The Hookup

  Brooks squealed.

  Izzy smiled and whispered, “You can attack me when we get back to the mill.”

  “Obliged for the permission,” he grunted instead of sharing he didn’t need it.

  Her smile got bigger.

  She knew he didn’t need it.

  “Ice cream, everyone?” Addie shouted from the kitchen.

  “Yeah!” Johnny shouted back.

  “Yes!” Izzy yelled.

  Brooks let out a shriek and then collapsed into his own lap, giggling.

  “The secret room revealed,” Izzy murmured in awe.

  Johnny had just guided her into the walk-in closet that led off the door at the back of the bathroom.

  He’d switched on the lights, which were mostly recessed spots that shone on the railings and shelves as well as on the island in the middle. He’d then walked in and dumped her bag (which was much heavier than yesterday) unceremoniously on top of the island that was covered in sliding glass panels that protected velvet-lined jewelry trays.

  All of them empty.

  “The secret what?” he asked.

  She was wandering around the opposite side of the closet from him like he would suspect she’d wander around a castle. She lifted a hand and ran the tip of her forefinger along an empty slanted shelf, which had a lip that was supposed to display shoes but now was bare.

  “Izzy,” he called when she said nothing.

  She stopped and turned to him. “I always wondered what was in here. I almost looked in that first morning. But I didn’t want to snoop.”

  “It’s just a closet,” he said.

  “It’s the biggest, most gorgeous closet in the history of man,” she replied, glanced beyond him to the half a rail up top and half a rail under it that were the only rails in the huge place that held clothes. “Though you need more jeans.”

  His mouth hitched. “I don’t need more jeans.”

  She looked him right in the eye. “You built this for Shandra, didn’t you?”

  His mouth stopped hitching. “Iz—”

  Her head tipped to the side and she interrupted him. “You don’t like talking about her.”

  “I don’t like her being any part of us,” he corrected.

  She gave him a small smile and started walking toward him.

  When she reached him, she put a hand on his chest and tilted her head back to look up at him.

  “She was a part of your life,” she noted quietly.

  “I know that,” he replied.

  “And in your life when you fixed up this place,” she guessed.

  He put his hands on her hips. “We were gonna move in together. But we didn’t do that, Izzy.”

  “You built this for her. You built the bathroom for her.”

  “I did but she never used either of them, Iz.”

  She swayed toward him and asked, “Is that for me?”

  He was confused. “Is what for you?”

  “All that reassurance, is it for me?”

  He gave her the obvious answer. “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Okay,” she started. “Then let me make it clear that you’re not giving me any indication you’re still hung up on her. I don’t ever even think about it, until you take pains to reassure me you’re not hung up on her. Our start was rocky, honey. Then it smoothed out. Notwithstanding, of course, Perry spraying gravel with his angry exit. But that wasn’t about us. That was just something we had to deal with.” She pressed her hand in his chest. “You can talk about her. You can talk about that time in your life. You can stop trying so hard to protect me from something that happened when I didn’t even live in this town.”

  She swayed even closer so her breasts were brushing his chest.

  “I was there last night when you were inside me,” she told him. “And I did get what was communicated, Johnny. You keep trying to educate me but I knew exactly what kind of guy you were from the first moment I met you. So I know you aren’t the guy who would lead me on, start something this intense if your heart and mind are with someone else. Shandra is history but that history is your history, and I want to know everything about you.”

  “I love that, baby,” he said softly. “And it’s me trying to reassure you about that but it’s also the fact I know everybody in town is taking sides like there’s a chance for Shandra when there isn’t, and I know that, I wanna make sure you know that, but they don’t know that. And I don’t want you to hit town and hear shit that makes you doubt where we are. I want you to know where we are and if you hear shit, you can stand strong and know it’s just that. Shit.”

  “I don’t care what they think,” she returned. “They aren’t here. They don’t know. This closet isn’t hers. It’s yours. The bathroom isn’t hers. It’s yours. And she’s not yours. I am.”

  He felt those words everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.

  But with her that close, her tits brushing his chest, he felt them mostly in his balls and dick.

  This meant his, “Eliza,” was a growl.

  She ignored his tone and ordered, “So stop worrying about it.” She then pulled out of his hold, took a step away, but turned her back to him and went on to say matter-of-factly, “Now I nearly dislocated a shoulder trying to get this dress zipped this morning. Can you do me a favor and unzip it?”

  If there was nothing else in this world Johnny could do, he could do that.

  So he took the step she’d moved away and unzipped her.

  She stepped away again, rolled her shoulders so the dress fell off of them and then she slid it over her hips and let it drop to her ankles.

  Johnny watched it go and enjoyed the show.

  She turned around wearing a black strapless bra, black lace panties and her pumps and gave him a look.

  He raised his brows. “Are you trying to seduce me, spätzchen?”

  “You haven’t tackled me yet,” she whispered.

  He had not.

  Johnny didn’t hesitate to rectify that mistake.

  He lunged.

  And Izzy went down without a fight.

  Moon in the Fifth House

  Johnny

  “YOU KNOW THE constellations?”

  “No. Mom did. She was always pointing them out. I never really saw them. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s good we’re not sailors.”

  Johnny chuckled.

  They were lying on their backs on a blanket under the stars. Iz was at a slant to him and had her head on his gut. He was trailing a hand through her hair that flowed over his side. The fingers of his other hand were laced in hers and she had them pressed to the side of her tit.

  Opposite Izzy, Ranger was lying with his back plastered down Johnny’s leg, head on Johnny’s hip.

  Johnny’s tent was pitched about ten feet away from them. It was a one-man deal but he’d zipped their two sleeping bags together, they were a snug fit, but they fit, and he figured they’d be totally good to make do with the limited space.

  The fire was crackling about five feet away in the opposite direction to the tent.

  It was the first and only night of their camping trip and the experience had made Johnny decide they’d have a lot more of them.

  But even so, he figured he wouldn’t need to buy a new tent.

  It had been the first time in a while that he’d remembered they hadn’t been together for very long.

  Mostly this was because Izzy spent the day surprising him.

  What he learned probably shouldn’t have surprised him. She didn’t complain much ever, really. She just got on with it.

  And the “it” she just got on with was anything and everything. Not just her doing her thing with her pots and her plants and her friends and her sister and her animals and her land.

  That day, she helped him load up Mist and then helped unload him and unhitch Ben’s horse trailer before they took off to go camping.

  The spot he camped was a mile and a half off the road. He’d packed her backpack and it wa
s half the weight of his, but it didn’t weigh five pounds. Since she didn’t do this sort of thing, he figured that there would be a possibility that he’d need to shift some things around, take on extra weight with some of the stuff in her pack.

  She’d hefted it up and didn’t say a word.

  She’d then walked a mile and a half with it on her back and she also didn’t say a word except to talk about how it was so cool they were going to have good weather, or ask if he wanted her to take a turn with the cooler he was carrying or point out wildflowers and name them by name. “Look, Johnny, there’s some yarrow . . .” “The foxtail is everywhere . . .” “Awesome, corn poppy . . .” “There’s lupine . . . this place is filled with flowers. It’s amazing.”

  He’d camped at this spot so many times he’d lost count and he’d never once seen the flowers.

  Now he could say he liked lupine the best.

  While he pitched the tent, he asked her to gather kindling for the fire and she did that, grabbing some small, downed branches when she did, carrying them back to the fire pit he’d created years ago and he knew others used besides him. She stacked it neatly, but far enough away from the pit that the dry tinder wouldn’t be in danger of catching a spark.

  And then they were there. They were set up. In doing that, they didn’t have a disagreement or an argument. Iz was just along for the ride.

  And liking it.

  The only hiccup they had was when he took her to the edge of the river to teach her how to fish.

  She seemed to like fishing and didn’t get squeamish about the bait. The fish liked her too, and she caught two bluegill before he got his first fish. They were too small to eat so he showed her how to unhook them and toss them back in.

  She didn’t get squeamish about that either, to the point she watched her second bluegill swim away, turned to him and said, “This is fun!”

  He grinned at her.

  She immediately set about re-baiting her hook.

  Five minutes later, he caught his first catfish and it was big enough for their dinner. So he immediately moved through spiking it and bleeding it out.

  When he threw it aside and looked to her, she was pale and staring at the fish.

  Her eyes drifted to his. “Um . . . you said you brought hotdogs in case we weren’t lucky at the lake?”

  He tried not to bust out laughing.

  But the cooler he had not allowed her to carry had sandwich meat and cheese for their lunch, a six pack for him, a bottle of wine for her, tartar sauce for the fish, cream for their morning coffee, milk, eggs and butter for their morning pancakes and a packet of hotdogs in the very unlikely event he couldn’t catch dinner for her.

  “Did I just push you closer to vegetarianism?” he asked.

  She swallowed and nodded.

  He decided against teasing her by reminding her what was in a hotdog and instead leaned toward her, gave her a brush of his lips and moved back. “I got hotdogs.”

  “’Kay,” she whispered.

  She gave up on fishing then but she didn’t leave him to it and she didn’t give him shit about it.

  She walked to their camp and came back with the book and pens she’d brought that he’d packed for her.

  She then sat close to him, her knees up, her book on them, and she wrote in it, alternating between three pens and the times she’d stop to stroke Ranger, who’d gotten bored with fishing and was flat out at her side with his head in her lap.

  Johnny didn’t pry when she was journaling. He also didn’t say anything when she put it away, stretched out her long legs in her shorts and tipped her face to the sun, focusing on petting Ranger and nothing else, clearly happy to just sit beside him while he was fishing and . . . be.

  Margot never went camping or fishing. She’d cook a cleaned fish one of them caught, but she didn’t want to know about it and further detested hiking, outdoor clothing that was “not feminine in the slightest so precisely what is the point?” as well as mosquitos, sleeping on the ground and not being within driving distance of a mall.

  According to his dad, his mother had felt much the same way.

  Shandra hiked and camped but got bored easily, and a trip couldn’t last longer than it took a shower to wear off (her estimation, twenty-four hours) or they had to be in a campground that had showers and toilets, and camping in campgrounds was not Johnny’s gig.

  It was about being in nature. The quiet of it. Life slowing down and your brain slowing down with it. Not being in nature with a bunch of other people, noisy families, kids out just to get drunk and therefore loud, and a lot of people who didn’t camp often who did stupid shit that could also be dangerous that drove Johnny right up the wall.

  Eliza showed no signs of being bored. She said nothing when he caught his second fish, spiked it, bled it out or when he cleaned either of them (however, she didn’t watch, mostly because he took them to a place she couldn’t watch).

  She helped him build a fire. She roasted her hotdog. He put his fish on aluminum foil and roasted them. They heated up a can of beans and shared them, eating straight from the can.

  After they cleaned up, they made s’mores.

  They sat through it all close together, Izzy leaning against him, one of each of their legs tangled.

  They swapped stories. They laughed. They kissed a lot.

  It was Izzy who got up first and put the blanket out for them to stare at the stars.

  But Johnny didn’t say a word against it.

  It was the best day he’d had in a long time.

  What made it better was having the understanding it was also the first of many.

  Izzy brought him back to the present by sharing, “She was a Mercury in retrograde type of person.”

  “What’s that mean?” he asked.

  “I have no idea. But she did. She always talked about what planets were aligned and what that meant. She used to say things like, ‘Venus is in the Twelfth House!’ That, in particular, meant she’d met some guy she liked. Or, ‘Clearly, Mars is in the Third House.’ This she’d say when Addie or me were acting like know-it-alls.”

  Johnny chuckled again, staring at the stars and weaving her hair around his fingers.

  “I should look it up, what all that means,” she whispered. “I should translate my mom.”

  “Yeah,” he whispered back.

  She fell silent.

  Johnny did too, staring at the stars, holding hands with Izzy.

  “I hate him.” She was still whispering but this one was fierce.

  The stars blurred and Johnny felt his body get tight.

  “Who, baby?” he asked gently.

  “Dad,” she answered. “I hate him.”

  He wrapped her hair around his fist like it was him giving her a reassuring hug and started, “Iz—”

  “I lied,” she stated.

  “Spätzchen,” he murmured.

  “We weren’t happy. We were poor. Mom worked hard. She dated guys she liked and thought she could love, but they didn’t want a woman with kids or they just wanted a piece of ass or they drank too much and became jerks. She wanted to find love again. She wanted someone to help out too. She wanted stability, for her, for us. She wanted more. And Addie and me, we had to watch her go through that. Because of him.”

  Her tone was low but harsh and when she stopped speaking, Johnny said nothing. He didn’t move. He didn’t prompt her.

  He just laid there and waited for her to get more out.

  She did.

  “Addie was right with what she said in my kitchen. I caught on to it before she did. I saw it. What she found in Perry was what Mom saw in Dad. Dad played the guitar and he was really good. He wrote his own songs and those were really good too. Or as good as I knew, being a little kid. They still seemed good. He was a great singer. He had such a beautiful voice. I remember those times. I remember those being the only good times with him. How he’d get. How he’d be all dreamy and lovey and happy. How he’d put his guitar aside and pull Mom i
n his lap and hold her close and kiss her. Or catch one of us girls and swing us up and tickle us and shout, ‘I make beautiful babies!’ But it wasn’t that he didn’t get the record deal or get discovered and he got frustrated and bitter. He wasn’t even out of his twenties. There wasn’t time for that. It was just how he was. It was just who he was.”

  Her fingers in his were getting tight, biting into the webbing, but Johnny just held on.

  “I think it was the dreamer part of him,” she declared. “I think she wanted to be there to watch him build his dream. Live it. I think she liked to think she was his muse. That he’d get off the road and come to us and we’d be his sanctuary against life on the road and his adoring fans. That when he was on tour, he’d step up to the mic and say, ‘This is a song I wrote for the love of my life. For Daphne.’ I think she wanted to grow tomatoes and string beads and raise his daughters and walk at his side into awards shows being gorgeous and proud and people would say, ‘Look at her. The serenity. The beauty. No wonder he writes such amazing music.’ I think that was her dream. I think that was the dream he fed her that she swallowed whole. And I think when it didn’t happen, when it turned dark and ugly, it broke her in a way that could never be fixed.”

  Johnny let her give this story to him and the stars and said nothing.

  “I think she escaped my grandfather,” she continued. “I think my dad was the opposite of him. Free spirit. Romantic. She wanted peace. She wanted adventure. She wanted love. She found hell.”

  She found that for certain.

  Izzy kept going.

  “A couple of years after we left, his mother, my grandmother, she showed at the door. That was the only time in my life I saw my mother be ugly. She opened the door to that woman and poison spewed out. She yelled at Mom. Screamed in her face. ‘What are you doing? How dare you keep his babies away from him? How dare you run away? He’s just troubled! You stand by your man! You never run away!’”

  Izzy dragged in a jagged breath and let more of it out.

  “Mom got right up in her face and yelled back, ‘Troubled is not hitting your woman in the face with your fist and knocking her down only to kick her in the stomach, you bitch. That isn’t standing by your man. That’s falling for his shit. That’s teaching your queens to be weak and that is not what my queens are gonna learn from me!’ She slammed the door in her face, turned to us and said, ‘If you ever see that woman again you run. You run away as fast as you can. And you find me.’ My grandmother banged on the door and shouted and Mom put us in our room and called the cops. I heard the murmurings. I don’t know what happened but that woman never tried to find us again. She never sent money to help out and she was rich too. We never saw her again. She gave up. And that was it.”