The Overlap (22 page)

Kensie’s room was two floors higher, and as she left the elevator she was able to shoot me a sideways glance without Dustin noticing; a glance that wordlessly indicated she completely understood the predicament I was in, and she would be there for me since I no doubt would need all the support of my good friends that I could get.

My room was on the fifteen floor, but I hadn’t pressed the button for fifteen. I knew that Courtney and Kensie had noticed.

Dustin’s room was on eighteen, and that’s where I got off alongside him, and that’s where I would spend the night.

The entire work week in Chicago was pretty much a blur. Well, not a total blur; I had some very vivid memories that will stay with me for a long time of the total hell someone’s job can suddenly become, for hours on end into the darkness of night. And at the same time, once-vivid memories of Zack and
Cerise
and
Vivant
and
Solazarse
, of “Trojans and ‘Cocks” toasts and promising sidewalk kisses on Wilshire, of fantastic sex in his apartment... all of those memories faded a little bit more each passing day to the point where as tired as I was, I swear someone could walk up to me and within an hour convince me that it had all been nothing more than an intense dream. In fact, maybe not even so intense anymore, either. After a couple of days I would find myself thinking about that first dinner with him at
Vivant
, or how we both had gazed hungrily at each other and said so little as we sipped Remy Martin after our dinner at
Solazarse
before the cab ride back to his apartment, and my recollections were becoming gauzily detached; almost as if I were watching conjured images of Kensie or maybe my sister Lauren on those dates based on what I had been told afterwards, rather than seeing myself and reliving what I had personally experienced and felt.

It was all so incredibly sad because at least a couple times each day, as the work pressures were getting to me, I tried to get my mind to take me back to recent happier memories as a way to cope with how shitty my days were. However, not only did the realization hit me that now there probably wouldn’t be any new memories I would be making with Zack – no new dinners or more fantastic sex, and also no weekend trips or maybe even longer vacations that we had never had a chance to experience – but also that the handful of memories I did have were fading so much and so quickly that I couldn’t even hang onto them to help me get through one bad day after another.

And to make things worse, the time I was able to spend with Dustin the first few days in Chicago wasn’t coming anywhere close to making up for the terrible sadness and sense of loss I was feeling.

I tried. Really, I
did
try! We ate dinner together after that first incredibly long workday that ended around 8:30 Tuesday night, and then again the next night as well as the next. Each of those nights we ate by ourselves; no Kensington or Courtney or any of the other people from our firm who came out with us from L.A., or who had already been out here with Dustin since the beginning of the month. Just the two of us: Dustin and me.

Almost our entire conversation that first night was rehashing everything that had gone on Tuesday for more than twelve hours straight, from the time we showed up at 8:00 in the morning all the way through delivered pizza in a conference room during a working lunch until they finally let us go at 8:30 that night, with orders to be back Wednesday morning even earlier than that first day – 7:00 A.M. for a mandatory planning meeting that was expected to last through lunch. More delivery pizza, halfheartedly eaten while working through lunch in a windowless conference room, anyone?

I had thought we would just eat dinner at our hotel’s main restaurant Tuesday night, but Dustin suggested we stop at this new place he had heard about that was halfway between our client’s building and our hotel... which were only four city blocks away from each other. So at least we didn’t have a long walk to the client’s offices and then back, especially now that Chicago was starting to get a little bit chilly in the early mornings and then again very soon after twilight gave way to night. I just answered his dinner suggestion with a detached “uh-huh” or “okay” or something like that; I was so numb from this first day there that Dustin probably could have suggested that we walk out to O’Hare, have dinner at the food court after sneaking through security, and then walk back downtown... and my response would have been the same numb “okay” or whatever.

I didn’t pay attention to the name of the restaurant when he steered me left off of the sidewalk and opened the door for me, and I didn’t really pick up the name when the host mumbled “Welcome to...” as he distractedly greeted us and showed us to our table. But when I sat down and took a look at the front of the menu, and I saw that the name of the place where Dustin had taken me was
Solazarse
, I so much wanted to break down into a frustrated crying fit!

When Zack and I had met at the restaurant with the same name
less than a week ago
on Hollywood Boulevard, shortly before we had sex together for the first time, I hadn’t given much thought to the name itself; but now I did.

Solazarse, I remembered from high school Spanish, meant to relax; to enjoy yourself.

How I wished I could relax and enjoy myself as I had with Zack that night, but as I sat here on a Tuesday night in Chicago, my boyfriend across the table from me, it felt as if I would never relax and enjoy myself again.

*     *     *

I thought about telling Dustin that I was way too exhausted to spend the night with him, but the truth was that I was so miserable I needed to be with someone – honestly, almost anyone – this Tuesday night. Okay, the blunt truth here: I
really
needed to get some endorphins going to pull my emotions away from this dark place I was now wallowing in and for me, a couple of orgasms would be the fastest way to make that happen. I suppose I could have gone back to my own room and quickly taken care of my own “endorphin release” two or three times before fading off to sleep, but given how shitty today had been and knowing that the same was waiting for me tomorrow, I wanted to be held; to have a man inside of me; to have real sex.

We stayed in my room this time – I figured I might as well get some use out of it, right? – and as soon as we walked in, I steered Dustin over to the bed and began kissing him as I eased us both down onto the bedspread, with me landing on top of him.

But it wasn’t working.

I hadn’t had that much to drink, just two beers. But my mind and body weren’t responding at all to him as he undressed me and touched me and then moved his head between my legs. For the first couple minutes I felt as if I were an overhead light on a dimmer switch, and was only on the lowest possible setting. You know, barely turned on; nowhere near as bright as possible.

My mind started wandering, and of course it wandered to thoughts of Zack. And sex with Zack.

And then I did something I hadn’t done during sex with Dustin on Saturday night or Sunday morning, or last night.

I pretended it was Zack’s face and tongue and fingers, not Dustin’s, pressed up against me.

I came in about thirty seconds.

I shut my eyes when Dustin slid upwards and entered me and the whole time he was thrusting, I pretended it was Zack inside of me.

Now
my “dimmer switch” had been slid all the way upwards to fully turned on.

But a little bit later, as I drifted off to sleep, I felt so guilty about what I had just done. My thoughts were all jumbled, but I felt like I had just cheated on Zack with Dustin, and Dustin with Zack, both at the same time. I was cheating on everyone... including myself!

Everything in my life was so messed up! That was my last thought as this first full day in Chicago slipped away into the temporary safe haven of sleep.

*     *     *

From 7:00 A.M. Wednesday morning until 1:00 that afternoon, more than twenty of us were basically locked into a large conference room. It was a nice conference room with a gigantic oak table and really comfortable chairs that weren’t too close to one another, so we each had plenty of work space. There was a little popup box with a couple of power outlets and USB connections in front of each person’s workspace around the table so we could all plug in our laptops and cell phones and tablets all at the same time. Whiteboards covered the walls of the entire room, and we even had one of those fancy single-serving coffee machines right in the conference room, so there was no need to have to walk to a nearby kitchen area for one of the seven or eight cups of coffee every single one of us seemed to drink this morning.

In fact, if someone had taken a picture of all of us in that room sometime that morning and if I had seen that picture on a brochure or on the firm’s website back when I was still at ASU, I would have thought something like “Wow! What a great job that must be!”

Of course, a still photograph doesn’t tell the whole story about what was really going on.

Basically, we were changing almost everything that Dustin and the original team had decided on for our client’s strategy during the first three weeks of long hours and working weekends. I mean
everything
. Some senior executive at our client had flown into Chicago from New York late Friday, taken his first look at what our guys had delivered right before Dustin left for O’Hare Airport Friday afternoon, and over the weekend had decided he didn’t like
anything
about what we had proposed they do. It wasn’t that Dustin and the others were wrong, or had come up with bad recommendations. In fact, they had worked for weeks with dozens of other managers and executives at the client, over and over and over, and their recommendations had eventually been approved by everyone so far after going through all of the modifications that Dustin had worked on.

But this one guy didn’t like any of it, so just like with a college term paper, our firm’s work came back with a big red “F” but also with a chance to do it all over again to get a better grade. (Actually not a “chance” to do all the work over again; it was more like “an order.”)

Like I mentioned earlier, our firm’s senior partners actually loved how this was all turning out. Our team had done what they had been asked to do and it wasn’t like they did bad work or anything, so there was no reason the client could say that they weren’t paying for the thousands of hours our firm was going to bill them for just a couple weeks of work. Would you believe the bill so far was close to
one million dollars
for twelve people working really long hours for three weeks straight, including a couple of weekends? And now, with ten more of us working on the project now probably for another month or two, even more would be headed into our firm’s partners’ pockets over the next couple months.

Anyway, just about the time the lunch order arrived (sandwiches today instead of pizza again; at least that was something positive since I was able to grab a turkey sub, so maybe today would be a healthier eating day than yesterday had been), we all took about fifteen minutes to slow down on our work – not quite stop, since discussions about the change in strategy continued in smaller groups within the room – and check e-mails, enter our travel expenses into our online website so we could get reimbursed; that sort of thing.

I was looking at my e-mails, trying to get the number of unread messages in my mailbox under 100, when a brand new one came in with the subject line of “L.A. Practice Organizational Announcement.” I immediately opened it and received the news that effective yesterday, Dave Evers “had decided to resign from the firm to pursue other career opportunities” and that “the Los Angeles practice and the firm wish Dave the best in his new endeavors.”

I looked across the table at Kensington, who was talking to a guy named Rick Worthington from our Seattle office who had been part of the original team along with Dustin that had come to Chicago right after Labor Day. Kensie obviously was interested in Rick; he was really good looking and had an MBA from Ohio State, so he was about the same age as Kensie with her own MBA from Michigan. In fact, Kensie used the longstanding Michigan-Ohio State rivalry as an excuse to personally introduce herself to Rick yesterday morning after the brief go-around for the entire team in which we each gave our names, what office we were from, how long we had been with the firm, and what degree or degrees we had and from where. After lunch yesterday some seat shuffling occurred and Kensie made sure that she sat next to Rick for the entire afternoon, and she was back next to him this morning as well.

I knew Kensie was really into Rick because we had both slipped out of the conference room around 10:00 this morning to go to the rest room, and on the way there she lowered her voice and jokingly asked me: “Do you think ‘Kensington Worthington’ sounds like too snobby of a name?”

Anyway, I caught her eye and said “look at your e-mail!” The tone of my voice and the look on my face told her that this was something epic, and sure enough as she read you could see the same look come to her own face.

“Wow!” was all she could blurt out as Rick looked over at Kensie’s laptop to see what she was looking at that had caused that reaction.

“A Senior Manager in our office,” Kensie told him. “We were just working for him at MetroGen!”

More than half of the people in the room were from our L.A. office and within about thirty seconds, we all knew. Nobody wanted to say the words out loud, but we all knew that “pursue other career opportunities” was business world language for “was fired.”

So they actually did it! The firm didn’t even wait until Dave went before the partner committee in a couple of weeks. With MetroGen on hold, they apparently had decided that not only was he not going to make partner, but also to get rid of Dave immediately. So that probably explained why he wasn’t on the team that was sent out here to Chicago.

As the afternoon dragged on and I wandered from meeting to meeting in different rooms, I found myself thinking off and on about Dave Evers and his abruptly getting fired. On the one hand, I really didn’t like him very much. His impromptu total waste of a trip to New York that dragged me along; his nasty behavior last week at MetroGen with his bullshit about me being responsible for conflicting meetings the clients had actually scheduled; his snarky pointing to his watch when I was only a couple minutes late into a conference room for a meeting that hadn’t even started yet; none of that would be missed.