Lucy found a pair of older, looser-fitting jeans, and pulled them on, and then put on the tee shirt and hoodie too. She rubbed her hair with the towel until it was only damp, not wet, and then tied it back again with the same tie that had caused the fuss earlier. Then she went back into the kitchen.
Erica was typing, concentrating on her computer, so Lucy sat down on the stool where she’d been earlier, quietly, so she didn’t interrupt. Erica was writing an email, it looked like, from what Lucy could see over her shoulder. A long one, Lucy thought, from the amount of typing, so it was probably some kind of technical report.
“Hold on,” Erica said, still typing. “I know you’re there.”
“Yep,” Lucy said. “Don’t worry.”
“Just let me finish this…”
“It’s fine,” Lucy said. “Don’t hurry.”
“I won’t be a sec,” Erica said, although she was actually ten minutes.
That didn’t really matter, though. Lucy just sat and waited.
This was the other way around to how it had always been before, she thought. Now she was waiting for Erica, and she didn’t really mind. She sat, and watched Erica type, and then after a while she looked out the front windows, towards the sea.
For the first time in years she had no idea what to do with her day. She had no plans at all. She had been working twelve and sixteen hours days for weeks, for months, trying to fend off disaster, and that had got her nowhere.
So now she had nothing to do.
“Okay,” Erica said, after a while. “Sent.” She got up and went into the kitchen and started making coffee. “Are you feeling better?”
Lucy nodded. “I think so. Can we talk, though?”
Erica looked up, and seemed a little unsure. “Maybe. What about?”
“I kind of meant what I said last night,” Lucy said. “About you. About us.”
“Yeah,” Erica said. “I had a nasty feeling you did.”
“So I can just go, right now. If you’d rather I did that. If that’s the least uncomfortable thing to happen right now, I can really just go. Or we could talk about it instead, if you’d rather do that. It’s completely up to you.”
“Um,” Erica said.
Lucy nodded. She understood. “Okay,” she said, standing up. “I get it. I really do. And I’m really sorry I said anything and made this weird…”
“Wait,” Erica said. “Hold on.”
Lucy sat back down again, and waited, but Erica didn’t anything else.
YOU ARE READING
Losing Everything
RomanceLucy loses everything that matters to her, her partner and job and business and all her money. She loses everything, and in doing so she reconnects with an old friend, Erica, and begins to fall for her instead. And as she does, she realizes that e...
