Losing Everything

Chapter 2.3

Afterwards, Erica had wanted to stay in touch with Lucy. She had told Lucy so several times, had phoned and emailed to tell her again, and had seemed to mean what she said, and to actually be trying, but Lucy had never quite managed to bring herself to return Erica’s calls, or write back to her emails.

Lucy listened to the voice messages, and she read what Erica sent. She listened and read, usually several times over. And then she deleted the messages, and never answered.

She made excuses to herself about why. That she had too much on, or that it wasn’t fair to Jake, or sometimes that it wasn’t fair to Erica. Mostly, she told herself she was too busy, but she knew the real reason was that she was hurt by Erica leaving, and she was scared by what being around Erica made her feel. She was scared, sometimes, by how intense her wanting was for Erica, and how badly she felt it just from hearing Erica’s voice, or thinking about her smile.

She had never reacted to anyone the way she did to Erica. Not that strongly, not feeling so helpless in the face of it. It was unreasonable, and terrifying, and it scared her enough that once Erica had left, and wasn’t right there with her, it was just easier to avoid all contact rather than risk feeling it again.

Erica left, and found another job, and eventually had stopped calling Lucy, when her messages weren’t returned. And Lucy had thrown herself into Bitmo, and got on with her life, and told herself it was better this way, to have a clean break, and that furious foolish passions like she felt for Erica weren’t sensible or safe or anything she needed.

Lucy had thrown herself into Bitmo, and for a while that had worked, but unfortunately this had been about the time that everything had begun to go wrong. Something had changed at Bitmo. The company no longer worked as well as it had. People squabbled, and didn’t cooperate like they used to. They each pulled their own way, concerned with their own needs. Suddenly, they were no longer a team.

More than once, in the middle of dark lonely nights on her own, Lucy had wondered whether Jake somehow knew about her affair with Erica and was sabotaging Bitmo on purpose, trying to destroy it to punish Lucy, to hurt her, or just to show her that he could. In the morning she always decided she’d been wrong, that she was imagining things, and that not only did those fears not make sense, but they weren’t really fair to Jake either. Jake wasn’t out to destroy Bitmo, and neither were the finance people. It was just that none of them understood how tech companies worked, and were making mistakes in their ignorance, just like Lucy was about money. Jake and the venture capital people were simply stupid, Lucy had decided, not malicious. And Lucy’s ignorance of money and business hadn’t helped either.

It had been innocent mistakes, not malice, that had brought Bitmo down. Not that it had mattered in the end.

Because in the end, Bitmo had gone bust, and that was terrible, but it had all worked out in a strange, peculiar kind of way.

Erica wanting to stay in touch meant that Lucy still had her phone number, and had it in her phone to tempt herself, to look at sometimes, in case she ever wanted to call. And the number already being in her phone meant she could reach Erica easily, whenever she wished, and so, in the end, she had.

In the middle of the night. From a beach in some small town where Erica now lived.

When Lucy needed to, she had called. And now she was sitting naked on the sand, on a beach, waiting for dawn, and wondering what the rest of her life would be.

If she hadn’t been too stoned to actually laugh, it would almost have been funny.