Do You Sell Flying Pigs?
RECOMMENDED TRACK: Sleep Token – Caramel
The goodbye kiss Emma leaned in to press to my lips before I left her outside Classic Vinyl was a promise I intended to collect on. Later. She was being a good employee, and if I stayed I would distract her, very intentionally. So I walked away, though not without watching her disappear into the little shop.
I headed to the gym and cajoled one of the other regulars to let me use his gloves. But in the end, I could only keep myself occupied with the bag for twenty, thirty minutes before the song called to me between rounds. I retrieved it and went back to Sig House.
I do not have my own vinyl player, but there’s one in the house library, and the house steward that year, Alex Whitely, was also our chapter’s unofficial music guy. So I knew it would be in working order when I strolled into the library and closed the door behind me. I fiddled with it carefully and set the record in place, placing the needle into the outer groove and plopping into the nearest armchair.
The song began, little tinkling bells, like a music box, and then a melancholy British man began singing. It wasn’t what I expected from a band I’d heard was metal, but I caught on quickly to why Emma had picked it. I leaned forward in the chair as the man sang about how he had built his own on-stage cage, sang out his frustrations with an audience who might kill him with their greedy adoration. An audience he could not help needing and loving anyway. He was still glad they came.
Yes, I saw why she would give this to a man who joked about being like Petrushka.
I listened to it two more times. She could not have known that it was a stark reminder of what was waiting for me after graduation, a future where I replaced the stage I’d built, a stage of pranks and parties, with my father’s. A power broker’s stage, one with financial maneuvers that could give the world economy shivers hiding behind its curtain.
The ache that pulsed in my chest matched the song’s rhythm. I was used to people enjoying the me that I gave them and not looking any closer; the speed with which Emma had cracked through that version of me should have been terrifying. That she saw someone she thought was worth her time, her tears, her bed? Made me want to follow her like a puppy dog.
At least until she figured out she was wrong and left.
My future was not compatible with courting an American girl. Eventually, I would have to leave. But she would leave me first, surely. Emma was sharp, painfully intelligent. She would see deep enough to recognize the coward that I am before that time came. Until then, it was not such a crime to want to stretch out in that warmth a little longer before returning to cold, forbidding Moscow, was it?
Even if it meant making something worth missing after all.
I finally set the turntable’s needle back to the side and tucked the album back into its slipcover. I tucked my dark thoughts into a locked box in my mind, too, shoving it to the side and mapping out a dinner plan instead. And a plan to kill time until I could jog back down Third Street. I wanted to burst into the record store before she expected me, like that Kool-Aid Man commercial Monty insisted on showing me sophomore year (It was not especially funny to me. Monty said “you had to be there,” even though he was not yet born when the ad was popular. Americans are funny about nostalgia.)
The inside of Classic Vinyl and Curios was small and warm, with orange walls, a grey-blue carpet floor that had seen better days, and wall-to-wall egg crates stacked all around. They were mostly full of records but some featured strange collections of…things. Toys and little glass statues, comic books, and baseball cards.
I’m sure there is a charming English word for the assorted objects, but I could not think of one at the time because after my eyes circled the store, Emma called my name and all my attention shifted to her.
And the man standing next to her.
Adrian Calloway.
He was holding a record furtively against his chest next to Emma as she beamed me. “Look who’s here,” she told me.
I forced a smile onto my own face. “Calloway,” I said, giving it the full force of my accent. “What a surprise to see you here.” But not really. Parker had told me Calloway was asking about Emma. His attention to her, or anyone, was unusual. But he did not strike me as the type to lose interest easily, once piqued. “You are slumming it among the bourgeoisie today?”
His name was all over the fraternity, the college, the whole damn town. Of course he could track down the workplace of a girl if he wanted. So, surprised I was not. But I was not happy, either.
“He came to apologize,” Emma continued smoothly.
…Okay, maybe I was a little surprised. “Apologize?” I think I might have done an actual double take. “Calloway?” It was not a polite response, but it was genuine. I stepped over and stood pointedly hip-to-hip with Emma, sliding an arm around her waist. “Do you sell flying pigs here, moya koroleva? A Calloway does not apologize.”
“I’d give you an apology if one was ever warranted, Sokolov,” Calloway replied, and to his credit, he kept his tone more smooth than me. But his eyes flickered to where my hand rested on Emma’s hip, a giveaway.
“Better if you do not. I might have a heart attack,” I said, less aggressive than before. More like my usual cheekiness. “What homework did you assign him?” I asked Emma, peering at the record Calloway tried to hold out of my view.
“Ah-ah-ah,” she chided. “Shopkeeper-client confidentiality. I promised.” She said, bumping her hip against mine in a gesture of such casual intimacy it made up for her not telling me. She plucked the record from Calloway’s hands and hugged it secretively as she trotted back behind the counter to the till, slipping it into a brown paper bag.
“I never said I’d buy it,” Calloway reminded her in a curt tone.
She turned and folded her hands together on the counter like a menacing little mob boss. “Well? Will you?” There was a challenge in her voice I had not heard from her before, and even though it was brittle, I wanted to glare at Calloway for inspiring it.
But if he sensed the irritation that must have been radiating from me, he ignored it, his attention fully on her. He tapped a finger on the counter, just one time, as he made up his mind. “Fine,” he said. “Ring it up. Please.”
Emma smiled like a saint and turned to the register. “Eight bucks even,” she said.
He paid with a card and made for the door. I couldn’t help leaning into his path so he had to brush past my shoulder, just to drive home the point.
I knew she was not mine. We had not defined what we were doing. I had no claim on her.
But I did not have to stand aside for him, either.
The little bell over the door rang, and just when I was about to relax fully, he turned back to look over his shoulder from the open doorway. “Your plans sound interesting, Emma,” he said, a wisp of smugness floating around the words. “I’d like to hear more sometime.” And then he left.
I paused, recalibrating, curious, annoyed. I willed the annoyance away as I leaned over the counter.
“What plans?”
“Oh…about after I graduate,” Emma explained, fiddling with the register. It was a massive old thing, and she flipped through a stack of receipts and jotted something in a little notebook to the side. “I’m studying media adaptation, and I want to go to grad school for business. Work for one of those big TV or movie companies that keeps remaking stuff.” She flicked an almost sheepish smile at me.
That sounded like her, finding a way to take that passion for stories and turn it into a career.
The warmth I felt at hearing her dream was undercut only a little by the annoyance that Calloway had learned about it before I did. And that it sounded like something that would interest him. Literary analysis used for business pursuits? Sounded like Calloway catnip. Something that he and Emma could talk about at length. I’m smarter than I let on, but I don’t analyze like breathing the way the two of them did. For her, that kind of conversation was just…Wednesday night.
I had never been jealous before. I did not like it.
“I would never have thought of something like that,” I said, honestly. I declined to mention I had never needed to think about it all, since my path had been laid out for me without any concern for my thoughts. “It sounds smart. Ambitious. Perfect for you.”
“Thanks.” She shut the cash register drawer with a finality and turned to me. “I thought it would be a cool way to get to work on something I care about.”
“It would be,” I agreed with a grin. “Capital-c cool,” Her shy expression turned delighted.
Fuck Calloway. He could talk literature with her, but I bet he could not make her smile like that.
“What about you?” She asked, fetching her backpack and trotting towards the back office. I followed. “What are your plans after graduation?”
…No. I was not ready for that conversation. I just shrugged. “I have not decided yet,” I said. I could not see her expression as she poked her head into the back office and told someone she was leaving—her replacement, I assumed.
“Ready?” She asked when she returned, apparently having decided not to press the issue. Slava bogu.
“Very,” I replied, gesturing for her to hand her bag to me.
She held it out with some confusion that was honestly adorable but also made me wonder what sort of mudaki she’d dated in the past. I slung it over my shoulder before escorting her to the door. “Where do you wanna eat?” she asked as we stepped into the cool November air.
“I know this place a few blocks away,” I said, gesturing down the street. “Small. Very small. Georgian. Makes the best khachapuri I have ever had,” I told her.
“Khachapuri?” She repeated the word carefully as she stepped into place beside me. “What’s that?”
“Delicious. It is pure delicious,” I said. “Bread, cheese, egg, butter. You’ll see.”
She laced her fingers through mine tentatively. I grasped her hand firmly and she beamed up at me, so bright I could melt. “Sounds great!”
We walked a few steps further, and even though her warmth at my side was settling my nerves some, my mind still churned—annoyance, worry, guilt, annoyance again. “So, Calloway likes music? That is news to me. I thought he only liked spreadsheets.”
“I think he listens to a lot, actually,” she said, hesitating just a little. I wondered what it was she had promised not to repeat.
“But he came to the store just to apologize to you?” I asked.
My doubt must have shown on my face, because she frowned a little but shook her head. “I think there was something else, but I wasn’t sure what. Do you think he’d show up just to annoy you?”
I snorted. “Come on. You’re too smart for that. He may be a walking stock ticker, yes, but he is still a man,” I told her. “And you are smart and beautiful and…booksy. He did not show up at your work to annoy me.”
Her cheeks had turned pink and she scrunched her nose thoughtfully. “If he was trying to flirt with me, he was really bad at it.”
Ha. That made me feel better, and she did not even mean to. “Bad at flirting, huh? That I could see.”
“He seemed like he just wanted to talk,” she said, shaking her head. “Or argue. Maybe mostly argue.”
“Of course he did,” I said, pulling her closer to me. “You are passionate. It is a very attractive quality.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sure.” I squeezed her shoulder and she looked up at me with scrutinizing eyes. “I’m not interested in him, you know.”
I paused in the middle of the sidewalk. “Not even a little? He is not bad looking,” I admitted, pulling her to me in a tone that was less teasing than I meant it to be. “And he has a big brain to go with that big mouth of his.”
She turned to me and put her hands on either side of my face. “Not even a little. Adrian is not the Sigma who has my attention,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to kiss me.
I believed her.
I leaned into the kiss, then nudged her against the nearest wall to capture her attention in its entirety, pressing her against the brick. She responded eagerly and I began to push my knee between her legs before I caught myself. “Nyet. No, no, no,” I said, pulling myself away reluctantly. “Do not tempt me. This restaurant, it keeps odd hours sometimes. Dinner first.” I rolled my shoulders and tried to shake it off, looking her up and down, not hiding the greed on my face. “Dessert after.”
Bonus Content:
The Eldritch Gods of Classic Vinyl
Author’s Note
B-Side Track: Frank Turner – I Still Believe
FUN FACT:
More in-universe trivia today! I don’t know exactly where I came up with the nonsense objects that sit behind the counter at Classic Vinyl, or why they became Eldritch gods, but I blame the furby, Rizzmo.
Also, “Caramel” is a gut punch of a song. Even if you’re not into heavy metal, you should give it a listen.
Right, so. Any guesses as to what kind of restaurant Misha’s going to take Emma to?