'90s Playlist (Romance Rewind #1)

by Anthology

  James moved half his stuff from his dorm room into her apartment, the rest of it jammed into the backseat of his car. He didn’t mind delaying the trip and helped her pack, boxing up the contents of the half life she’d been living. With a new opportunity in front of her, Rory finally started thinking about what she wanted to do, what she could do. She’d probably still be working at a West Coast coffee shop to pay the bills, but poetry was in her blood, and with James by her side, anything felt possible. There had to be MFA programs, ones like the scholarship she’d had for Pearce. Maybe she’d be able to do a work-study thing. Looking into that would be priority one as soon as they made it across the country.

  They day they were hitting the road, Rory emptied out the trash and found the postcard from her parents on the floor. It had slipped behind the can the day she’d thrown it out, one edge stuck into a floorboard like a shell in the sand.

  She stared at it until James paused at the doorway of her empty apartment.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, pocketing the postcard. “I need to do something. I’ll be right back.”

  Grabbing her journal and scratching down the address of their rental in LA, Rory made a quick trip to the post office. One envelope and stamp later, she began the process of writing her parents a letter. She had no intention of sugar-coating anything, but she didn’t want to lash out at them either, and this postcard was an olive branch she needed to accept

  She wrote that things had been rough over the last few years, that she’d really needed them and wished they’d been there for her, but it was okay. She finally understood that they were following their dream when they thought she’d achieved hers. After all, plenty of kids get out of college and need to work crappy jobs until they figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. She told them about James and where they were headed. She even threw out the idea that maybe the two of them could make a trip up north once they got settled. Portland wasn’t so far from Seattle, and Rory had her own Northern Lights to seek out: one that was filled with her own spiritual rejuvenation. What better place to do that than the birthplace of grunge?

  Making one more pit-stop on the way back, she arrived at her building to find The Ryans waiting at James’s car. Kaleb and Noah wrapped their arms tightly around her, and Rory’s shirt quickly grew damp with their tears. She promised to write to them, thanked Mr. and Mrs. Ryan for all they’d done for her, then took one last look around Hammond Falls before climbing into the car.

  “I got you something.” Rory plucked the rolled-up and rubber-banded gift from her bag and handed it to him.

  James’s eyes sparkled brilliant blue when he unrolled it. “A Kermit the Frog poster!”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek, her nose, her mouth, then paused. “Wait, does this mean we have to trade in my car for a rainbow-painted Studebaker?”

  Rory laughed—a laugh that felt like her. The old version, the one that didn’t need walls. All she needed was music, poetry, and him.

  “Yes,” she answered. “And we’ll listen to Nirvana the whole way there.”

  Other books by Rebecca Grace Allen

  Legally Bound Series

  His Contract

  Portland Rebels Series

  The Hierarchy of Needs

  The Duality Principle

  The Belle vs. the BDOC

  Amy Jo Cousins

  Shelby Summerfield is a gold star lesbian, even if she doesn’t look like one, with her big hair and flowered skirts. Menswear-sporting, high fashion goddess Florence Truong is the only other dyke at Carlisle College in 1993 who sticks out as much as Shelby from the sea of plaid flannel and polar fleece, and Shelby sets her sights on seduction.

  But instead of a delightful tumble in the sheets, all that’s in store for Shelby is public embarrassment when Florence calls her out for being a straight girl after busting Shelby in a compromising position with a boy. With seduction off the table, Shelby settles for revenge for her humiliation.

  Whether the battlefield is trivia night at the local pub or the annual campus-wide game of Assassin, Shelby Summerfield plays to win. But if all she wants is to show up her campus rival, how come Shelby can't stop herself from saving Florence instead of annihilating her?

  Possum Kingdom by The Toadies (1994)

  Chapter 1

  Getting busted in the back of a bar with your hand on a penis was not the way to go about picking up the hottest lesbian on campus.

  “Oh my gravy,” Shelby Summerfield murmured into the ear of the boy who was panting into her breasts and tugging her hand toward the bulge behind his belt. Davis was full as a tick, if the tick had been downing shots of Wild Turkey all night, and Shelby was trying to break it to him gently that she was a pussy-only sort of girl. Of course, if she hadn’t known he’d just been publicly dumped by his girlfriend in humiliating fashion, she’d have applied her knee to Davis’s private parts, but allowances could be made for heartbreak among study buddies.

  “Excuse me.”

  Oh, fudge.

  “Um, hey,” Shelby managed to squeeze out over Davis’s shoulder.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Florence Truong drawled over the Gin Blossoms singing about jealousy. Someone in the bar—Shelby suspected Davis—had pumped a truckload of quarters into the jukebox and put the song on repeat.

  “No, he’s not—” But the woman Shelby had come here to find just shook her head and rolled her eyes, striding off toward the front of the bar with a swing of her hips that called attention to her pipecleaner-skinny grey trousers and forest green velvet blazer with cuffed sleeves.

  “Damn.” Shelby let herself curse, because really, if a situation called for it, this one did. “Double damn. Oh, get off me.”

  She pushed Davis’s dead weight off her shoulder, where he seemed to have passed out sometime after begging for his first hand job and before the spectacular exit of Ms. Florence Truong. Halfway through his slow slide down the wall to the floor, Shelby gave in and hauled him upright again.

  “Good thing you don’t weigh much more than a sack of wet mice, Davis Crawley” she ground out as she wedged a shoulder under his armpit and hauled him toward the front of the bar. If she were lucky, she could prop him up on one of the bar stools with a high wooden back long enough for him to sober up. No sense trying to send him home when the boy probably couldn’t remember his own name, much less where he lived. Pouring him into one of the few town taxicabs was a waste of the money she’d no doubt have to pay the driver in advance.

  Besides, one drunk poli sci study partner—who was almost certainly going to remember none of this in the morning—was not about to put Shelby Summerfield off her game plan. She’d come to this stupid bar tonight, on trivia night, because she’s heard Florence showed up every Wednesday.

  Shelby was tired of drooling over the woman from afar.

  She was going to track Florence down like a bloodhound if she had to, because Shelby didn’t believe in settling for anything less than exactly what she wanted.

  And if that meant slipping the bartender ten bucks to let Davis sleep it off at far end of the bar, she certainly wouldn’t consider that a waste of the allowance her parents mailed her every two weeks from Dallas.

  The bartender, a cranky man whose belly, nose, and enunciation made it clear he was used to drinking as much behind the bar as Davis had poured down his throat in front of it barked at her when she deposited Davis on a vacant chair.

  “He pukes, you clean it up.”

  “If he pukes, I’ll kill him myself,” she muttered, as worried about the state of her campaign to seduce Florence Truong as she was about the state of the floors at Egon’s.

  The impression that she’d been giving Davis a handjob in the back of the bar could surely be overcome. Mopping up puke on her hands and knees in front of the coolest dykes on campus? Not even Scarlett O’Hara could have come back from that kind of blow.

  “Just…let him sober up a little. I�
�ll check on him. I promise,” she swore, and then grabbed her longneck and wriggled through the crowd toward the table where Florence sat with a half dozen girls, all of whom howling the words to a 4 Non Blondes hit. Throwing her shoulders back and pasting a big smile on her face, she waited until the song trailed off, strategically, and then made her approach.

  Someone at the table was wearing too much patchouli—although Shelby really thought that any patchouli was too much, and stuck to her Clinique Happy, because even the name had a good attitude—and no one even looked at her, which was how she knew they were ignoring her on purpose, because her boobs were spilling out of this sundress like nobody’s business.

  Her cup runneth’d the heck over.

  A friendly greeting would’ve been nice, but she’d learned Northerners were way stingier with their howdys and hellos.

  “Do y’all have room for one more?” Shelby asked. But before she could deliver her line about being a ringer on U.S. history and absolutely anything involving the presidents, Florence put her beer down on the table and leaned back in her seat, one leg crossed elegantly across the other, foot resting on her knee.

  “Sorry, honey. You’re cute but we’re the Cunning Linguists,” Shelby’s walking wet dream said, imitating her with a terrible southern drawl like Darryl Hannah in Steel Magnolias. Shelby wanted to be insulted, but wasn’t sure if she was being flirted with or not. Florence pointed at the paper table tent with the team’s name on it, and then waved across the room at the table of Tri Delts who had set up shop next to the Chi Si guys. “You want the sorority girls over there. Or you can hook up with the boys, I guess. They’ll like your idea of privacy.”

  So, that was a not on the flirting question.

  “Do tell,” the girl sitting next to Florence said, chin in her hand. She had a pretty shaved head—because no, Shelby was not prejudiced against women with short hair and this girl had a lovely skull for it—and a ring in her nose. The way she leaned lightly against Florence’s shoulder told Shelby all she needed to know about why that girl was giving her the stink eye.

  Shelby knew competition when she saw it. And she would normally be up for it in a heartbeat. No one could do a polite battle of wits like a Texas woman on a mission.

  But with Florence throwing that stupid, misunderstood moment in the hallway in her face in front of a table of the most popular dykes on campus, polite had flown out the window long ago.

  “For future reference?” Florence added, not at all helpfully, with a smile tugging back one corner of her full, nude lips. “If you go all the way back, past the cigarette machine, the rest of us can’t tell you’ve got your hand in the guy’s pants.”

  Shelby refused to wonder how Florence knew that. Refused to wonder, but was very much afraid she’d be imagining it later that night in the privacy of her own single room in Safford.

  “My hand wasn’t down his pants, thank you very much,” she protested, her cheeks hot as the table of women stared at her. “Which maybe you’d have noticed if your eyes had made past my bust.”

  Which wasn’t even true, and the sting of regret poked her conscience immediately. Florence hadn’t paid Shelby any more attention than she’d needed to squeeze past Davis’s drunk behind. Before she could open her mouth to apologize, Florence propped her elbow on the table and opened and closed her hand in Shelby’s direction, like a goodbye wave for a particularly dim-witted person.

  “Go on now. Don’t let your boy fall off his bar stool.” And that flirty imitation drawl was back too.

  In the face of half a dozen deadeye stares and Florence’s elegantly lifted black eyebrow, Shelby made a speedy retreat back to the slumped form of Davis at the back corner of the bar and demanded whatever Davis had been drinking from the bartender.

  What do you call the opposite of Dutch courage? Danish cowardice?

  Shelby tossed back the bourbon and let it burn out the.

  Just…calm your tits, Shelbs.

  If the embarrassment was banished—and that was sure enough the story Shelby was sticking to—only one thing still burned hot under her sternum. And that definitely wasn’t the bourbon.

  That was the desire for revenge.

  Because Florence hadn’t just publicly humiliated Shelby, she’d done it in front of a group of the most popular lesbians on campus. Even at a liberal New England college like Carlisle, there were only so many dykes to go around, and gossip traveled faster through the GLB community that it did on her momma’s church phone tree.

  Florence had just killed any possibility of Shelby’s getting laid on campus between now and graduation.

  Shelby’s idea of revenge was detailed and involved many steps, all of which involved an equally public humiliation for the fabulously dressed and irritatingly superior Florence Truong.

  She’s not that fabulous. In fact, she’s looking a little haggard tonight.

  But before she could even try to fake believing her own lies, Shelby called bullshit on herself.

  Florence did look fabulous, as always. Conversation in the bar stopped when she stripped off her jacket to reveal a pinstriped shirt with a tie. And a tie bar, for goodness sake, which was melting the part of Shelby’s soul that had read Vogue from cover to cover every month since she was a little girl borrowing her momma’s issues.

  Sitting at that high top table between the girl in the Tracy Chapman T-shirt, ripped jeans, and combat boots, and the girl in the plaid flannel shirt, ripped jeans and combat boots, Florence shone like a beacon of high fashion and gloriously pre-meditated style.

  As someone who’d only barely been able to give up her long, Laura Ashley florals for a babydoll dress as fashions changed—and she refused to wear the de rigueur combat boots on the principle that she never wanted to fit in that badly, no matter how much teasing she got from the girls in her dorm about being a Southern belle—Shelby had been drawn to Florence’s uncommonly elegant yet masculine style the first time she’d seen her in a politics seminar their junior year shortly after transferring to Carlisle.

  If only Florence didn’t look so delicious in her crisp menswear and shiny loafers with no socks. With her hair spliffed up in a modified pompadour, the short back and sides just called for Shelby to press her palms against them.

  If only Florence didn’t look so tailored and then stare so intently at the little tin of Burt’s Bees lip balm when she rubbed her fingertip against it in tiny little circles, slowly…

  Shelby could practically feel that finger between her thighs and it made her cross her legs and rock against her bar stool, humming under her breath with anticipation.

  Or, at least, it had, before the night had gone so disastrously wrong

  But if she couldn’t get what she wanted, she didn’t believe in wallowing in despair either. No, what always perked her up after the occasional rejection—although they were admittedly rare, and never as humiliating as this one—was a nice bout of lowdown, dirty fighting, preferably with an intellectual edge rather than an actual street brawl.

  Although Shelby wouldn’t run away from one of those either. Having three older brothers meant she knew how to throw a punch just fine, thank you, even if she did prefer not to get her hands bloody. She might keep her nails dyke short, but they were cotton candy pink and scratching her polish made her madder than a wet hen.

  So, Florence Truong didn’t want her? Florence Truong didn’t even acknowledge Shelby as someone it was possible to want, because she couldn’t see past the drunk boy propped on her shoulder?

  Her loss.

  But the rejection stung. Shelby wanted to bond over velvets and silks, over cashmere and suede and leather.

  Florence in leather…

  Stop it. Get a dang grip.

  Besides, what if Shelby had needed help, damn it? Shouldn’t Florence have stopped to pull Davis off her, and maybe check—with her tongue—to make sure she was really okay?

  But if Florence didn’t want Shelby, she damn sure wanted something and it didn’t take She
lby more than an hour of pouring coffee down Davis’s drunken throat to figure it out.

  Wednesday nights were trivia nights at Egon’s and Florence had come to win.

  The woman was a general in charge of her troops, waving off the shot girl after the first round—which Florence skipped, although the rest of the women at the table were raucous in pounding down whatever nasty blue stuff was poured directly into their mouths from the plastic bottles the shot girl carried on her hips.

  As soon as the countdown clock hit zero and the questions started showing up on the bar’s many TVs, Florence corralled her team and kept them close. Huddling over the bright blue remote console into which she entered the team’s pick of the multiple choice answers to each question, Florence’s focus was laser-sharp, her voice snapping out demands for certainty from her players.

  “You sure about that? Because if you’re not, you need to own it, Susan.”

  From what Shelby could observe, most teams rotated control of the console. But after the first time the girl with the shaved head and nose ring got distracted by a curvy redhead at the bar, Florence took over the job and never gave up control again.

  Some games were short and focused on one particular trivia topic: old school TV shows, music lyrics, sports trivia. Other games were longer and ranged over all kinds of topics. Teams had running totals of their total points for each game, for the night, and for—it looked like—ever. After an intense, hour-long game called Showdown, the mood of the bar shifted visibly when a game began whose goal seemed to be identifying cartoon characters by their drawings. For the first time since the disastrous encounter by the bathrooms, Florence got up from her table.

  Perched on her stool at the corner of the bar, Shelby watched with narrowed eyes as Florence strode through the crowd of rowdy frat boys and girls like a knife, turning heads and sparking gossip with every table she passed.