Losing Everything

Chapter 2.2

Lucy had always known that Erica wanted to fuck her. At least, she’d been fairly sure Erica did. Erica was into smart chicks. She’d told Lucy that once when they were smoking weed on the office building’s roof. She was into women who’d done something, or who were doing something. Women with ambition, she said. Women who dreamed bigger than everyone else.

Lucy had thought about that, looking out across the city, and wondered if she should ask.

She thought. She thought carefully. And then decided that she should.

“Like me?” she had said, and Erica had nodded, silently.

And that, pretty much, had been that.

It had taken another couple of weeks before anything happened, and some sleepless nights and wondering, but Lucy had been lost right then. That moment, a little bit stoned, up on the roof, when she realized how Erica saw her.

As someone worth admiring. As someone it was worth being into.

Lucy liked who she was in Erica’s eyes.

Erica was the first woman Lucy had been with, and later, afterwards, Lucy thought she might well be the only one. What happened between them was because Erica was Erica, and not really about anything more than that. It had been intense, and intensely difficult, an affair at the place where they all worked, Erica and Lucy, and Jake too, but in a strange cruel way it had been worth it, no matter what the consequences were. Lucy had slept with Erica, and fallen for her as well, and all the time, the whole time, they had both known someone would get hurt.

Someone. Not anyone particular.

It always seemed to Lucy that Erica had never thought it would be her.

Erica was confident, and a little arrogant, and had always had this pretence she and Lucy were only about sex. Lucy had tried to stop what was happening, once or twice, had tried to tell Erica to stop think, to make Erica walk away. Lucy had tried to make Erica stop, because she knew she couldn’t stop herself. She had tried, though. She had talked to Erica lot about how she could never leave Jake, and how Erica would be hurt, and how it was going to end badly. And every time Erica had shrugged or laughed or kissed Lucy and told her to stop going on about it, because Erica didn’t really believe her own hurt was possible.

Erica believed Lucy would leave Jake, Lucy thought. In the end, Erica thought Lucy would, once Lucy got used to the idea. No matter how often Lucy said she wouldn’t, Erica thought she would, and so had stayed around longer than she should have.

Erica had stayed, hoping, and so, in the end, they had both been hurt. Lucy too, but Erica more. And in the end, Erica had left, unable to stand seeing Lucy every day and knowing they ending was never going to be happy.

Erica had left Lucy, and left Bitmo, and Lucy had taken a week off sick, pretending to have the flu. She had moped, and smoked weed, and sat in lukewarm bathtubs for hours. She had hurt, but then decided that although it hurt terribly, it was best she and Erica were over, because in the end Bitmo would have been harmed by what they were doing, and Bitmo was what mattered. Lucy had told herself that, and then gone back to work, and fixed fifteen crises that had happened while she was gone. She had gone back and fixed the code that nobody else seemed able to make work. She had thrown herself into Bitmo, because that was what had seemed to matter, but now she didn’t even have that.