Chelle woke up early on Saturday morning to her alarm clock going off. She swam groggily out of sleep and fumbled for her phone, turning off the alarm and flopping back into bed. It would probably be best if she just stayed in bed, but after a few minutes of laying there with her eyes closed, trying to go back to sleep, she got up.
The old Chelle – the one her parents lovingly called a screw-up, the one who backed down from a challenge – would have gone back to bed. As she went into the bathroom and caught sight of the puffiness around her eyes, she really wished that there was no new Chelle.
But there was, and she was going to work. She couldn’t just quit because she got in a fight with her boss-slash-lover. She had a shift to cover and the books weren’t going to shelve themselves.
So Chelle brushed her teeth and put her hair up, and all the while tried to ignore the heaviness in her chest. It was like a cold settling into her bones, making it hard to breathe, but while she’d had a thousand colds in her life, this was different. This was a new feeling – heartbreak – and it likely wouldn’t clear up in a week the way colds had a tendency to do.
While she was standing at the sink, running cold water onto a wash cloth to hold under her puffy eyes, she heard Leah stirring in her bedroom, and a moment later she walked down the hall past the bathroom.
“Morning,” she mumbled, still half asleep. “Is there coffee yet?”
“No,” Chelle said, thankful that Leah was not alert enough to notice or remark on her swollen-eyed appearance. She just kept walking toward the kitchen, and Chelle swung the bathroom door quietly shut behind her.
The odds were good that Mira would be at the library today. She’d only missed a single Saturday shift in the entire time that Chelle had been working there, and she’d no doubt be frantically trying to come up with a way to save herself in front of the Board on Monday. It was all because of Chelle and her rakish insistence on seducing the gorgeous library director.
All because of her.
When she came downstairs, Leah was pouring water into the coffee maker.
“It’ll be ready in a few minutes,” she said sleepily.
“I don’t have a few minutes,” Chelle said. She grabbed her keys off the hook by the door and on the way out she called over her shoulder, “Thanks anyway.”
***
When Chelle got to the library, Jack was sitting at the reference desk as always, but his posture was a bit straighter and his lips formed a cocky snarl. He must have been feeling like the boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted, and a wave of hatred washed over Chelle at the sight of him.
He greeted her with an extra menacing smile and said, “I’m surprised you showed up today.”
“I’m on the schedule,” Chelle said, then forced her mouth shut before she said anything to dig herself further into the hole that Jack was happily standing over.
Rather than standing around, waiting for him to throw more invectives her way and try her patience, she headed over to the circulation area and started unloading the book drop. The area had dried out pretty well after Mira called the cleaning crew in, and the bin itself showed slight signs of swelling where the wood had been soaking for several hours, but otherwise it looked like nothing ever happened.
Chelle pulled a small handful of books out of the bin and checked them into the system, lining them up on a book cart as she went along. She kept her head down the whole time, glancing up only sporadically as people made their way across the lobby. Not one of them was Mira, but Chelle did notice that Jack was scowling at her the entire time she was working.
When she was done, she shoved the cart out from behind the circulation desk and headed over to the elevator. She narrowed her eyes at Jack as he watched her call the elevator, and breathed a sigh of relief when the doors slid shut behind her. There were only two books on her cart that needed to be shelved upstairs and ordinarily she would have just carried them up the stairs, but she couldn’t stand letting Jack stare at her any longer without lashing out at him.
The second floor was quiet –nothing but row after row of shelving, with not so much as a comfortable chair or a computer terminal to lure patrons up here most of the time. This meant that Chelle was almost always alone when she came up here.
Almost always.
The memory of her very first tryst with Mira came flooding back into her head and the pressure in her chest redoubled, making her lose all motivation to shelve her books. Because she was alone, and because the pain in her chest was turning sharp, she abandoned the cart near the elevator and wandered into the stacks.
She found the biography aisle, running her fingers lightly over their spines as she walked along the stacks to the end of the row. Standing below the window where Mira had first appeared, and where Chelle had pulled her into the embrace that they’d both been trying so hard to avoid, she closed her eyes and tried to recreate the moment in her mind.
She could almost feel Mira’s hands on her, almost smell the perfume of her hair, almost taste Mira’s lips against hers. It wasn’t the same though, not by a long shot, and the sudden realization that she might never experience the real thing again made Chelle’s legs give out under her. She slumped to the floor, her back to the metal shelving, and put her head in her hands. She felt pathetic and hopeless and wretched and lovesick all at the same time.
***
Chelle could not have said how long she sat on the floor, but when she noticed movement in her peripheral vision, her heart leapt into her throat at the possibility that it was Mira coming to help her remember how it felt to be in her arms.
Her second thought, much more likely, was that Jack had been monitoring the time she spent on the second floor and had come to reprimand her and drag her back downstairs. But as she watched the figure rounding the corner of the aisle, she saw that she’d been wrong on both counts.
It was Leah, carrying a pair of travel mugs.
“Hey,” she said as she came and leaned against the stack of shelves opposite Chelle. She’d changed into a flowing, custard-colored sun dress and she looked a heck of a lot better than Chelle felt.
“What are you doing here?” Chelle asked as Leah extended one of the mugs to her.
“You didn’t seem like yourself this morning,” Leah said. “I thought coffee might help, or at least it couldn’t hurt.”
“Thanks,” Chelle said, taking a long sip.
Leah was looking at her with a sympathetic expression that tended toward pity. She sat down across from Chelle and asked, “So what are you doing on the floor?”
Chelle let out a long sigh that turned ragged halfway through, and told her everything that had happened yesterday afternoon, concluding with, “I screwed everything up so colossally and now I have no idea what to do. Even if I quit I probably couldn’t throw myself on the sword to protect her because he’s got that damn video that’s going to trump anything either of us does.”
Leah was silent for a few moments, working through everything Chelle had just laid out, and then delicately, she said, “I hate to say it, but could Mira losing her job be a blessing in disguise?”
“How?”
“The two of you can’t be together because she’s your boss,” Leah said. “You quitting isn’t going to keep Jack from invoking the nuclear option, but if Mira’s not your boss anymore, then there’s nothing standing in your way.”
Chelle shook her head, then let it thump backward against the shelf behind her as she moaned.
“You should have heard the awful things I said to her last night. I got angry and frustrated and… I called her a coward. I’ll never forget the look she gave me after I said that,” Chelle said. “No, it’s too late. We’ve done enough damage to each other.”
After a long pause during which time Chelle closed her eyes, willing herself not to allow a fresh wave of tears to spill over her cheeks, Leah stood up. She said, “I hope you stop wallowing before it really is too late. For the record, I don’t think you’re there yet. I’ll see you at home.”
“Okay,” Chelle said as Leah disappeared around the corner, heading back toward the elevator.
Chelle opened her eyes again when she was sure Leah was no longer in her sightline and swiped at a few stubborn tears from the corners of her eyes. When her vision cleared, she was looking up at the top of the stacks and she finally noticed the small black dome of the security camera. It was at the end of the aisle, near the window, and if she and Mira had meet just one stack further away, Jack would almost certainly have nothing that he could use against them.
“Fuck,” she whispered, thumping her head against the shelf.
In the distance, she heard the elevator door chime as the doors opened sluggishly for Leah. And then Chelle was leaping up from the floor, knocking her mug over to leak coffee slowly into the carpet as she raced toward the elevator.
“Leah!” She called, sprinting the length of the second floor. “Leah, wait!”
When she got to the elevator, the door was just sliding shut again and Leah was waiting for her with a befuddled look on her face.
“What?” She asked, her eyes wide.
Chelle was a little bit out of breath as she leaned against her forgotten book cart, breathing heavy and saying, “I might have a way to fix this, but I need your help. What are you doing today?”
“Whatever it takes to get you and Mira back together,” Leah said with a grin.