The day Kaylee O’Connell meets a cute redheaded girl in her college O-chem class, she has no idea she’s found the love of her life.
Rachel Nikolides loves to learn about all kinds of strange and interesting things, and Kaylee loves to listen to her info dump. Eight years later, the flames are still burning between them, but how sexy can to a trip to the local flea market be?
After browsing through another four or five stalls, Kaylee had found a table that was covered in boxes of vinyl records. Each box claimed to be sorted alphabetically by artist, but she’d quickly discovered that was more of a goal than actual reality. She’d picked out a copy of A Night at the Opera, some Handel, a My Fair Lady Broadway recording, and a couple of Ramones albums when she noticed Rachel coming down the aisle and waved her over before going back to flipping through the box marked M through T.
“Hey you.”
“Hey yourself, gorgeous.”
Kaylee shifted so that Rachel could get next to her, then happily let herself be squeezed into a quick side hug.
“You get the space rock?”
“Yep! Ended up paying forty in cash for it.”
“Nice.”
Rachel nodded as she picked up one of the albums she’d set aside. “Ahh. Yes, more proof that I corrupted a sweet, innocent girl with an iPod into a ravenous audiophile.”
“Pretty sure we might have a debate about ‘innocent’.”
“Good thing I can make a solid case for your sweetness then.”
The banked heat of arousal Kaylee had been nursing had gotten a bit stronger, and as she flipped between a few more records she knew it was about to get worse. Or maybe better. It depended on how you looked at it.
“Oh hey,” she said as she pulled a plain sleeve out of the box, then pulled it out enough to expose what appeared to be someone’s shoulder and collarbone running across the surface of the slightly irregular disc. “Didn’t you tell me about these once?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure I did! Can I take a better look?”
She offered her wife the disc and looked on as Rachel gently extracted the LP, her finger tracing the grooves that had been cut into the plastic before pointing to some writing that had been hidden beneath the sleeve.
“Okay, yeah, here -- do you see how the whole thing looks a bit funky, and this writing? It’s in Cyrillic!”
Kaylee nodded, trying not to think of how sensitive she was starting to feel as she leaned in over Rachel’s shoulder, just inches from her lovely neck, and that spot behind her ear that always made Rachel moan when she teased it with her fingers or her mouth.
“Uh ... yeah. I mean, I guess so -- it all looks kind of smudged to me.”
When Rachel leaned her head over to rest it against her arm, Kaylee felt a bit weak at the knees.
“It is, yeah, but I know a few of those characters. More importantly -- between that and the bones, this has to be one of the old Soviet Union ‘ribs.’ Bootlegs that got cut into processed X-ray film and then spread around.”
Kaylee had to admit that was interesting enough to distract her from the increasing state of her horniness.
“Huh. Right, I do kinda remember that. Lots of rock and jazz and banned music, right?”
“Partly, yeah. Also a lot of folk songs and work songs from the Gulags and songs about farms or homes taken from people by the state and turned into kollektivs. Sometimes a bit of all of that at once if the person who cut the record was piecing it together from other records they’d collected.”
“Damn. That’s pretty hardcore by today’s standards, let alone the sixties or seventies.”
“Seriously,” Rachel agreed as she carefully returned the record to the sleeve, then held it up so the shaggy haired woman who was selling the accumulated records could see it. “How much?”
“Oh, is that one of the weird ones? Call it fifteen bucks for that one, and I think there’s a couple more in the boxes. If you can dig ‘em out to go with what she already put to the side, I’ll do ... I dunno. How’s eighty bucks sound to you?”
“Sounds like a great deal,” Kaylee answered. She knew Rachel could probably have shaved more off the price, but if she could pull out two or three more of the bootlegs that would make for ten or eleven records. Not a bad deal at all -- and probably four or five fun afternoons of listening to their haul, too.
“Softie,” Rachel murmured just loud enough for Kaylee to hear, then turned her hand over and pressed a kiss to the back of it.
“Mmm. Maybe,” she admitted with a happy little sigh. ”Check that last box while I finish this one up?”
