The Overlap (21 page)

“Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s pretty much what you told me Thursday at lunch, that you really weren’t ready to break up with Dustin.”

I was immediately on the defensive.

“You mean here?” I thought she was talking about when she, Courtney, and I had eaten lunch here at
Cerise
.

“No, the day before then; outside,” she corrected me. Then I remembered our sort-of-heated discussion while eating our baguettes; a discussion that had started with me telling her that I hadn’t been planning on breaking up with Dustin despite having slept with Zack the night before; that since Dustin was supposed to be in Chicago for the next couple of weeks including weekends, I wasn’t going to think about a breakup scene for that entire time while things moved forward back here with Zack.

“Come on, Lindsey,” Kensie said sharply at first but then she softened her tones. She could be pretty snarky, almost bitchy, even to friends but I could tell in the year I had known her that she was increasingly making an effort to dial down her bitch-meter whenever she caught herself talking that way.

“You’ve gone out with two guys at the same time before, right? You know, an overlap between somebody you’re dating and a new guy you’ve met, and for a couple of weeks you go out with both of them; usually with them not knowing about each other. It’s exactly like you said you were going to do... sort of, even though with Dustin in Chicago you technically wouldn’t be going out on actual dates with him during that same time you would be with Zack.”

“Yeah, but now I’ll be in Chicago. With Dustin!”

“So what?” Kensie again had gone up a couple notches on the bitch-meter with those two words before she caught herself. “Obviously if you slept with Dustin and couldn’t bring yourself to break up with him, there’s at least something still there. Like I said, you knew yourself well enough to know that it wasn’t time to end things. I figured that with things so hot between you and Zack, and with Dustin headed back here, the time was right to break up with him; Dustin, I mean. But obviously not. And now you have your chance to figure it all out, just a little bit differently than you thought it would be. You know, being with Dustin in Chicago while you see from a distance how things might going with Zack.”

“But what about Zack???” I was almost crying now. “I have
no
chance now to try and fix things if I’m in Chicago for the next month or however long it will be...”

“Fix things?” Kensington interrupted me, her eyes narrowing. “Technically, you don’t have to ‘fix’ anything.” She made little air quotes around “fix.”

“As far as Zack knows,” she continued,  “he was gone and you were here, and he is the one that for whatever reason didn’t get in touch with you. He doesn’t need to know anything about what happened with Dustin, and you can make him feel shitty for not contacting...”

My turn to interrupt.

“You think I shouldn’t say anything at all to him about...” – our waitress was coming back to our table, so I continued with “...you know” instead of saying “sleeping with Dustin” or something specific like that.

“Why would you? I mean, if we wind up in Chicago for a month or two and then come back here and you pick things up with Zack, why tell him about Dustin? Just tell him that you ‘didn’t quite break up’ but nothing more than that.”

I let out a sigh of terrible frustration and personal agony.

“This is too much,” I said as I actually lowered my head into my arms resting on the table. “I can’t believe how much everything changed in less than two days. Friday morning I was looking forward to a great weekend with Zack, and now this...”

My voice trailed off and a few seconds later I felt Kensie’s hand fall gently on my head that was still face-down into my crossed arms.

“It’ll all work out,” she said soothingly.

I knew she was just saying that, and from my perspective I could see no way at all that it would “all work out.”

Monday morning at MetroGen was a frenzied whirlwind. Every one of us – even Dave Evers, who wouldn’t be accompanying us to Chicago – scrambled to look at every document we had written and add a paragraph or two at the end; the intention was to help somebody different who might get assigned to work on this project if we wouldn’t be coming back. We must have had ten meetings that morning – a lot considering we were all gone from there by noon – but each meeting was about five or ten minutes. We just ran back and forth between conference room (after being called on a moment’s notice throughout the morning) and our desks. I barely had time for one rest room visit the entire morning. All in all it was easily the most stressful workday I’ve had so far at this firm, and that included the shitty days in New York that pushed my first-night-of-sex dinner date with Zack back by two days, as well as the day last week when Dave Evers was on the warpath.

And all the while, my own mind was a whirlwind, flipping back and forth between wondering what had gone wrong with Zack and me – no sign of him yet here at MetroGen all morning, and believe me I was on the lookout for him! – and what was going to happen when Dustin and I were “together” in Chicago for... well, who knew how long it would be. To Dustin, this past Saturday night and Sunday morning had been no more than a reunion of boyfriend and girlfriend after several weeks apart, just with that slight “hiccup” of some awkward sex the first time.

To me, though, this past weekend was so different than I imagined it would be that I honestly felt as if I had no control over my life at all. Not just the whole Zack-and-Dustin problem, but my work life as well. On somebody’s whim, I found out on Sunday morning that the next day I needed to be on a plane to Chicago and any personal plans I may have made based on where I had
thought
I would be – you know, working in L.A.; near home – had to just be tossed aside. So even without this complication of having slept with Dustin, my brand new relationship with Zack was being compromised.

In fact, suppose that Dustin weren’t in the picture at all; suppose I had never gone out with him in the first place, or we had broken up a while ago. And forget that Zack disappeared on me this weekend; let’s pretend that he hadn’t gone to San Francisco, or that he did but had texted me and called me throughout the weekend.

So that meant that even without my real-life complications, I would have just started this hot new relationship with Zack but after only one week, because of my job, I might not see him for weeks or a month or even longer. And for all I knew, that would have been the death blow to our relationship before it even got going.

This morning I felt exactly as Dustin did when he slumped down on my couch right after walking into my apartment Saturday afternoon and saying “I hate this.”

It wasn’t fair!

*     *     *

By 2:30 I was at LAX with Kensie and Courtney, about 45 minutes away from our boarding time. We saw Steve and Jack as we were going through security, about a dozen people ahead of us in line, but hadn’t seen them or anybody else from our firm since. We knew the two of them were on our flight, but didn’t know about anybody else who was making this forced pilgrimage to a couple square blocks of downtown Chicago.

Kensie and I had caught Courtney up on the whole Dustin-and-Zack weekend saga on the drive over (we all took my car) and while we were waiting at the gate, and her opinion was the same as Kensie’s: nothing was really over for me with either one of them even though this week would be so incredibly different – in terms of who was where, and with whom – than I had thought it would be.

Suddenly my phone dinged and my heart skipped at least two beats when I saw the text was from Zack.

Back now stayed extra night in SF. Not going into MetroGen today have afternoon meeting downtown. Have dinner meeting tonight then flying to Seattle tomorrow morning. Want to come over tonight after I get back from dinner meeting?

After I reread the message a second time, and then a third time and then a fourth, I held my phone out for Courtney and Kensington to see. And as I did, I time-traveled in my mind backwards almost exactly one year, to Miami, and in my mind’s eye I could actually see Josh Chamberlain’s “Back now want 2 come up?” booty call text that had triggered our angry sex a few minutes later on that had been so hot... but had also been the beginning of the end of Josh and me.

Then it was:

Courtney: “WTF?”

Kensie: “Sounds like he’s telling you to just come over for a booty call tonight!”

Courtney: “No explanation at all for not contacting you the entire weekend?”

Kensie: “No reason for why he stayed in San Francisco an extra night?”

Courtney: “He didn’t say anything about just finding out he had to go to Seattle, wonder if he knew that all along and just didn’t tell you?”

Kensie: “He didn’t ask how the breakup with Dustin went...”

Courtney: “...or if you were doing okay.”

The two of them went back and forth for another minute (though it seemed like an eternity), dissecting Zack’s message for what it said and, even more so, what it
didn’t
say. And all the while my mind went back to my first instincts last Thursday after Zack dropped the news on me about this weekend conference in San Francisco: how I instantly felt the same as when Josh had told me he was going to spend that one weekend in Fort Lauderdale with his fraternity brothers rather than with me, but how I had immediately told myself that making such a comparison was incredibly unfair to Zack.

Turns out I might have been right, after all.

“So what are you going to text back?” Kensie asked.

“
If
you text him back,” Courtney added. It almost seemed that Courtney was angrier with Zack than I was. As I thought that, I realized that with all that was going on I had never heard anything about her “rebound date” Friday night with that one guy from earlier in the summer. I would have to ask her, because from her reaction to Zack’s text and the story as a whole, she suddenly wasn’t nearly as much of a Zack fan as she had been only a couple days ago. Maybe her own date had gone badly, and she was making her own comparisons between Zack and that guy.

I found myself talking to my friends and finger-typing on my phone at the same time, even though I was only slightly aware I was doing either.

“I’m going to text him this,” I was saying in a somewhat detached manner as I typed, and when I finished – but before I could press SEND – I held my phone out to the girls so they could read my reply.

Not here tonight MetroGen project put on hold Sunday morning. We’re all being sent to project in Chicago don’t know how long. At LAX right now flight leaves half hour

Courtney: “Wow!”

Kensie: “You said a lot without having to say it!”

Courtney: “Like ‘Hey you dick! if you had contacted me over the weekend when I so badly wanted to hear from you, you would have known this already!’”

Kensie: “And you didn’t specifically mention the project in Chicago is the same one Dustin is on, but he’ll know.”

Courtney: “Especially since you said you weren’t sure for how long you’ll be there, and you didn’t say anything about coming back home...”

Kensie: “...or getting together next weekend...”

Courtney: “...or maybe ever...”

Kensie: “Plus there’s ‘I’m still here in L.A. but only for another half an hour, if you had
bothered
contacting me at least we could have planned to see each other for a couple minutes!’”

I looked at both of my friends.

“Should I really send it?”

To their credit, they both paused to consider my question ...even though they each paused for all of about two seconds.

Courtney’s “Yes!” and Kensie’s “Uh-huh!” were uttered at the exact same time.

“Okay,” I heard myself say as I pressed the SEND button.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

No reply.

*     *     *

We arrived at O’Hare Airport just after 8:30, and by the time we got our luggage, grabbed a cab, and made it through the still-heavy traffic into downtown Chicago the time was past 9:45. Dustin was waiting for us in the lobby and given that Kensington and Courtney knew all about Zack and that by all rights Dustin and I should have been over this past weekend, this particular meet-and-greet was
really
uncomfortable for me! Especially when Dustin gave me a warm kiss right before he said hello to the girls, and in response they gave him the fakest “Hi, Dustin! So nice to see you!” responses. Well, at least I knew they were fake; hopefully Dustin had no clue.

We quickly checked in but left our luggage with the bellman since we were all starved and
needed
to get something to eat... and drink, even though we all had to be at the client’s office by 8:00 tomorrow morning.

As I expected, Dustin came with us to the lobby bar. We all ordered bar food (potato skins, fully loaded was what I got) and a beer. Fortunately, the conversation for the half hour that we sat there was dominated by Dustin giving the three of us the rundown on just what to expect tomorrow when we showed up. We didn’t know all that much about this project from hell because of its confidentiality, but I had also picked up a little from Dustin’s heartfelt pouring forth of his work life agony this past weekend. Dustin spent some of his time focusing on what we were likely to be doing but even more on the extremely difficult personalities we would have to be dealing with: not only those of the various client executives but even our own firm’s senior managers and the two partners who were leading this account. And the more he told us, the more it sounded like Dave Evers had been cloned and every one of those clones sent to Chicago where they were eagerly waiting for us tomorrow to make our lives miserable every day, for the foreseeable future.

By 10:30 we all decided we needed to wrap it up. The three of us new arrivals went to retrieve our luggage, and then all four of us rode the elevator up together.

Courtney’s room was on the sixth floor, so she left the elevator first as we all made plans to meet at 6:30 tomorrow morning for breakfast.