Cool at the Tips, Then Burning
by Dilbert Jazz
Copyright© 2025 by Dilbert Jazz
Romance Story: In a dim record shop, a dropout clerk and a brilliant pre-med junior orbit each other through jazz and snow for one winter, trading mixtapes and almosts until her hand finally slides into his (cool at the tips, then burning). Their first kiss tastes like cherry balm and tomorrow. But tomorrow ends in May, when her dream pulls her to Baltimore and his stays behind with a pair of green gloves and a mixtape titled “Almost, but not quite.” A tender, aching love letter to the ones that almost were.
You were twenty-three, working the closing shift at the record shop because rent didn’t care that you’d once dreamed of being a sound engineer. You’d grown fluent in almosts: almost-relationships that ended in almost-kisses, almost-texts you never sent, almost-nights where someone’s fingers brushed yours on the subway pole and the moment dissolved before it could become real.
Then came Nawana.
She was twenty-one, pre-med junior, the kind of beautiful that made you forget how to alphabetize. She blew in on a Tuesday in late October, rain dripping from her curls, backpack heavy with textbooks and a battered copy of Adrienne Rich. She went straight for the jazz section like she already knew where everything lived.
You told yourself: Don’t stare. Don’t be that creepy girl behind the counter who hits on every pretty customer.
But she pulled out A Love Supreme, whispered “finally,” and you were gone.
“Most people only buy it to look deep,” you said anyway.
She looked up. Dark eyes. Crooked half-smile. “Most people are idiots. You disagree?”
“I like the live bootlegs,” you answered, voice steadier than your pulse. “Studio version’s too polite.”
Her smile widened, dangerous. “I like impolite.”
(You are in trouble, your brain announced. Deep, catastrophic, gay-panic trouble.)
You spent an hour showing her bootlegs while she leaned on the counter, hoodie sleeves pushed up, arguing about Coltrane’s spiritual crisis like it was the most natural thing in the world. When she left she paused at the door.
“I’m Nawana.”
“I know,” you said, then died because your name tag was literally screaming “JORDAN” at her.
She grinned. “See you around, name-tag girl.”
You told yourself it was nothing. A story. A moment you’d replay in the shower until it hurt.
She came back the next week. And the next. Thursdays became yours because her org-chem lab ended at nine and you started closing late on Thursdays without ever admitting why.
You learned her in fragments:
She drank coffee even though she hated it.
She wrote poems in the margins of her notes and tore the pages out before anyone could read them.
She wore cherry lip balm because her grandmother mailed it every birthday.
She was terrified of becoming her mother (a surgeon who measured love in MCAT scores).
She learned you too:
You’d dropped out when the loans outran the music.
You still wrote songs on a thrift-store guitar with two broken strings.
You kept every mixtape anyone had ever made you, even the ones from girls who ghosted.
You never swapped numbers. Naming it felt like tempting fate.
The night it happened, the radiator was dead and the shop was freezing. Nawana arrived in a swirl of snow and stolen dining-hall cocoa, cheeks flushed, eyes bright.
“Peace offering,” she said, handing over a steaming cup and a pair of dark-green knit gloves. “You look like a sad penguin.”
You took the gloves. They fit perfectly.
(She measured your hands with her eyes weeks ago, your traitor heart whispered. She planned this.)
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