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 was 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).