The Overlap Read online

  I couldn’t help it; I burst out into an embarrassed laugh.

  “Am I right?” she egged me on. She was a pretty girl from Spokane, Washington who was going to work out of the firm’s Seattle office after we were all finished up here in Miami.

  What the hell, I thought.

  “Four, actually,” I retorted. “One of them was a double.”

  We both dissolved into a fit of giggles, laughing hysterically and uncontrollably as people looked our way and wondered just what had caused these two women in their early twenties to act and sound like a couple of high school girls.

  Anyway, my point is that from that “discussion” with Whitney, I knew that the walls in the hotel were on the thin side and it was fairly easy to make out at least muffled sounds in adjoining rooms and out in the halls. So as I argued with Josh I made sure to “yell” at him in clipped, hushed tones; you know, the “angry whisper” voice. And since he was as aware as I was of the sound problem, he was doing the same.

  “I’m coming down,” he finally said to me.

  “Don’t you dare, I’m not opening my door!” I countered.

  “I’m coming down,” he repeated and then hung up.

  Sure enough, a minute later there was a rapid series of quiet knocks on my door. I thought about not answering, but for whatever reason I did anyway.

  He walked inside my room and began a smooth, seemingly rehearsed apology for not texting or calling me all weekend. I let him get about thirty seconds into his apology when I walked up to him, thrust myself against him, and began kissing him as frantically as I had ever kissed anyone. Usually I’m a slow, passionate kisser; even when the sex would be more appropriately described as “doing the nasty” than “making love” I like to kiss deliberately and sensuously. This time, though, my tongue was just about bursting out the back of his neck. I steered him away from the door towards the bed, not breaking off the deep kiss for even a second, and we proceeded to have the best “angry sex” I had ever experienced in my life, and probably would ever experience. I didn’t make the least bit of effort to be quiet; if anybody from our class, or some retired couple taking a post-Labor Day vacation to Miami, or anybody else wanted to count how many times I came, then let them; I didn’t care.

  But the extra-hot, extra-good angry sex came with a price.

  Within a week, Josh and I were done for good. That lost weekend, with him in Fort Lauderdale and totally out of contact with me, had moved him for all time into the category of “guys you have fun with for a little while, but that’s it.” I could have kept things going with him for the rest of the training class, and then I would have gone to L.A. and he would have gone to New York, and that would have been that.

  Instead, though, I had decided that enough was enough. We slept together one more time, in the middle of that following week, but by the next weekend I had told Josh that I wanted to end things. He actually took the news harder than I thought he would, but I think it was more ego than anything. This non-pedigreed girl from Chandler, Arizona via Arizona State was dumping Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain IV of Maine via Dartmouth? When she could still enjoy another three and a half weeks of intense, no-strings-attached sex with young Mister Chamberlain? Balderdash! Harrumph!

  Whatever. He was a big boy (well...) and he would get over it. I knew that all eyes would be on us yet again to see if we were following the firm’s “Guidelines for a Congenial and Non-Toxic Breakup” (which those rules might as well have been called), so I went out of my way that entire week to make sure that Josh and I were on the same team for group exercises, and we were the utmost professionals in relating to one another. Josh was on the same wavelength as I was, and by the time that next week was over, everyone – Josh, our instructors, our classmates, and especially me – breathed a collective sigh of relief that our training class wasn’t going to be infused with a little extra Human Resources drama.

  * * *

  With my mind guiding through an encore presentation of last summer and fall I covered three miles before I knew it, and didn’t even feel tired. I thought about jogging some more but decided to instead have a more leisurely breakfast than I usually was able to enjoy during the week. Instead of a quick to-go stop at the bagel shop down the street from my apartment, post-running sweatiness and all, I went back to shower and get at least partly ready for work (my hair but no makeup yet) and I pulled on jeans and a getting-frayed ASU T-shirt. I walked about ten minutes down to one of the Jewish delis on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and sat down to actually read the morning paper rather than just check out the headlines on my cell phone, and to luxuriate in a three-egg omelet with – gasp! – home fries. I was feeling more than a little stressed, and some comfort food of the breakfast variety was just what I needed. Even with my new work life and the sometimes long hours I still found enough time to get to the gym and run, and – completely unbiased opinion here – I had a pretty good body and was in good shape. So I could easily handle an omelet and home fries now and then, just like the occasional couple pieces of pizza and ice cream. I tried to eat healthy for the most part but I wasn’t a fanatic about it, and as long as I could still turn guys’ heads I didn’t see the need to go all obsessive in what I ate; at least not at this stage of my life.

  I enjoyed every bite of my breakfast, not to mention the rare luxury of reading the morning paper on a weekday. Before I knew it, though, the clock had ticked past 8:00 and I actually found myself having to rush back to my apartment, finish getting ready and dressed, and I made it into the conference room that MetroGen had set up for our team as a “war room” (more consulting-world terminology that was becoming part of my day-to-day vocabulary) in time for the daily 9:00 A.M. “stand-up.” (Yeah, you guessed it; still more consulting-speak. Why couldn’t we just call a meeting... um... a “meeting”?)

  Anyway, the morning stand-up lasted a little over half an hour and as the meeting broke up, Kensington came over to me, gave me a knowing smile and said:

  “Well?”

  I thought about playing dumb. You know: “Well what?” Or maybe going for the outright deception: “Why Kensington Reynolds! Get your mind out of the gutter! We just talked; nothing more than that. I’m in a relationship, as you well know!”

  After all, Dustin not only worked in the same office of our firm that I did, that was also the same office where Kensington and Courtney worked. Even though we were all scattered on various projects around Southern California or – like Dustin and a lot of others at the moment – elsewhere in the U.S. or even in another country, at any given point either Kensie or Courtney might wind up on the same assignment as Dustin. So maybe total discretion (meaning total secrecy) was the way to play this?

  Nah. Kensington, Courtney, and I had become very close friends. Courtney had been in the training class with Dustin and me (and Josh) and she thought Dustin was a good guy overall. And shortly after getting to L.A. we became good friends with Kensington, who had been with the firm for a year longer than Courtney and me, when I got assigned to the same project Kensie was on. Kensington also had gotten her MBA from Michigan before joining the firm so she was three years older than I was, but we still became pretty close friends.

  Then one night a couple months ago when just us three girls were out drinking, Courtney had a little too much and started going on about how I shouldn’t tie myself down in this relationship with Dustin, no matter how nice a guy he was. At least now, at this stage of my life and my career, and especially out here in L.A.; “it’s the wrong time for you,” Courtney kept slurring. Kensington kept trying to shush her but Courtney kept rambling on until finally I said to her, exasperated:

  “Okay, Courtney, I promise that if some really hot guy comes along and there’s an attraction there, I won’t automatically say ‘no’ just because of Dustin. Okay?”

  Come to think of it, I guess that’s probably why Courtney – and maybe Kensington as well – had slipped away last night when my discussion with Zack looked like it might be pic
king up a little bit of steam. What great friends I have! (Grin!)

  “We’re going to dinner Saturday night. At Vivant.” I opted for the full disclosure, no games approach.

  Kensington’s eyes lit up along with a wicked smile.

  “Fantastic!” she whispered. “I could tell he was really into you!”

  I shrugged but couldn’t fight off my own smile.

  “I guess,” I said as nonchalantly as I could.

  Seeing the partner from our firm who was in charge of our project approaching, Kensington whispered “We’ll talk later at lunch” and headed out of our “war room” to another conference room where she had a meeting. I had been assigned to cover a different meeting, one that would last all the way until lunchtime (groan!), so there was my morning.

  During that entire two and a half hour meeting – one with no breaks, of course, though I did slip out once to go to the rest room when I couldn’t hold it any longer – I had a great deal of difficulty concentrating on what was being discussed. Fortunately for this meeting I was more of a participant and observer than anyone with an active role, so I was able to get away with my mind being... well, pretty much anywhere else but within the walls of this room.

  Part of me was again wrestling with the morals and ethics of agreeing to go out with Zack despite my relationship to Dustin. True, I had done this before but even though I tried to tell myself that this could be just a repeat of that one-and-only date with the Stanford guy during my internship that Andrew never found out about and never impacted our relationship, I knew this time could – and probably would – turn out differently. Should I call Dustin and be honest with him? Should I call Zack and back out of the date? At any given moment my conscience was giving me very different directions that it insisted were “the answers” and that I was compelled to obey. But then, only minutes later, I would be whipsawed into a totally different answer...

  Even amidst all of this angst, I was also trying to get my head around all of the things I needed to do before the date with Zack; presuming I would keep it, which I was pretty sure I would. After work today I would go to get my nails done; I was a bit overdue and whereas last night in Cerise with the lighting sort of low he wouldn’t have noticed, he probably would over dinner. Presuming a guy would notice that sort of thing, that was, and Zack with his teal shirt and $300 jeans seemed to be the kind of guy who would. So definitely my nails, in fact a full mani-pedi; hopefully I could get squeezed in at the place over on Canon I had discovered and had made my regular salon, and I made a mental note to call for an after-work appointment as soon as this meeting broke up.

  I thought about getting my hair cut a touch, but decided against it. I had just had my hair done about a month ago and I actually liked how it looked right at this moment: length, color, everything. So no need to spend a couple hours (and a couple hundred dollars) on my hair, at least before tomorrow night.

  I also thought about getting a wax since I was a little bit overdue there as well, but I kept telling myself that given the circumstances there was no way he would be anywhere near there tomorrow night. I had planned on getting that done sometime next week before the next time I was with Dustin, and as I pondered that wax-or-not quandary I suddenly felt the strongest rush yet of feeling that I was doing something wrong. But I forced those feelings aside by simply telling myself “no wax because no sex” and therefore deferring any reckoning that might need to be faced. (My mind was wandering so badly this morning that I conjured up a mental video of hundreds of protestors back in my parents’ day taking to the streets with signs and chanting that motto: “No wax, ‘cause no sex! No wax, ‘cause no sex!”)

  Somewhere around 11:00, I felt my phone vibrate once. Distracted as I was this morning, I had still remembered to turn the ringer off, and had it sitting on the table in front of me, face down. I waited until one of the MetroGen people started writing something on the whiteboard and drawing everybody’s attention up there, and then I slid my phone off the table and snuck a lightning-fast look at the text message I had received. It was from Kensington and she said that unexpectedly she and Courtney had to go up to Burbank for a meeting this afternoon so she wouldn’t be around for lunch. Maybe we could meet after work, if they got back at a decent time. I didn’t dare text her back right then. I was still fairly low on the consulting pecking order at our firm, and one of the things drilled into us down in Miami and emphasized over and over every time we were about to go onto a new project was this: stay off your phones and don’t text! To be honest, for most of us who were young and not that long out of college our phones were an essential extension of ourselves, and what they wanted us to do was almost physically painful! In college and before then in high school we texted while we ate; we texted in class; we texted while we did homework. We pretty much texted anywhere and everywhere except when we were having sex, and even then it wasn’t unheard of to sneak a text to a friend when a guy headed into the bathroom between rounds, or if one of us did.

  So to not text Kensington back right now was excruciating, though less so than it would have been at this time last year when we were all basically going through withdrawal while we sat in that classroom in Miami for hours on end under the watchful eye of our instructors who just about dared anyone to try and sneak either reading or typing a text. I had to wait until the meeting broke up a couple minutes after noon to text her back that I had received her message, but that I wouldn’t be able to meet her and Courtney after work today. I switched over to the emoticons on the keyboard and pressed the symbol for a long painted fingernail and then one for a foot. I thought about typing that I had been thinking about going for a wax (no little graphical emoticon for that one!) but had decided not to; but then I figured that was TMI, even between Kensie and myself. I suppose I could have put off the mani-pedi until tomorrow, but the place I went was almost always booked on Saturdays weeks in advance, and doing a walk-in was just about impossible. So after work it would have to be.

  I wound up walking across the street to a French bakery and grabbing a baguette for lunch, and then sitting outside for half an hour to enjoy the day. Being out in the sunshine seemed to help take the edge off the fluctuating sense of conflict that I was feeling, and I wished that I could just spend the rest of the day outside. One of the things about my consulting job that was starting to nag at me a little bit was that I almost never got outside during the workday, which is especially sad when you’re in a place like L.A. Back at ASU I would spend as much time outside in between classes as I possibly could. I would just about insist that any study groups I was in would meet outside the business building at one of the tables adjoining the coffee place, or we would sit on benches near one of the fountains on other parts of campus and quiz each other. But now, in professional life, there was no such thing. Even though I enjoyed my work for the most part, most days were comprised of shuffling from one conference room to another with occasional trips back to some “war room” or maybe a cubicle if that was the setup a client gave us.

  For a moment I wondered if Zack Buchanan, in his side of the consulting world, suffered through this same never-gets-outside syndrome that we did. Somehow I didn’t think so; he seemed to be the kind of guy who spent a couple hours outside each day, maybe sitting exactly where I was right now, conducting a one-on-one meeting with a client on his terms rather than the client’s. I supposed I would find out soon enough next week, presuming Zack was back here at MetroGen next week. I guess I could ask him that tomorrow during dinner, right?

  * * *

  Friday afternoon passed excruciatingly slow, but by 4:30 our partner decided that we could all head out for the day, that no more productive work was going to happen. I had already called ahead to the nail salon for a 5:30 appointment so I immediately called them back to see if they could squeeze me in at 4:45 – I needed about fifteen minutes to make it over there – and fortunately they could. Normally a full mani-pedi there takes a shade over two hours; a bit more leisurely than where I
used to go back home in Phoenix, so that meant that I’d be there until close to 7:00... not quite as late as the 7:45’ish time I had originally figured it would be when I was done. But regardless, the mani-pedi would still be the core of my evening’s plans.

  On a whim, I opted for a touch of nail art that was a bit bolder than I normally wore since joining the professional ranks. During the “charm school” portion of our training program in Miami, the instructors had stressed the importance of being fairly conservative with elements of our appearance such as nails for the girls. They did say, though, that depending on the client where we might be working a bit of “flair” might be permissible as long as it wasn’t too outlandish. Given that our client was in the entertainment industry, I figured that the pale pink polish I had right now could use an upgrade; so I selected two tones of purple – light and dark – separated by a diagonal line of an even darker purple near the top.

  I kept up my part of the obligatory salon conversation, but there were lengthy periods where I was alone with my thoughts. And as much as I tried to prevent it from happening, my thoughts kept wandering to my eleven months with Dustin Pearson.

  We were together in Miami for the last two weeks of training, and headed out to L.A. on the same flight. We both wound up living one floor apart in the temporary corporate apartments near LAX that the firm put new hires in. I found the apartment near Beverly Hills that I’m currently in and moved there just after New Year’s, while Dustin stayed in the temporary place a couple of weeks longer than I did before moving to a building in West Hollywood, not too far from me. We both chose fairly centrally located areas of the L.A. area for the same reason: because we were fair game for being assigned to work for clients as far south as Orange County and as far north as Thousand Oaks or even up in Ventura and still be considered as having been “assigned locally.” That meant the likelihood of frustratingly long commutes day after day, so the more centrally located you were the better the chance of having, say, three hours of commuting (an hour and a half each way) rather than five hours of commuting... a staggering two and a half hours each way in the worst of traffic.