Page 29 of Make Room for Love

Isabel shrugged, her heart racing. “I don’t think I’m in the mood for this. Reading about a bunch of tough guys and maybe one woman on a space station. I should start going to the library again.”

“Hmm.” Mira’s lips pursed in thought. “Well, if you’re a purist for physical books, you can read any of mine.”

“I don’t have to take your Latin class first?”

“I do have novels. In English. If you want to read them.” Maybe Mira was eager for a distraction from grading. She took her glasses off—how Mira looked so sexy both putting her glasses on and taking them off, Isabel couldn’t say—and got up. They crouched in front of the bookshelf.

For the second time this evening, after they’d been torturously close while washing the dishes, Mira’s coconut shampoo wafted to Isabel’s nose. Her curls were stunning, bouncy and lush and the deepest, darkest brown. Isabel wondered, for the millionth time, how it would feel to gently run her fingers through Mira’s hair.

“Have you readParable of the Sower? You don’t have that one,” Mira said. Isabel snapped back to reality. Mira was examining the Octavia Butler books in Isabel’s collection. She shook her head. “It’s my favorite of hers,” Mira continued. “I’llget it from my room. You can come with me and see my other books.”

Isabel followed Mira through her doorway, roiling with curiosity, wracked by guilt. And she had good reason to be. There was Mira’s unmade bed. And there were her pajamas, in a heap of pink cotton and lace on the bedspread.

Isabel’s face burned, her heartbeat pounding between her legs. Mira had pulled those pajamas off herself this morning before putting on the sweater and skirt she was wearing now. Isabel absolutely couldn’t be thinking about that, not after Mira had invited her in for the most innocent reason imaginable. Let alone picturing it in detail.

So many things she shouldn’t be thinking about. Like how if Mira wanted some stress relief, the kind that involved Isabel’s face buried between her thighs, Isabel would be on her knees on this wood floor in an instant. There must be some way Mira loved to be taken care of, some way to make her go from buttoned-up to fully unraveled, flushed and panting?—

If there was, Isabel was never, ever going to find out. Thank god Mira was looking through her piles of books and couldn’t see Isabel’s face.

“Sorry that all my books are on the floor,” Mira said. “I figured it wasn’t worth it to organize them, since I’m moving out soon anyway.”

Isabel bit the inside of her cheek. Hard. “That’s fine.”

She rubbed her face, exhaled, and took in the rest of the small, bare-bones room: the familiar blouses and skirts hanging in the closet, the alarm clock and prescription pill bottles on the windowsill that Mira was using as a makeshift nightstand. Someone who walked into Mira’s room knowing nothing about her might think she was just an academic whose entire world was in her books. But there was so much more to her.

Isabel took a small book from a pile on the floor. It turned out to be in Latin, but she idly flipped through it anyway. Mira had written notes in the margins, and seeing them was somehow more intimate than being in Mira’s bedroom—it was like being inside her mind. Isabel brushed her thumb over a line of Mira’s writing, her hand trembling slightly.

“Found it,” Mira said. Isabel, startled, closed the book she held. Mira stood up and handed over her copy ofParable of the Sower. It was an older edition, clearly well-loved. “Let me know what you think. I first read this in high school, and I thought it was astonishing. So clear-eyed and so hopeful. Before that, I didn’t realize that science fiction could be so much more than…” Mira stopped and frowned.

“Books about a bunch of tough guys on a space station?”

“I didn’t mean…”

“Don’t lower your standards just for me.”

Mira rolled her eyes playfully. “I don’t mean it like that. Let me put it this way. If we ever go to space, I’ll be an alien linguist.Youcan build the spaceship.”

“Deal. You brought a lot of books with you.” A few months ago, Mira had moved into her apartment with a small suitcase and two big boxes of books. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

“I have a hard time getting rid of them. Sentimental value, and all that.” Mira picked up a slim novel from a pile. “My boyfriend in college gave this to me. He was sweet, even if it didn’t work out. He was a gay boy and I very much wasn’t.”

Emotions swirled within Isabel. Relief that someone had once been good to Mira, and regret that she herself would never get to be. And a prickle of jealousy that she didn’t like in herself. Mira picked up another book, a much thicker one. “This was from the ‘literary criticism for classicists’ seminar I took in my first year of grad school. My French wasn’t really good enough at the time. But I was new to the city, and I felt so sophisticated,lugging around my big books and doing my reading in cafes like I was finally arealintellectual. But now I’m rambling.”

“No, no.” Isabel was parched. She could keep drinking up every detail of Mira’s life for hours. She held up the book in Latin that she’d picked up originally. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that was the edition of Catullus I used in undergrad. I had— I’m not boring you?”

Isabel shook her head. Mira went on. “The professor I had for that class terrified me. I was one of those insufferable students who breezed through the intro classes and thought I knew everything. And on the first day, she made sure I knew, in front of the entire class, that using big words wasn’t going to cut it anymore.”

They shared a smile. Mira continued, “She gave me a B-minus. And she wrote me a letter of recommendation for grad school, and I got in everywhere I applied. Last year, she sent me a long email about an article I’d published, rebutting everything she disagreed with, and it felt like the highlight of my career so far, that she took me so seriously.”

Isabel leaned against the foot of the bed. “I had a journeyman like that once. Steve, the one I told you about. The first time I showed him a panel I wired, thinking I was hot shit, he made me take it apart and do it all over again. Took me hours. He told me that anyone who sees my work should know immediately that the union electricians in New York City are the best in the world.”

“Do you tell that to your apprentices?”

“I do. I try to go a little easier on them, though.”

“Not everyone can be you, right?”

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