The Overlap (2 page)

I looked over at where Kensington and Courtney, my two work friends, were standing and talking to each other, five feet or so away from us. Neither one of them seemed to be in a hurry to leave; at least that’s how it appeared.

“Sure,” I replied, smiling warmly as I answered.

“How about your friends?” he said, nodding to where Kensington and Courtney were standing. Instantly I felt a wave of jealousy envelop me. Both of my friends knew of course that I was in a relationship with Dustin, and I could easily see one or both of them automatically assuming that meant making a play for Zack here was fair game since at most I would only be engaging in a little bit of bar flirting... but nothing more. Neither Kensington nor Courtney was in any sort of relationship, even a casual one, at the moment and in fact Kensington had explicitly stated her intentions to “meet a hot young Beverly Hills guy” when she had suggested the three of us go to
Cerise
after work.

To my surprise, this was the answer that came back from Kensington directly to Zack, having overheard Zack asking about another round of drinks for them:

“I think we’re going to leave, so no thanks.”

Before I could interject – Leave? We had only been here at
Cerise
for less than an hour! I wasn’t exactly sure that I wanted to leave right now, having just begun talking to Zack – Kensington looked at me and said:

“You should stay, I just have to get some things done before work tomorrow and I’m feeling a little tired. We should plan on coming back here over the weekend though, I
love
this place!”

I looked over at Courtney, who added as she slightly nodded in Zack’s direction, and with him still within earshot:

“You’re having a good time, go ahead and stay; I’m just getting a little tired also, like Kensie.”

To my slight irritation Zack responded to both of them with:

“Are you ladies sure? Just one drink?”

“No thanks,” Courtney shook her head as she held her hand out to Zack for one of those hello-I-must-be-going types of introductions.

“I’m Courtney, by the way.” No last name as I had offered, and her “by the way” was definitely code for “...and just so you know, it doesn’t matter if you remember my name or not.”

“Kensington,” Kensie offered her own hand with the same type of undertones conveyed by the crisp way she offered her own name.

And that was that. They gathered their Coach computer bags (we had all come straight over to
Cerise
from the MetroGen offices), and the three of us exchanged parting hugs. As Kensington and I hugged she whispered to me in a lowered voice: “He’s cute!”

Interesting! I would have expected Kensington to have been all over Zack given her “mission statement” for the evening (to dip into the vocabulary of our world of consulting for a moment), and especially after confirming that she thought he was as attractive as I did. But for whatever reason, she was backing off and apparently giving me the first shot at him. But she knew I was with Dustin; so WTF???

Anyway, Courtney and Kensington left and I was sure we would have
plenty
to talk about tomorrow morning at work. I turned my attention back to Zack, who had slipped away to the bar to order the next round of drinks... for just him and me...

He returned, Cosmo for me and another orangey beer for him. He handed my drink to me and raised his slightly; a half toast. I did likewise as he answered my question from about three minutes earlier.

“I was a film major at UCLA,” he said. “I did take a few marketing classes from the business school as electives but I spent most of my time taking classes like “Film and Social Change” and “Writing Television Comedy Scripts.”

“Wow!” I blurted out, instantly imagining that my somewhat dry, routine curriculum during my four years at ASU had instead been filled with classes like the ones he had just mentioned.

“So how did you wind up at an ad agency with that major?”

He shrugged as he sipped his beer.

“I found all of those courses interesting, but not necessarily where I wanted to start focusing when I graduated. I mean, there’s probably fifty people in this bar right now” – he quickly looked around
Cerise
as if surveying the crowded room – “who have a pitch for a TV show or film sitting on the desk of somebody in the business at this very moment. And to be honest with you, even though I did pretty well in those types of creative courses I was nowhere near the best in the class, and I could see a future behind the bar here” – he nodded towards the bar to his left, and specifically to the four bartenders hustling to fill the accelerating pace of drink orders, most of them looking fairly stressed as they did – “or waiting tables somewhere if I went down that path. So instead, I headed to an ad agency that specialized in film marketing, and wound up on the creative teams that specialized in what I mentioned I still do.”

“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 29
^th
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?

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 panic 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?