. They’d watched it on one of their first dates.

She took his hand and looked at it, not even wincing at the sight of blood. She frowned. “No, it’s not. That’s pretty deep. What did you cut it on?”

“Wine bottle.” He used his chin to show her the broken bottles inside, the dark wine splashed all over the rest of the groceries.

“Well,” she said with a grin, “that’s too bad, isn’t it?”

A second later, though, she was frowning again in concern, his hand cupped in hers, her thumb pressing the wound to stanch the blood. “You need stitches. Or at least a bandage. C’mon, I’m sure they have something inside. Go wash your hands in the bathroom. I’ll see what’s in the store.”

He wanted to protest, reassure her that he was fine. Manly enough to handle just a little flesh wound. The truth was, the cut was already throbbing, the blood flow slowing but caked into his skin, and the way the skin gaped was making his stomach hurt.

Jessie closed her hands over his, gently cupping his wounded thumb. “Go.”

In the restroom, he used a paper towel to turn the hot water faucet until a trickle of first lukewarm, then scalding water shot out and splashed his front. Max did the best he could to clean it, but it was starting to hurt a lot more and he muttered a particularly creative string of curses.

Turning from the sink, he caught sight of the advertised shower, a narrow stall with a sagging, mildewed curtain shielding what looked like equally moldy tiles behind it and a steadily dripping showerhead. You’d have to pay him a helluva lot more than the five bucks they wanted to charge to get naked in that thing. On impulse, he twitched the curtain aside and stepped back at once with a stifled shout.

It looked like an abattoir.

Summers growing up as a kid, Max had spent a lot of time on his uncle’s farm. Uncle Rick and Aunt Lori had raised a few dairy cows, kept a bull, a coop of chickens, one or two pigs. They kept animals for food, not profit, and definitely not for pets. Max had learned that the hard way after he’d adopted a spindle-legged calf named Doey. Years later, when he watched the film version of The Silence of the Lambs, the scene in which Clarice described the sound of the lambs screaming had sent him from the theater faster than any of Hannibal Lecter’s tooth-sucking comments about fava beans. To this day, he couldn’t eat veal.

The barn had looked like this shower stall the day he’d found them slaughtering Doey.

Max backed up so fast that the heel of his boot caught on a ridge of tile. To catch himself from falling, he flung out his injured hand. Fresh pain, bright and wide and thick, covered him, and he let out a yelp that echoed in the dimly lit room. He could smell it now, he thought. The stink of old, dried blood. And hear the soft buzz of flies battering themselves against the small window set high in the wall.

Shit and blood, that’s what Uncle Rick had always said brought flies. Shit and blood.

Outside in the late-afternoon sunshine, the scene in the restroom seemed surreal. When he came around the corner, he found Jessie talking to the old woman/man sitting in the rocker on the front porch. Rather, the ancient lump of wrinkles and raggedy clothes was talking. Jessie seemed to be just listening.

“Stay out of the woods,” the old person was saying.

Jessie glanced up at him, her expression so carefully neutral that he could tell she was trying hard not to laugh. “Thanks, Mrs. Romero.”