“So you both really like being librarians,” Chelle observed, smiling at Ruby and Max as they explained in animated style the outreach project that they would be presenting tomorrow afternoon.
“Of course,” Ruby said. “What other job would pay you to read and review queer books so you can bring them to teens who have no idea that people are even writing books with characters like them?”
“I can’t think of any,” Chelle said. “So they really pay you to read all day?”
“Not all day, but it is one of the perks of the job,” Max said. She had a very blunt way of speaking, and now she turned to Ruby and asked, “Babe, do you think we should go run through our notes one last time before bed? It’s getting late.”
“Oh,” Ruby said, glancing down at the clock on her phone. It was a quarter to nine and the social hour seemed to be wrapping up all around them, librarians trickling out of the room in greater and greater numbers. Ruby turned to Chelle and asked, “Do you mind if we leave you alone? I hate to be so rude but Max is right – we should get some sleep so we’re fresh tomorrow.”
“No problem,” Chelle said, glancing around the room. “I’m sure Mira will be back soon. It was nice meeting you.”
“Nice meeting you, too,” Max said, extending her hand again.
Chelle shook it while Ruby added, “Don’t forget to check out our presentation. It’s in the last session block of the day.”
“I will,” Chelle promised, and then the two of them weaved their way around the bar tables and out of the room, Max leading Ruby with their hands linked.
Chelle sighed and turned back to her half-eaten plate. A strange mix of emotions was stirring inside her. On one hand, her heart felt so full and she was beginning to think that Mira was a genius – if even a tenth of the librarians at the conference were as cool as Max and Ruby, Chelle knew she could feel at home in this profession very quickly. She was even starting to imagine the way her parents’ eyes would light up when she told them that she was going to grad school – something that even the golden child, her brother, had yet to do.
On the other hand, watching Ruby and Max holding hands and being so obviously in love, right out in the open surrounded by a hundred colleagues, made something heavy settle on top of Chelle’s chest. She never realized how bad she wanted that for herself, having been perfectly content to see girls casually in college and bend to Mira’s need for privacy until now.
Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to tear through the crowd searching for Mira and pull her into a big, sweeping embrace. But of course, that was strictly off-limits, and would be for as long as she continued working at WPL. It was so bittersweet that this realization came on the heels of her discovery that she really did want to work at the library, not just because it was the only job she could find but because she wanted to build a career there.
***
With her head spinning, Mira left the social hour and headed back down the hall toward the hotel. She didn’t want to leave Chelle behind, but if she pulled Chelle away from Max and Ruby it would only increase Jack’s suspicions if he was still watching her – which he almost certainly was. The bastard never let anything go.
Mira walked quickly through the hotel lobby, intending to spend the rest of the evening in her room, trying to calm down and figure out exactly what Jack knew and how he’d use it against her. Instead, she wound up in the hotel gym.
She passed it on the way to the elevators, a narrow hallway branching off from the lobby and leading to a room where she heard the motorized whir of a treadmill. Mira went down the hall and found a glass door, locked and equipped with a keycard reader, and beyond it was a small room with a row of free weights in front of a mirror, an elliptical machine, a bike, and a couple of treadmills. One them was in use by a young guy sprinting along with an air that seemed to say, I’m a young, fit, attractive white man and the world is my oyster. If I want to be a library director, it won’t take me ten whole years to get there and my employees won’t fight every decision I make.
Mira tried to shake this fictional narrative she made up for him – for all she knew, he was a hotel employee, or someone here for a reason completely unrelated to the conference. But her anxiety about Jack was beginning to bubble into anger at his stubborn insistence on ruining every good thing that happened to her. The more she looked at the guy on the treadmill, the more certain she was that he was at least mid-level management, and probably an asshole.
She decided that she’d probably feel a lot better if she went for a run instead of just lying on her hotel bed, flipping through cable channels and grinding her teeth, so she went upstairs and changed into the tennis shoes and leggings she’d packed for the return trip. They weren’t optimal workout clothes, but they would do in a pinch. Then she came back downstairs and mercifully, the gym was empty by the time she let herself in with her room keycard. The young executive, or whoever he was, had finished his run and now Mira had the slightly musty-smelling room to herself. She went over to the wall and put her hand out to steady herself while she did a couple hamstring stretches, closing her eyes as she relaxed her muscles in an attempt to do the same for her mind.
What did Jack have on her, anyway? As far as she could tell, he’d seen Chelle’s hand slip into Mira’s when she pulled her onto the elevator, and he’d heard the ridiculous, stupidly giddy laugh that followed. As she pressed her toes up against the wall to stretch out her calves, she racked her brain for any other times when she and Chelle could have been caught in a compromising position.
But there was nothing – aside from a few flirtatious words spoken very low under their breaths, she and Chelle had never done anything remotely revealing in the library, or anywhere else outside the privacy of their apartments.
Well, except for the time she’d followed Chelle into the stacks. But the library was closed and there was not a soul around. Ever since then, Mira had been very careful to maintain utmost professionalism whenever they were together in public.
Mira hopped on the nearest treadmill and cranked it up to a pretty challenging pace. She really didn’t want to keep thinking about this – what could happen if Jack really did bring her relationship with Chelle to the Board, what evidence he might drum up, and last but not least, the yearning that she was beginning to feel whenever she was around Chelle.
Mira really didn’t want to think about that, because it felt an awful lot like falling in love. That was a feeling she clearly did not have time to indulge, so instead she ran as hard as she could, her feet pounding against the treadmill and sweat pouring down her back as she obliterated every thought in her head except one.
Right foot, left foot, exhale. Right foot, left foot, exhale. You can do this.
***
Chelle was picking the last crumbs of food from her plate when she realized that she was one of the last people still lingering, and that the social hour was coming to an end. She disposed of her plate and glanced around the room, scanning every table for Mira and coming up empty. There was one familiar face still in the room, though, and Chelle reluctantly went over to the bar where Jack was nursing a beer.
“Have you seen Mira?” Chelle asked. As soon as the nickname popped out of her mouth, the word SHIT flashed across her mind and she quickly added, “-nda? Have you seen Miranda, Jack?”
It was not a good cover-up, and Jack scowled at her – business as usual, then – and gave her a rather unhelpful, “Nope.”
Chelle thought for a second about asking him if his family photos growing up all showed the exact same snarling expression that he wore now – because she had never seen another one – but it was always better not to poke the bear. So she just counted herself lucky that it didn’t seem like he’d picked up on the nickname slip.
“Okay, well if you see her, can you tell her I’m going up to my room?” Chelle asked. It sounded like an innocuous enough thing to say, but she hoped that Mira would decipher it as code for, Please come visit me because I’ve never made love to a beautiful woman in a hotel as fancy as this.
“I doubt I’ll see her,” Jack said, turning back to the bartender to order one last drink before the bar closed.
Chelle rolled her eyes while his back was to her and wondered if there was a certain number of drinks that made him nice. Whatever it was, he hadn’t hit it yet, so she adopted a chipper voice that she knew would irritate him and said, “Have a great night. I’ll see you in the morning, bright and early!”
He harrumphed at this, not turning around again to acknowledge her, and she walked away. Mira definitely wasn’t at the social anymore, so Chelle wandered out of the conference center and back to the hotel. It was getting pretty late and everyone who was here for the conference had long since checked in. Now the lobby was empty and there was a single clerk leaning sleepily against the check-in counter.
Chelle’s heels clicked on the stone floor as she crossed the lobby and pressed the elevator button to go up to the third floor. She thought if she knocked on Mira’s door and then reassured her that Jack was occupied downstairs, getting his money’s worth from the open bar, Mira might let her in. She was already imagining what it would feel like to sleep next to her in a plush, California King bed instead of the cramped full-sized mattress in Mira’s apartment.
Maybe Chelle could even bring her overnight bag into Mira’s room and they could spend a leisurely morning together. This was a fantasy that Chelle had played out quite a few times since Mira invited her to the conference. They’d shower together, and then share the bathroom as they got ready. Mira would be drying her hair in front of the mirror, an impossibly soft hotel towel tucked around her chest and her skin still damp from the lingering humidity of the bathroom. Chelle would stand beside her in front of the sink, admiring Mira’s figure reflected in the mirror. The motion of her body as she dried her hair would shake the towel loose, and as it fell to the floor and revealed her perfect body, Chelle would abandon all thoughts of getting ready and pull Mira into her arms.
The elevator door dinged, pulling Chelle out of the fantasy just in time to see that she’d gotten so caught up in it that the doors were already sliding shut on a pair of librarians giving her somewhat critical looks.
She hit the call button again, her cheeks reddening at the fact that Mira had such a powerful effect on her, and as she waited for the elevator to come back down, she looked around the lobby. The hotel clerk was watching her, a bemused look on his face – he must have seen her going full space cadet as she missed the elevator – and a few more librarians were trickling through the lobby on their way back from the social hour.
Chelle wondered why Mira would leave without telling her, or her grad school friends.
She glanced down a little hallway to the right of the elevators while she waited. It seemed more like a service entrance than anything important, and she hadn’t noticed it on their first trip upstairs because she was too busy making sure Mira didn’t get lost in the crowd. Now that it was quiet, though, she could hear the rhythmic footfalls of someone running. Curious, she abandoned her place in front of the elevators and went down the hallway.
At the end, she found a little gym, and on a treadmill running like hell, there was Mira.
Chelle knocked on the glass and Mira looked over, startled at the interruption to her focus. Chelle gave her a sultry look as she fished her keycard out of her pocket and let herself into the gym.
“Hey, gorgeous,” she said. “I was looking for you.”
“I’m sorry,” Mira said, punching at the buttons on the treadmill to slow her pace. Slightly out of breath, she said, “I made the mistake of talking to Jack when I went over to the bar and then I just had to get the hell out of there. I didn’t mean to abandon you, but you seemed like you were having a good time.”
“I was,” Chelle said. She went over and propped her arms on the back of the treadmill’s display panel, smiling up at Mira. “I liked your friends. They make a really cute couple.”
“Yeah, that’s Ruby and Max,” Mira said, slowing the treadmill all the way down to a walk as she caught her breath. The neck of her tee shirt was ringed with sweat and her face was bright red. “They hated each other’s guts for the first few months of grad school, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.”
She hopped off the treadmill as it crawled to a stop, then grabbed a towel from a stack near the door to wipe the sweat from her face.
“No side stitches?” Chelle asked, coming over and starting to slide her hands around Mira’s waist from behind.
“No,” Mira said, taking a quick step away from her.
Chelle wasn’t quite sure if this was a no to side stitches, or a no to the way she’d touched her. Mira hadn’t jerked away from her like that since the day they met, and Chelle had to admit that it hurt a little bit. She glanced at the glass door of the gym and thought it might be what Mira was objecting to.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “No one could see us unless they were standing right at the door, and Jack’s busy getting loaded at the bar. He’s not coming to the gym.”
“I’m all sweaty,” Mira objected.
“Call me a pervert, but I think it’s pretty hot,” Chelle said, running her hands over Mira’s arms and playfully squeezing her biceps. “I love a woman who works out.”
Mira gave her a little half smile, starting to give in to the moment. Chelle took her by the hips and pulled her into the corner beside the door, where it would be very difficult for someone to see them even standing directly in front of the door. She pressed Mira up against the wall, Chelle’s fists closing around the damp fabric of her tee shirt as they came nose to nose but didn’t kiss. Chelle wanted the tension and the thrill of the moment to last as long as possible.
She wanted to commit it to memory because, besides all the times at work when they had to pretend to be virtual strangers, they had very few moments together that didn’t include the backdrop of either Mira or Chelle’s apartment. The hotel, the gym, the bed waiting upstairs for them, were all exciting new settings waiting to be explored.
“Stop,” Mira said, looking away from Chelle.
“It’s safe,” Chelle said, nevertheless feeling the moment slipping away from her. “We’re alone. I promise no one’s going to find out and fire you.”
That was the exact wrong thing to say, because Mira shoved Chelle’s hands away.
“I said we can’t, okay?” Mira said, more bile in her words than anything Jack had directed Chelle’s way all evening. Then without any further explanation, she threw her towel in the basket by the door and walked out of the gym, letting the door swing shut behind her.
Chelle was shocked. She didn’t chase after Mira – she could only imagine how bad it would look if Jack were to choose that moment to go back to his room. Instead, she stood in the gym with her hands on her hips for about ten minutes, trying to figure out what went wrong. By the time she finally headed back to the lobby to wait for the elevator once more, the best she could figure was that she’d pushed Mira’s boundaries too much. She let the excitement of a new town and the gorgeous, upscale surroundings of the hotel get the best of her, and had freaked Mira out with her less than subtle seductions.
So she went up to the third floor, where there was no sign of either Mira or Jack, and went to her room at the end of their block of three. She shut the door and then thumped her head against it, muttering to herself, “You’re a dumbass, Chelle.”