The Overlap (13 page)

“Maybe I should just do what you did; you know, go work for myself as a consultant...”

Zack’s abrupt, blunt interruption was a surprise, considering that we were on our second date and you would think he’d be trying to prop me up, ego-wise.

“No, not yet,” he quickly shook his head as he sipped his wine. I could feel the first little percolations of a “Oh really? Well, just why the F not???” type of response as he continued.

“Your side of consulting is different than what I do,” he went on. “In my case I’m a lot more specialized so it was easier for me to be able to approach a studio or distribution company and sell myself. Whereas you’re more of a generalist...”

He went on for a little bit. Not in a preachy way; not condescending; not lecturing. Really, no more than candidly and openly sharing his opinion with me. As he talked my mind insisted on making yet another comparison between him and Dustin. Whereas Dustin and I were professional equals, you might say – both slightly less than a year and a half out of school, and both with exactly the same amount of tenure at our firm – Zack clearly had “seniority” over me out there in the business world.

So I found myself listening to him share his thoughts and opinions with me in a very different way than I would listen to and talk to Dustin about the same subjects. If it were Dustin sitting here across from me right now and I had just finished telling him about what I had gone through with Dickhead Dave and the two geeky computer guys and the wasted trip to New York, he would have commiserated with me but any advice would probably have been predicated with “I think” or “maybe” or something along those lines. In other words, Dustin wasn’t quite in a position to give me advice from his own experience since he had exactly as much experience as I did. (Actually, a little bit less than me since I had that internship in San Francisco before my senior year, whereas Dustin just partied with his college friends down in Mexico most of that summer.)

Zack, though, was telling me things and giving me advice based on what he had actually seen, experienced, and lived through. There was only about six years of age difference between the two of us but in terms of our professional lives, he had something like seven times as much experience as I did. Okay, I know that’s not really valid math there, but his seven years out there in that real world versus my single year so far did seem like a huge gap between what he knew and what I did.

The bottom line, though, was that he thought if I stuck it out with this firm for another two years – maybe a little bit less, maybe a little bit more – that I would be in the perfect position to join a smaller firm in a more senior position, and have much more control over my life at work and overall. Basically, I liked what I was hearing from him; he was telling me that he was certain I was intelligent and good enough to get what I could get out of a couple years at my firm and then get off of the lengthy, stressful path that Dustin and Josh Chamberlain and maybe even Kensington and Courtney would all probably wind up taking. You know, that quest to become a partner at the firm but for twelve or fifteen years along the way being all but a slave to the whims of people like Dave Evers.

Both Zack and I then looked at our watches at exactly the same moment. When we had sat down at our table – after Zack had kissed me hello this time when we both arrived at
Solazarse
at literally the same second, from different directions – we had agreed that we would talk about my wasted trip to New York for at most twenty minutes, but that would be all; not a second longer. After that twenty minutes had passed, if either one of us brought up anything about the New York trip again then that person would have to do something – anything – the other person wanted, without objection. My eyes narrowed as Zack explained these rules to me and I was helpless to keep the wicked smile from my lips as I interrupted with an innuendo-laden “
Anything
?” In response Zack slowly nodded, each bob of his head just as loaded with innuendo as my words and my smile were.

The whole time we were talking, the back part of my mind insisted on fantasizing about what might happen if I would be the one to “slip up” (okay, on purpose!) and bring up New York or Dickhead Dave or aspect ratios or anything that had been part of my past two and a half days. Zack would point his finger at me and go “aha!” or “you said it!” or something like that. I would shrug, look him directly in the eyes and say “well, you got me; I guess I will have to do
whatever you tell me you want me to do...
” with, of course, a ton of seductive intimation in my voice. We would leave after dinner and in the cab on the way back to his apartment he would lean over and whisper in my ear exactly what it was that I was now obligated to do for – to – him, and I would respond by looking him in the eyes and submissively asking “do you mean right now?” Zack would wordlessly nod and I would
know
that I had no choice. So I would reach over with my hand and begin to unbuckle his belt and then for the first time ever in the backseat of a cab I would...

OMG, I was getting myself incredibly aroused with my imagination! I willed myself back from fantasyland to reality and realized that tiny beads of sweat were breaking out on my forehead, and I was certain that I was becoming all flushed. I hoped that Zack didn’t notice but truthfully I would be surprised if he didn’t; he already seemed like a pretty perceptive guy to me. But even if he noticed that my face had reddened and I was sweating a little bit, hopefully he wouldn’t make the leap and think it was because I was fantasizing about unzipping him in the back seat of a cab and sliding my hand down inside his pants against his hardness and then...

WTF! Just thinking about what I had been thinking about a couple seconds earlier (follow that?) was getting me even hotter! I swear it felt like a thousand degrees inside this restaurant!

“You okay?” Zack asked, now definitely noticing the beads of sweat, several of which were freely running down my forehead. I reached up to brush away the moisture, frantically thinking of something to say. If we had already had something spicy-hot to eat, maybe some tapas with an extra-tangy sauce, I could have blamed my sweating on the food. But so far, no food at all; just our first glasses of the Pinot Noir Zack had ordered.

“I’m fine,” doing my best to get this sudden libido-driven hot flash under control. “Just a little bit jet-lagged still, I guess, so maybe that’s what’s causing me to... you know...”

I reached for my glass of Pellegrino and though I felt like chugging the entire tumbler and immediately pouring my own refill, I willed myself to apply at least a little bit of restraint. Slowly, over the next minute or two, I could feel the heat dissipating and every time my brain tried to veer back into that wicked fantasy of my first time giving Zack a blow job taking place in the backseat of a cab not that far into the future from this very moment, I was able to silently scream at myself “stop it, Lindsey!” and force my thoughts back into “safer” territory.

*     *     *

We both knew. There wouldn’t be any negotiating or cajoling or playing our expected roles (mine was, of course: “Well, um, I’m not really sure we should yet...”) or anything like that. Zack ordered Remy Martin for both of us after dinner and for the fifteen additional minutes until the check came, we toyed with our snifters and mostly looked hungrily at each other as our conversation died down significantly. We didn’t even have the “your place or mine?” exchange. I followed Zack out of
Solazarse
and when he hailed a cab back to his apartment, I wordlessly followed him right into the back seat.

Of course I didn’t act out what my mind had been fantasizing about earlier in dinner, and in fact we didn’t even make out or anything like that in the back of the cab. Zack did give me one brief but passionate kiss as the cab pulled into traffic; you know, sort of a “we’re really going to do this, and I promise it will be alright” kiss. But the rest of the time he just had his right arm around me as I wordlessly snuggled against him, lost in the moment;
feeling
more than
thinking
.

I should have been thinking about Dustin; I mean, Dustin and me. At least a little bit. But I could honestly say that I didn’t give Dustin Pearson or my relationship with him a microsecond of thought the entire night. It was as if my brain had set up a giant concrete barrier along with miniature armed guards and there was no way they would let even a miniscule thought of Dustin break through into my conscious mind... at least for tonight.

The cab ride to Zack’s apartment took about ten, maybe fifteen minutes with traffic. I had no thoughts whatsoever of backing out of this; of letting cold feet or guilt about Dustin or any latent “maybe it
is
still too soon for sex” epiphanies change my mind. I
was
going back to Zack’s apartment with him and we
were
going to get naked and have sex with each other for the first time.

He lived on the top floor of a five-story building. The elevator was an older one and a bit on the slow side and we were the only two in the elevator. So as soon as the door closed on the main floor Zack turned me towards him and we began passionately kissing, continuing for what felt like five minutes because the elevator was chugging upwards so slowly. We really only kissed for maybe twenty or thirty seconds, of course, but that was long enough to get me so worked up that it felt like an eternity until the doors opened again and I followed him out into the hallway and then five or six doors down to his apartment.

We were inside standing right by the door that he had just swung closed when we started kissing again, and this time both of our hands started roaming over the other’s body. Definitely no turning back now, I thought to myself; not that I wanted to, of course.

*     *     *

How is it that my first night of sex with Zack could paradoxically be both a blur but also a vivid, precisely recalled memory? It’s like someone who is nearsighted, like my Mom. Not that I really want to be thinking about my mother at the same time I’m recalling my first night of sex with Zack, of course; but anyway...

Someone who is nearsighted can see things up close very, very clearly but when that person steps back or looks at things at more of a distance, they become blurry. That’s what my first night with Zack was like. I can think of all the snippets and segments and tidbits from throughout the night, each one so vivid I can remember even the tiniest detail, yet the night at as a whole from the time we got to Zack’s apartment is fuzzy; even jumbled and seemingly out of sequence.

I mean, I know for a fact he was inside me two different times, and each was different than the other. One time was this incredibly intense, frenzied round that only lasted about five minutes but which left us both out of breath and flopped side by side onto his bed afterwards, thankful for the cool air washing down from the ceiling fan. The other time was this prolonged, passionate, very deliberate session that went on for more than half an hour, I think.

But which one came (no pun intended) first? Thinking about the night as a whole it mostly seemed that after we were done kissing by his door we frantically went at each other first and then, after resting and talking for a little bit, the second time was the one that was slow and erotically charged, preceded by plenty of stroking and licking and grinding. But other times I could swear that the order of the two was reversed. Weird, right? I actually had to really concentrate to be certain that my initial recollection was correct: fast and frenzied first (a triple-”f” – that’s how I would remember).

But I can focus in on so very many specific details with near-perfect recall; details like Zack handing the condom to me after he had unwrapped it, and whispering as he licked my right ear: “Put it on me,” which I did. Or how, after the condom was on him, he teased me for something like two minutes before suddenly entering me for the first time. One thing about Zack: whereas Dustin and Josh and Andrew and almost every other guy I had slept with were just about the same age as me, Zack was older and therefore being in bed with him was like being with someone “in charge” for the first time in my sexual lifetime. Actually, I think the guy I met at the baseball game and slept with a couple times after breaking up with Andrew was older than me by about three or four years, but he hadn’t been that good in bed so I hadn’t felt anywhere near the same about being with him as I was feeling about this first night with Zack.

All night long I could feel myself sort of taking the lead from Zack with whatever we would do, or what I would let him do to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t take any initiative on my own all night. At one point during our prolonged, erotic sex I sort of pushed him down onto his back and straddled him for a couple of minutes, just rubbing myself all over him but not letting him inside me... until all of a sudden I adjusted myself slightly and he slid right inside of me.

(But to my point about the night as a whole being something of a blur, when exactly did that happen within that half hour or so? Earlier or later? Honestly, even though I can so intensely recall not only the images but also the actual sensations of those couple of minutes, I’m not 100% certain exactly what happened right before any given recollection and what happened immediately afterwards.)

So anyway, even taking charge for a couple of minutes, or however you want to describe that, was more about wanting to prove to Zack that despite being a lot younger than him I could still “tease and please” him just as much as the older, more experienced L.A. women I figured he was usually with. You know, almost like I was trying to make sure he enjoyed this first encounter of ours just as much as I did. Or something like that. I was perfectly fine giving him control over what we did most of the night. And it wasn’t like I was “auditioning” or anything but I did want him to think throughout the night, and afterwards, “wow, she’s fantastic!” and that we had made a special connection sexually as well as when we talked to each other during dinner at
Vivant
or
Solazarse
, or when we had first met at
Cerise
.