The Hookup (Moonlight and Motor Oil #1)(101)

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.

“Sp?tzchen,” 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.”