The Overlap (25 page)

I did my best to concentrate on my work during the rest of the afternoon, but of course my mind was furiously at work devising the “script” for talking with Zack. I must have gone through twenty different scenarios for how the conversation would play out: what I would say, and then if he said one thing what I would respond with, but if he said something else how I would reply to that. Back and forth, back and forth. Some of those scenarios ended with me angrily stomping out of
Cerise
after dropping a couple of f-bombs on him, while others had us basically shaking hands (figuratively, not literally) and agreeing to be friends... and that we would always have great memories of our very short time together.

And okay, a couple of those scenarios actually had us somehow getting back together, maybe even with some really great makeup sex later this very night. I was certain that something like that was all but an impossibility, but my mind insisted on at least considering (hoping for?) such an outcome.

Finally, the end of the workday came and I slipped out of the MetroGen offices, around the corner, and over to
Cerise
. Sure enough, Zack was already waiting for me at “our table” – the high top where we had talked for so long that first evening when I had gone there for happy hour with my friends and wound up meeting him, and he was perched on one of the two barstools he had pulled up there for us.

Apparently somewhere in the ten or twelve seconds between spotting Zack and arriving at that high top my mind decided to go with this particular script:

“Why didn’t I hear from you that entire weekend?”

No “hello” or anything else from me; I went straight on the offensive.

I just stood there, refusing to sit down on the bar stool. For all I knew, this could be a
very
short encounter, and I was letting Zack know that. I was prepared to whirl around and walk straight out the door if I didn’t like what I heard from him. And the truth was I didn’t know what I would and wouldn’t like to hear from him... at least yet.

A pained look came to his face.

“Lindsey, would you please sit down? I really want to discuss this with you.”

I felt my eyes narrowing and was prepared to make my demand once more, still standing, but something in the look on his face made me soften that hardline stance. I wordlessly pulled the bar stool away from the table and plopped myself down, still staring at him and demanding an answer.

“What would you like to drink?” Zack asked.

“Answer the question, Zack,” was my tight-lipped, terse response. A tiny fragment of my mind flickered to life and asked the rest of me this question: two weeks ago, could you possibly have imagined talking so angrily to this guy?

I felt my head begin to slump as I acknowledged that sad self-question. But before I could say something else, Zack abruptly said:

“I had dinner with an old girlfriend Friday night; someone I ran into at the conference.”

My eyes blazed white-hot anger just as he continued:

“Nothing happened with her; I swear it.”

Then he paused for a few seconds before continuing.

“Actually, she was my ex-fiancé.”

“You were engaged? When?” I demanded.

“About five years ago, for about six months,” was Zack’s reply. “We actually knew each other at UCLA and had gone out three or four times, and then ran into each other a couple years later at a conference...”

“Just like the one in San Francisco?” I interrupted, my tones indicating my anger at what I was hearing.

Zack shrugged.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he agreed. “Anyway we started going out and after a year we got engaged, and then stayed engaged for about six months until we broke up and called it off.”

“What happened?” I demanded.

A very light quarter-smile – not one of amusement, but more of irony – came to his lips.

“She met another guy and...” – he paused for about a second, almost for effect – “...
eventually
broke up with me.”

He looked at me – hard – and I knew that he had chosen his words and tone very carefully.

*     *     *

I think Zack was waiting for me to say something but when I didn’t, he continued.

“We bumped into each other at one of the conference booths on Friday, started talking, and decided to have dinner together for old time’s sake. And yes, we went to the restaurant’s bar after dinner and had some more drinks. But I swear to you, Lindsey, I went back to my hotel room and she went back to hers, and nothing happened.”

A thought occurred to me.

“Did you see her again on Saturday? On Sunday?”

Then another
terrible
thought occurred to me, and I didn’t even give him a chance to answer my question.

“Oh my God! She’s why you stayed an extra night in San Francisco, on Sunday night!”

Zack was already shaking his head.

“No, she had already left earlier in the day.”

Seeing the blatant skepticism on my face, he “swore the truth” for the third time in about two minutes:

“I swear that’s the truth, Lindsey. She was gone. I met this executive from one of the studios that I’ve been trying to get as a client for years but have never been successful, and this guy loved what I had talked about on my panels. He has a house up in Marin County and he invited me up there for dinner that Sunday night, and we met last Thursday morning up in Burbank. We’re meeting again tomorrow morning up there, and I’m almost positive I’ll land them as a new client.”

“Congratulations,” I replied, wishing as I spoke that I could have put more sincerity into that single word. But my mind was on things other than Zack’s business fortunes right now.

“Then what about Saturday night?” I pressed. “Did you have dinner with her – your ex-fiancé – again that night?”

A second’s worth of a pause, then:

“Yes, I did.”

I felt myself prepare to explode, but Zack asked me this first:

“Do you want to know what we talked about Saturday night?”

“What?” I snarled, and from my tone Zack knew that I wasn’t asking what he had talked about, but rather that I didn’t quite get his question.

He repeated his question, and there was something in his tone that made me realize I probably didn’t want to know the answer.

“
What
did you talk about?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.

“We talked about you,” was Zack’s reply.

And then:

“We talked about you and Dustin.”

*     *     *

I instantly felt like I was on the defensive... rightfully and guiltily so, I should add.

“What
about
me and Dustin?” I said in clipped tones.

Zack paused for a few seconds before continuing. I felt like we were fencing with each other: move, counter-move; move, counter-move...

“I should ask you that question,” he said quietly. “What about you and Dustin? How did your breakup go?
You
never texted
me
Friday night to let me know...”

“His flight was delayed and he didn’t get into L.A. until around three in the morning,” I interrupted. “So I didn’t see him at all Friday night.”

That seemed to catch Zack off-guard, but – just like in a fencing match – he quickly recovered.

“Okay, then, what about Saturday morning? How did your breakup go?”

There was something in his voice that told me he
knew
. Even without actually knowing, he
knew
.

I lowered my eyes to the table.

I felt my shoulders slump.

I felt tears come to my eyes.

But then I also felt Zack’s hands come to rest gently on top of mine.

*     *     *

I told him the whole story. I didn’t leave out a single thing. Well, actually I left out one thing. I
was
going to tell him that in Chicago, almost every time I was having sex with Dustin I was feeling nothing until I fantasized that it was Zack, not Dustin, in bed with me. But before I did I thought better of it, and figured that comparison probably wouldn’t be thought of as a “complement” by the man sitting across from me at
Cerise
listening to my tortured confession.

He had a pained look on his face as I talked and talked, but to his credit he didn’t look away from me, or roll his eyes in disgust, or do anything like that. He patiently listened to my tale; he didn’t even ask any questions, but only uttered an occasional “uh-huh” or “sure” or “I get it.”

“That’s what I talked to Lacey – my ex-fiancé – about most of the time at dinner Saturday night,” he finally said. “I told her all about us and what was supposed to happen with your breakup that weekend, and given what she and I had gone through she knew how tough that was going to be for you and honestly thought that you probably wouldn’t go through with it.”

I started to get angry and was about to say something when Zack cut me off.

“It’s the same thing she did to
me
, Lindsey,” he said, his face once again pained as he spoke. “We were engaged like I said but then she met another guy and she started going out with him, and this one weekend after she had already... you know... with him she was going to break up with me but couldn’t bring herself to do it. So I wound up spending another two weeks with her while she was also with her new boyfriend, back and forth between the two of us, who actually thought she had already broken up with me.”

I was about to say something when Zack continued speaking, as if reading my mind.

“Yeah, it’s not exactly the same as with you, me, and Dustin, but it’s pretty close.”

I was confused about something, though.

“I don’t understand. What do you mean you talked to her Saturday night about all of this?”

“Because I
knew
, Lindsey,” he said. “I knew that you hadn’t gone through with the breakup. I honestly couldn’t tell you how I was so certain, but I was. Like I said, you would have texted me as soon as you had told him because you were sad, and you would have let me know. I was
sure
of it.”

Ah-hah! My turn to get off the ropes, as my Dad likes to say, referring to a boxing match.

“Oh yeah? Well I expected
you
to have texted
me
to ask if I was okay and how I was doing. Didn’t you think that maybe I was so sad and depressed that I couldn’t even bring myself to text you, and that you should check and see how I was?”

“But you weren’t, were you?” was Zack’s quiet reply.

Oh yeah.

“Well, I might have been!” I was grasping here.

“But you weren’t,” he repeated.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I didn’t want to text you really late on Friday night after Lacey and I finished our drinks. Besides, I had no idea of your timetable with Dustin and for all I knew you were in the middle of talking with him late Friday, or even Saturday morning after I finished my panel.”

He paused and took a breath before continuing.

“Well, when you finally texted me at 12:30 or whatever time it was Saturday afternoon I was on another panel, and I actually didn’t look at my phone for three more hours since I had to immediately fill in for somebody else who was sick and do a presentation on cultural differences in humor. You know, how some movies are funny in America but nobody else in the world thinks they are, or vice versa? Anyway, when I got nothing else from you other than that one ‘U there?’ and nothing about the breakup, I was so sure it hadn’t gone as planned and probably wasn’t a good situation.”

A waitress
finally
came over to the table – service wasn’t great tonight at
Cerise
– and I realized that I hadn’t had anything to drink yet. I ordered one of Zack’s orangey beer favorites as he ordered another one, and after the waitress was out of earshot he continued.

“I was moping around Saturday in the hotel bar, sitting by myself, and Lacey came over to ask me what was wrong. I figured what the hell, of anybody in the world – or at least in the bar – she would understand what was going on, even though she would probably empathize more with your side of it than mine. And actually, I guess that’s what I really needed because I was so hurt that...”

His voice trailed off. I
thought
he was going to say something like “...I felt like finding some woman to hook up with” but even if that were true, I didn’t want to hear it! And hopefully he didn’t, at least from what he had told me so far.

“Anyway, Lacey and I decided to have dinner again and we talked through the whole thing. What she said was that I should just take a step back and let it go for the weekend and when I got back to L.A. see where things were with you. Even if you didn’t break up with Dustin he would be back in Chicago and basically, nothing would have changed and then the next time he was back in L.A. you would more likely than not go through with it then.”

He paused again as our waitress returned with our beers. He didn’t make a move to touch his, nor did I. I was waiting for us to make a toast as we usually did, but so far there was
nothing
in our conversation worth toasting over, right?

Zack looked straight at me.

“I will tell you that I asked Lacey what I should do if I got back to L.A. and you told me that not only had you not broken up with Dustin but you had also slept with him. You want to know what she said?”

I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded anyway.

“She said ‘So what? Even if she did her body might have been with that other guy, but her heart was still with you.’”

I felt the tears return to my eyes.

“She said that’s the way she felt when she had sex with me after meeting the other guy, and even though it was like she was cutting open a five-year old wound with her words, I did appreciate what she was saying because she had been in the same position as you and she was speaking from experience.”

He sighed, and then continued.

“So I waited until Monday morning, figuring I would try to see you that night as soon as I could even though I had a client dinner and then had to fly out the next morning, and of course that’s when I found out about you going to Chicago. So not only were you not going to be around, you had gone to where Dustin was. And from everything you had told me about that project out there, I figured that now I might not see you for months.”