The Overlap

by Lynn Costa

  “So you only stayed there for one year before leaving to set up your own firm?” Implied in my question was a corollary question: “Are you that good that you only needed one year working for someone else before you were able to go to work for yourself?”

  Another shrug; one that indicated he had grasped the unspoken Part 2 of my question and which also accentuated his answer.

  “I realized that I didn’t need to work for anybody else, and I could actually do a better job on my own. Even on the very first assignment they put me on at the agency I wound up as the guy whose ideas were the ones that got used the most, and I was getting paid about one-tenth as much as the partners who didn’t really do much on the account.”

  The self-confidence in his voice was unmistakable. There was a touch of “I’m the best there is” arrogance which immediately brought to mind this one guy who I had hooked up with last year when I was at our firm’s training program in Miami right after starting my job. However, that other guy – Josh Chamberlain – was only a couple months out of Dartmouth at the time and still unproven in the “real world” while the more I talked with Zack Buchanan, the more I realized that unless he was totally feeding me a bunch of lies he was really good at what he did. And it would be easy enough to check out back at MetroGen; he mentioned a few names of their people he was working with who were scheduled to meet with our team for our project, so I could ask an innocent question or two to see what people thought of Zack and his work.

  He did turn out to be a couple months past his 29th birthday, so he was one of those L.A. guys who actually was just about as old as he looked. We talked for another hour – and two more drinks each – until sometime around 8:00 he looked at his watch (a Breitling, I could tell from my own quick glance and noticing the logo) then at me, and said:

  “I need to get up around 4:30 tomorrow morning to catch a flight to Seattle, so I hate to do this but I have to get going. Since your friends left, do you want me to call you a cab?”

  I shook my head.

  “I only live a couple of blocks from here, so I’m going to walk home.” I nodded in the direction of the path I would take to my apartment... or at least I thought it was the path, I was a little turned around direction-wise inside the bar as to which way was which out on the street.

  “I’m about a mile the other way but I could walk you to your apartment if you’d like,” he offered. In a flash of a second my mind raced to decide if he was simply trying a ploy to get to where my apartment was, and then see if he could make his way inside. But I dismissed that idea as quickly as it occurred to me; he apparently was just one of those believers in chivalry not being dead.

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “I need to make a couple of stops on the way home anyway,” thinking of my planned errands at the drug store and the supermarket that I had been putting off all week because I had been so busy.

  Then all of a sudden he asked:

  “What about having dinner with me on Saturday night? I’m not getting back from Seattle until pretty late tomorrow night, otherwise I’d ask you to dinner for then.”

  I hesitated... then hesitated some more...

  “I have a boyfriend,” I blurted out. “He’s in Chicago right now on business, he works at the same firm I do. He’s been out of town for a couple of weeks.” OMG! It was as if I couldn’t stop my mouth from spilling out the words! Lindsey, shut up already, I tried to silently yell at myself! Just stop talking!

  For the first time since he and I began talking he seemed to have been taken by surprise and was a little bit off his game.

  “Oh...” he said, but nothing more for a couple of seconds. Then:

  “I had thought from the way...” Then nothing further.

  “Yes,” I suddenly blurted out.

  No answer from him, just raised eyebrows as in “Yes, what?”

  “Yes to your dinner offer,” I expanded my answer. “If it’s still an offer, that is.”

  A wry smile came to his face.

  “So even though you have a boyfriend who is in Chicago, you want to go to dinner with me? Interesting...”

  He deliberately drew out the “g” – “Interestinggggggg” – in his response, almost demanding an explanation from me.

  “I just want to,” I said, looking him squarely in the eye. “Assuming that you still want to take me to dinner.” I almost added “even though I’m in a relationship” or something along those lines, but caught myself. This little verbal dance we were engaged in was intense! Now that we both knew that I wasn’t exactly unattached, and that despite my relationship I was accepting his dinner offer, the ball was in his court. He could easily and justifiably withdraw his offer; you know, “Um, well, I didn’t know you had a boyfriend; I don’t want to get in the middle of a complicated situation” or some graceful exit like that.

  Or he could take the past thirty seconds worth of conversation as both of us laying our cards on the table. He had let me know that he was interested in me and despite the relationship I was currently in – which I had finally brought into the mix – I was letting him know that I felt likewise about him. So now, he could signal to me that if I was pushing my relationship to the background for a night so I could see where things between us just might go, he could definitely do the same.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  We made arrangements to meet at Vivant, a bistro two blocks down on Wilshire from where we were now, at 7:00 on Saturday. We wouldn’t see each other at MetroGen tomorrow with Zack being up in Seattle, so while we stood there I texted him my cell phone contact information and he did the same with his to me. We finished the last drops of our drinks and eased our way through the growing crowd towards the door.

  Outside, I wondered how our parting would occur. Another handshake, like when we had introduced ourselves to each other? A hug? Neither seemed quite right. Definitely not a kiss, even lips-to-cheek; not yet anyway.

  A smile. That’s how we parted on this Thursday night, with firm plans for a dinner date almost exactly 48 hours from now. He gave me a warm smile and said,

  “I’ll see you on Saturday night, Lindsey.” But no movement of his hand, or any attempt to step towards me for a see-you-soon hug.

  “Till Saturday night, Zack,” I replied, a warm smile coming to my own face.

  We stood there for about five seconds, both smiling, our eyes locked on each other’s. Finally he raised his eyebrows a bit as his smile broadened for a brief instant before he turned to walk in the opposite direction of the way I would soon be heading.

  I stood there for a brief moment, wondering if he would turn back and look at me, but then realized I looked a bit creepy standing there eye-stalking him. So I turned in the direction of my apartment and began walking, resisting the urge to look back.

  I was enveloped in that delicious feeling of having just met an intriguing, really attractive guy who was interested enough in me to ask me out... and then to stick to that invitation even after I finally admitted to being in a relationship. The feeling was so erotically powerful that it wasn’t until I was inside my apartment - after a quick stop at the drug store to pick up a refill on my allergy medicine – that I actually gave any thought to this question:

  What did all of this mean for Dustin and me?

  Chapter 2

  Friday, September 13th

  In my dream they kept trading places in the seat across from me in Vivant. Zack Buchanan would be sitting there, but a second later – in the middle of saying something to me, even! – it would suddenly be Dustin Pearson instead sitting there and finishing the sentence without breaking stride.

  At one point somewhere around the middle of the dream, as best as I could recall after waking up in a panicky sweat, both Zack and Dustin had been sitting there together, next to each other. I remember looking down at the table and seeing only one plate of food, and they were both eating from that same plate. Then they went back to playing switcheroo, all the while apparently oblivious to the pa
nic that I was conveying on this imagined date.

  As I just about jumped out of my bed (no way was I going to allow myself to fall back into this dream again!) and walked to the bathroom inside the master bedroom in my apartment, I strained to recall as many little tidbits from the dream as I could, knowing that if I let too much time pass before recalling those scenes while awake, they probably would fade away forever. I plopped myself onto the toilet seat and as I sat there, I told myself that I didn’t need to be a genius – or a psychology major – to piece together the meaning behind that dream. Clearly, rational thought was now interceding and pushing aside my little triumphant feeling of being so desirous that Zack Buchanan still wanted to take me – Lindsey Barnes – to dinner, even knowing that I was in a relationship.

  True, Dustin was safely stashed away in Chicago at the moment, where he would still be on Saturday night while Zack and I went on our dinner date at Vivant. But then what? Dustin wasn’t staying in Chicago forever. Would this dinner with Zack just be a one-time thing, a little harmless, non-sexual flirtation that I would simply never tell Dustin about?

  I had done that once before a couple of years ago. I had been with my college boyfriend Andrew Travers for about a year. I was up in San Francisco the summer between my junior and senior years, doing an internship with the consulting firm where I eventually went to work. Andrew was going to come out to San Francisco about two weeks after me for rest of the summer and work there while I was interning so we could be together.

  About a week before Andrew arrived, though, I met a guy who had just graduated from Stanford and was waiting to go back east to New York for a job on Wall Street. We met in the gym near the apartment where the firm had put me up, and he and I hit it off. I went out to dinner with him at a trendy Thai place in the city, and afterwards we must have walked about seven or eight miles along the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf and the Marina; back and forth. Nothing happened – other than a goodnight kiss – but make no mistake about it, that night was still a “date” in every sense of the word. I just decided afterwards that with Andrew on his way out to San Francisco, I didn’t want to complicate things and I just never went out again with that other guy even though he did ask me. Eventually he figured out that I was with Andrew, and to his credit he just let things go instead of making a scene. I wouldn’t have blamed him for calling me out, though; I had gone out with him and had kissed him goodnight but hadn’t mentioned anything about being in a relationship back in Phoenix or that my boyfriend was on his way out to San Francisco. We just had that one date and that was that.

  So maybe that was how Saturday night with Zack Buchanan might play out.

  Or maybe not.

  I got up off the toilet and as I walked to the sink to wash my hands, my mind insisted on replaying for me the images from the segment in the dream where both Dustin and Zack had been sitting side by side, nonchalantly eating off of the same plate in front of them. Yuck! No mistaking the symbolism of that part of the dream!

  I hadn’t even looked at the digital time on my cable box (the only visible “clock” in my bedroom since I used my phone as my alarm clock) on my way to the bathroom, so as I walked back into the bedroom I forced my still-blurry vision into focus and could see that it was only a few minutes past 5:00; easily a whole hour before I had planned to wake up this morning. I briefly thought about trying to go back to sleep for another hour but the imagery from that dream was so unsettling that I was afraid that even after being up and about for a bathroom trip, I may well slip back into that dream.

  No way, I told myself so instead I put on my sweats and running shoes and headed outside to run. Normally I hate running in the morning and while I was at ASU I invariably found time during the late morning or early afternoon hours to squeeze in a couple miles between classes or doing homework. In the year since joining the “real work world,” however, grabbing time to run during the workday was pretty much not happening. So once or twice during the work week I would try to get up around 5:30 and get in a couple of miles. That hadn’t been the plan for this morning when I had made out my schedule for the week back on Sunday night. I actually intended to go to the gym and do some running after work to keep myself busy since Dustin would be out of town, but as of last night I now had different plans for this evening... like getting ready for tomorrow night’s date with Zack. So there would be no time to work out and anyway, now that I was sort of awake I figured what the heck; might as well go running now.

  The streets were still dark when I walked outside my apartment building. Official sunrise wouldn’t be until around 6:30, but the first peeks of the sun to the east would be showing about twenty minutes before then. Still, I would be finished and back by then. When I first moved to Los Angeles after the relative suburban safety of Chandler and Tempe back home in Arizona, I was a bit nervous about being out on the darkened streets in the early morning hours. But once I began carrying a pepper spray gun in the pocket of whatever sweatshirt or sweat jacket I would be wearing, my mind was put a bit more at ease. I was still on guard but given that I usually only had early morning darkened or semi-darkened hours to get in any outside running during the week, I figured I had no choice but to adjust my routine.

  Sometimes when I run, especially when it’s dark, my mind wanders off into some long remembrance of the past, and that’s what happened to me this morning as I found myself thinking about how I wound up here... and all that had happened to me just in the past twelve months.

  Only weeks after finishing my San Francisco internship and starting my senior year, I received an offer to join the same firm after I graduated. This wasn’t unusual, and I wasn’t particularly special. Most of the top consulting companies extended near-automatic job offers to their summer college interns who do a good job for them and carry themselves professionally; all of that. But anyway, I was able to spend a slightly more relaxed senior year than it might otherwise have been, knowing that not only did I have my post-graduation job all set barely after the fall semester started but also that I would definitely be based out of the firm’s office in Los Angeles, which was at the top of my list for places to work. I knew I would almost certainly be doing at least a little bit of travel for client projects, which I thought was great. I wasn’t tied down to anything or anyone in L.A., even though I had some friends who already lived there and several more of my ASU friends would be starting other jobs there around the same time I did.

  Before actually settling into L.A. and my job there, though, I would have to spend eight weeks straight in Miami in the firm’s intensive orientation program that all new college hires had to go through. The class I was assigned to didn’t start until the day after Labor Day, which meant that I had almost four months after graduation to relax, do some traveling, party, and tie up some loose ends at home in Phoenix.

  One of those loose ends – in fact, the loose end – was to break up with Andrew Travers. Andrew and I had been together for two years, since right after the end of our sophomore year at ASU. He was also a business major, though finance only; not the double-major that I had. Unlike many of us – including me – who were headed straight into the work world, Andrew had been accepted into the MBA program at Wharton in Philadelphia. He was one of those extra-smart guys who was able to get into Wharton right after getting his Bachelor’s Degree without any prior full-time work experience, and who also had a couple of side businesses going from his dorm room or apartment all throughout college. My parents, and a lot of my friends as well, thought Andrew was just perfect... not only perfect for me, but “PERFECT!”

  When I told my mother that I was getting ready to break up with Andrew, she actually asked me to give it some thought – “think long and hard about this before you actually do anything” were her exact words – and the reaction from my Dad was this disappointed head shaking, as if I had no idea what I was walking away from and would quickly regret that decision. Of the two of them I was more pissed at my mother for what she said, and I
almost instantly snapped back with “Okay Mom, I’ll think about some ‘long and hard’ reasons I should stay with Andrew! You want details?” But I didn’t...

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by their reaction since my parents met during their junior year in college up in Colorado and got married a month after they graduated, and have been together ever since. They always seem so happy with each other, too. In their world, I guess, someone lucky enough to wind up in the “right” college relationship should grab onto it and not let go, and all would be well with the world.

  What neither one of them realized was that my relationship with Andrew wasn’t necessarily “right,” instead it was... well, it just “was.” It had started off pretty strong, especially since he was much better in bed than any of the other guys I had been with during my first two years in college or in high school before then. About six months after Andrew and I got together, I was at a party one Saturday night when this other girl walked up to me; actually she staggered up to me because she was really drunk, just about falling down twice on the way. When she righted herself she began telling me that she had gone out with Andrew for about two months right after Christmas their freshman year, and then started telling me in detail about how good sex with him had been. Then she said something like “I would hang onto him if I were you, at least through college, just for the intense sex. He’s a lot better than most college guys are; even the older ones. Don’t take this like I’m thinking about trying to steal him from you, but lots of times I wish I were still sleeping with him every so often just for the sex.” (If I had indeed retorted back to my Mom’s “think long and hard” comment when I told her about planning to break up with Andrew, I guess I could have also added this other girl’s “endorsement” as a reason for staying with Andrew, and asked my Mom what she thought about that!)