Crate Expectations

Chapter 1

NOVA

Let me tell you about the worst thing that has ever happened to me at a vinyl show.

I fell in love at one. Not with a record, though I’ve done that too and it’s a perfectly respectable way to spend a Saturday.

No, I fell in love with my best friend. Which sounds romantic in a movie and feels, in real life, like finding a crack in the foundation of your house.

You see it every single day. You just keep hoping the whole thing doesn’t come down on your head while you’re standing in the kitchen making coffee.

It didn’t happen all at once. It never does.

It started simple, with pockets of conversation and time getting away from me the way it does on a long walk at the start of spring.

Offering up a few too many reasons to stay longer than I planned.

Jill Scott warned us about those long walks and I still chose to mind my business.

This is that kind of story. It takes its time, and by the time you think you’ve reached the good part, you’ll realize you’ve been in it the whole time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the Laura Nyro.

WaxCon ran twice a year in a drill hall on the edge of Center City.

A building with brick walls, arched windows running the length of both sides, and steel trusses overhead holding a roof high enough to make you feel, briefly, like the city had made space for you.

The concrete floor was original and unforgiving, the type of surface that would keep a chiropractor in business for years.

By the time I arrived on Saturday morning the floor had already been given over entirely to the seventy-something vendors who’d materialized to fill it, their tables running in rows under the industrial light.

Milk crates, long boxes, wire bins, and face-out displays along the perimeter.

The sound of the place was people having conversations they could have had anywhere else but were having here because the records were the point.

The air also smelled like old paper and something older underneath it, the scent of things that had been kept and were now being offered again.

I had been coming to WaxCon since before I could remember.

I knew where regulars were located before I crossed the threshold like the woman who always surprised us with a hard-to-find addition to any New Edition collector’s dream and that I was going to spend more than I intended at her table and had already made my peace with that.

What I did not know, standing at the first table on a Saturday morning in October, was that this was the day the drawer—the one I used for anything I wasn’t ready to deal with yet—was going to stop closing all the way.

But I’m rambling. Back to Laura.

The first table belonged to a young guy, maybe thirty-five, who had organized his seventies soul by label instead of artist, which told you something about his priorities. I was moving through his Philly International section when I felt Deion go still beside me.

“Third from the left,” he said, quietly, not pointing.

I looked where he was looking. An album tucked between two Spinners, the spine facing out, nothing visible but the edge of a sleeve. I had moved my eyes over it twice already and kept going. I reached in and slid it free.

My hands slowed without me thinking about it. The sleeve showed its age, corners softened, a faint crease along the bottom edge that told me it had been handled, not just stored. I turned it over and felt it for real this time. Fully taking in what I was seeing.

Bahamadia’s Kollage.

Definitely not an easy pull. The pressing looked early. I eased the vinyl out just enough to check the surface. It was clean. Cleaner than it had any right to be sitting in a crate like this.

“How did you—” I started.

“Spine color,” he said.

He was already looking at the next crate.

“You’d been through that section twice,” he added. “You skip things when you’re looking for something else.”

I had skipped it.

“You would’ve gotten there,” he said.

I looked up at him. He didn’t look back.

“Deion,” I said.

“Find something else.” He nodded at the crate. “You’re holding up the line.”

There was no line. I went back to digging and said nothing, because whatever it was, it was too much for right then.

Three tables later I found Laura Nyro.

She was a 1971 promo copy of Gonna Take a Miracle, Laura Nyro and Labelle together on one record, the same Patti, Nona, and Sarah from the Bluebelles, grown and transformed and still doing something no one else was doing.

Finding this at a table on a random Saturday was not a normal thing that happened to normal people.

This was a find. I pressed her to my chest, closed my eyes, and released a squeal that had absolutely no business coming out of a grown woman.

“You good over there?”

I did not open my eyes. “I’m busy.”

“You made a sound…”

“That was between me and the girls. You weren’t invited.”

I knew that pause. Whatever he’d been about to say, he’d thought better of it. Wise choice.

“So… Laura Nyro,” Deion said instead, his voice quiet in that way it got when he already knew the answer and didn’t need to press for it.

I glanced down at the record in my hands, at the sleeve I had already started sorting in my head without thinking about it, where it would go, what it would sit next to, what it would do to a room once it was played.

His hand came in, not taking it from me, just touching the edge of the sleeve where my fingers held it. It wasn’t enough to stop me. It was enough to interrupt something. I looked up and noticed he wasn’t looking at the record anymore.

“You always do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Decide where it belongs before you even hear it.”

His thumb shifted slightly against the cardboard, just enough that I felt it, the contact small but unmistakable, the kind of thing that would have passed as nothing any other day. It didn’t pass as nothing now.

“It’s not deciding,” I said, though I was already aware of the way my voice had changed, the way my attention had shifted from the record to the space between us. “It’s listening.”

“To what?” he asked.

“To what it’s going to do when it hits the room.”

His hand stayed where it was for a second longer than it needed to. Then he let go, but the space didn’t go back to normal.

Here is something you should understand about me: I organize everything. My mom’s records by feeling, by what a song did to a space. My own by the same system, because she taught it to me and it is the only system I trust.

At work I know which rooms run cold, which patients need you to sit down before they’ll hear you, which days are going to run long before they even start.

At home I know which records settle a room, which light to leave on so it feels lived in when I come back, which corners collect things I haven’t decided about yet.

I have a system for almost everything, including feelings. Especially feelings.

My mom called it organized. Simone calls it avoidance. I call it maintenance and keep it moving.

The feeling I had about Deion Hill had its own folder, marked Not Right Now.

Every time I found something new to put in it, whether it was a laugh, a look, his thumb moving across my knuckles two years ago…

I put it there. I told myself I would deal with it later.

The folder had been running out of room.

And then I saw Laura, and folder be damned.

No thanks to her, my body did the thing it always did when he got close.

It wasn’t subtle or polite. My whole nervous system said oh, him before my brain had a chance to weigh in.

The air shifted. My shoulders did something involuntary.

I became aware of exactly how close he was, the way you became aware of a song starting in the next room.

Deion Hill is six feet, three inches of inconvenience.

He fits in a way that makes space feel like it adjusts around him without asking.

Broad through the shoulders in a way you register a second too late, built like someone who uses his body for what it’s meant for, not for show.

He knows exactly how much room he takes up and moves like it’s already accounted for.

He was at my left shoulder without announcement, just suddenly there, and I felt it before I fully processed it. The shift in air, the awareness, the quiet way my body clocked him before my brain had a chance to weigh in.

I tipped my chin up, just enough to take him in.

Deep brown skin catching the light like it knew what to do with it.

A beard kept clean at the edges without looking like it required effort.

A jaw that explained a lot about the way other women behaved around him and had nothing to do with me.

Gray sweats, of course, because ovulation has a way of turning perfectly reasonable women into unreliable narrators, a jacket, and the version of himself that always landed exactly where it needed to without trying.

Deion Hill is my best friend. A decade of knowing him and he has memorized every tell I have without ever turning it into something I had to answer for.

He has always been my safest place, and here I was, about to risk all of that by glancing down to do a print check, which is absolutely not something I do, and definitely not with him, like, not ever…

except he was standing there today like he had forgotten how to be my friend and remembered something else instead.

It didn’t help that I caught the scent of him, that familiar something I had never once asked about, because that would have raised questions I wasn’t interested in answering.

I didn’t look at his jaw. I knew better. I knew how women noticed him because of it. Still, my body adjusted when he got close, quiet and automatic, like it had been expecting him before I had.

“Let me see,” he said.