The Overlap (14 page)

We both woke right around 5:30 Thursday morning. He looked at me and said “you know, you’re amazing!” as he slid his hand slowly down my belly and my legs instinctively parted for his fingers, and that’s when I knew that I had indeed been successful in getting that “special connection” message across to him.

My Thursday was an absolute roller-coaster of a day.

I woke up to Zack telling me that he thought I was amazing, just before we had our very first waking-up sex, which was really good (as I figured it would be). And my day ended almost exactly the same way: Zack again telling me he thought I was “absolutely the most amazing woman” (exact words there) followed by our third time that night; this one the deliberate, sort of slow-motion kind when you fall asleep almost immediately after finishing.

But in between there was a near-fight with Kensington; a big surprise from Zack; and a total crap day at work thanks to Dave Evers.

And then something else totally unexpected.

So here’s how my Thursday went.

*     *     *

I didn’t even have time for a quick cup of coffee at Zack’s apartment because I needed to get back to my place, shower and get dressed, and get to work. I really would have liked to walk the two miles or so from his place to mine but not only did I not have the time, I was definitely dressed only for the walk of shame; nothing else. So I grabbed a cab outside of his building. Which makes me think: is there such a thing as a “cab ride of shame?” You know, getting into a cab sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning outside of one apartment building and headed to what is so obviously your own apartment, wearing what can only be going-out-the-night-before clothes? If not then it seems to me there should be, because I could swear the cab driver kept disapprovingly raising his eyes to his rear view mirror every thirty seconds or so to quickly look at me and how I was dressed.

I wanted to yell back at him: hey buddy, don’t judge me; okay?

Anyway, I rushed through my morning getting-ready-for-work routine and made it into the conference room at MetroGen for our morning stand-up meeting with about fifteen seconds to spare. Kensington was already there, and she took one look at me as I was sitting down two seats to her left in the only remaining open chair and then she scooted her chair back so I could see her as she silently mouthed “I want to hear everything!” A flash of a knowing, wicked smile came and went on her face as I just quickly nodded and scooted my own chair into the table. If this were back in college and we were in a class instead of this meeting out there in “the real world” we no doubt would have texted back and forth the entire time, leaving copies of this incredibly detailed, maybe even X-rated transcript of my night with Zack on each of our phones (not to mention “also somewhere out there in cyberspace”). But like I’ve said, texting in the middle of a meeting was definitely frowned upon for us new consultants... though I should mention that more experienced people from our firm like the partners and even Dave sometimes go out of their way to visibly and dramatically send a text here and there in the middle of a meeting, often in the middle of when they are actually speaking, drawing attention to themselves to let everyone else know that they are extra-important and their attention for some earth-shattering crisis is needed right now. Whatever...

So far this morning, everything was pretty much normal. But right after the stand-up when I was on my way to my next meeting was when all the “fun” started.

I hadn’t expected to see Zack this early at MetroGen but I had just turned the corner to head down the long aisle between the cubicle farm on one side and real offices on the other side when I looked straight ahead and saw Zack headed right for me, only about ten or fifteen yards away. I fought the urge to give him a big smile and in fact planned to do nothing more than acknowledge him with a small nod and maybe a quiet “good morning.” You know, keep the whole thing out of the workplace just like they drilled into us down in Miami last year, though in this case the “other person” didn’t work for our firm. Still, the same rules applied while we were both onsite at the same client during the workday, right?

So I was surprised when Zack slowed just as he came within a couple of feet of me and before I could say anything, he said:

“Hey, do you have a quick minute?”

I hesitated for a moment before replying,

“I’m on my way to a meeting and...”

“I know,” he interrupted. “It’ll only take one minute – literally – and then we’ll talk later.”

Maybe he wanted to tell me something like how much he enjoyed last night (and this morning!), or maybe even take me aside and whisper a few things that he wished he could do to me right now. You know, a little bit of “get a room” naughty flirting that was definitely not suitable for being shared in the offices of our mutual client but which, if kept between the two of us, would be a real turn-on.

Wow, was I surprised by what he said instead!

“I got a text about twenty minutes ago from a friend who was supposed to be on a panel at a digital marketing conference in San Francisco this weekend and he can’t make it because his mother back east is really sick and he has to fly to Atlanta. So he asked if I would take his place.”

For about five seconds I was totally confused by what Zack had just said. I mean, I got the part about filling in for his friend at some conference, but why did he need to intercept me on my way to my meeting to tell me...

Oh.

We had stepped out of the aisle into a small kitchen area on the side where the real offices were, and fortunately nobody else was in there.

“So you’ll be gone this weekend?”

He nodded, then pursed his lips together as if he had something painful to say.

“I have to leave Friday morning and then I’ll be back Sunday night.”

Well shit! There went my first weekend with him, right down the drain thanks to this sudden need to fill in for a friend at a conference!

“I wasn’t going to this conference because I absolutely hate the ones that are held over a weekend. But this guy is a really good friend of mine and he’s in a bind because of the panel he was supposed to sit on, plus I know he’s feeling terrible about his mother. I’ll tell you more later, but would you like to go to
Cerise
after work?” Zack’s words snapped me out of my trance.

“Sure,” I answered with far more hesitancy in my voice than I would have expected, and which I’m almost certain he picked up on. I mean, of course I wanted to be with him later today, and even more so after he just dropped this bombshell on me about being gone over the weekend. A last night together until he got back, right? But in the couple of seconds I was standing in that kitchen area, between when he told me he was going to be gone and when he asked if I wanted to go to
Cerise
tonight, my brain had fired up an encore presentation of Miami last year and Josh Chamberlain casually informing me that he was going to be up in Fort Lauderdale for the weekend with his Dartmouth fraternity brothers. Even while reliving that entire weekend and how pissed I had been at Josh (okay, and also with some highlights of the really great angry sex after he got back) I knew it was entirely unfair of me to be making those comparisons. Still, my mind insisted on doing so. But before I could even say anything or ask any questions, that was when Zack shifted right into asking me about meeting him at the bar tonight after work.

Fine. I would think this situation through all day, and talk about it with him tonight.

“Okay, I know you have to run,” Zack said as he began walking to the door of the kitchen area. I looked at my watch and saw that it was already 9:47, meaning that I was 2 minutes late for the 9:45 meeting I was headed to after this morning’s extra-long stand-up.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, still distracted by what Zack had just told me. I wasn’t that worried about being late for the meeting because most meetings here actually began about 5 minutes after the scheduled start time. But I knew I had better hurry. I followed Zack through the doorway and when he turned left, I turned right... but not before he quietly said:     “I’ll see you tonight; can’t wait.”

Well, at least that was something, I guess. Still, I was getting a very bad feeling about what he had just told me... and not just having to do with Zack and his sudden travel plans, either.

*     *     *

If I had thought Zack’s news was a bombshell, it was nothing like the
real
bombshell that hit me in the middle of the meeting, even though I wasn’t aware until right after that one ended and I was on my way to... you guessed it, another meeting. Yay, more meetings! (Heavy sarcasm, right?)

I’ll get to that in a moment. But before I was aware of what else was waiting for me, I had to deal with The Wrath of Dave Evers. I walked into the conference room at 9:48 – I know this for a fact because I peeked at my cell phone just before I headed through the door to see if there were any texts from Kensington or maybe Courtney... or maybe even Zack. Nothing, though. But anyway, as soon as I walked into the room Dave Evers shot me this dirty look and mimed looking at his watch; you know, that “You’re late!” signal with the accompanying disdain and disapproval radiating from his face.

WTF? Not only hadn’t the meeting started yet, but the MetroGen person running the meeting wasn’t even here yet. So honestly, there was absolutely no reason at all for his snarky little pantomime. He had to be pissed about me not coming into MetroGen yesterday afternoon after we got back from New York and then staying late to rack up some billable hours for the firm – and more importantly, on behalf of his own long-shot quest to make partner, since he was partly evaluated on the total revenue produced from his accounts such as MetroGen. So to his way of thinking, my refusal to come into MetroGen and put in a bunch of extra hours last night not only cost the firm money, it also hindered his chances to make partner, at least a little bit. Well, tough! I had much better things to do with my time yesterday after getting back to L.A., right? Besides, it wasn’t my fault that he took us on that wild goose chase that as I later found out, MetroGen refused to pay for despite Margie e-mailing Dave Sunday night saying it was okay for the four of us to go.

As I learned later, early this morning Margie told Dave that while she had been fine with the four of us going to New York, there was no way in the world
any
of that work time, not just the many hours we had spent traveling, was going to be billed to our project. In fact she tartly reminded Dave that she had
never
told him that his trip for the four of us to “bring that company into the fold” (see, I can rattle off Dave’s early Monday morning consulting-speak from memory!) was going to be paid for by MetroGen as part of our consulting contract with them. Dave had incorrectly and stupidly made that assumption Sunday night when he asked Margie about this wild goose chase, and now he had a whole lot of lost revenue and thousands of dollars in unreimbursed travel costs that he needed Steve, Jack, Kensie, Courtney, the others from our firm working here at MetroGen – and me – to make up for as quickly as we could. And as a result, he was in a terrible mood and was obviously really pissed at me.

To repeat: What an ASSHOLE!

The meeting did get started a couple minutes later but by that time I was already firmly planted in my seat at the conference table, seething that such an incompetent jerk could not only be giving me grief like he was but also since our firm’s partner in charge of the MetroGen account was at another client down in San Diego today and tomorrow, Dave was basically running the show here for the time being. So if he came up to me at 5:30 this afternoon just as I was finishing for the day and handed me a stack of papers and said that he wanted me to work on them tonight in time for some meeting tomorrow morning, I would probably have no choice but to tell Zack that I couldn’t meet him at
Cerise
after work.

And what would I do then? Tell Zack that instead I would come over to his apartment later tonight after I was finally finished with work for a booty call before he flew to San Francisco tomorrow? For the first time I found myself wishing that even though I was only 23, I was able to do what Zack did: go to work for myself to get away from people like Dave Evers so they had no control whatsoever over me. Whereas Steve and Jack weren’t savvy enough to realize what a waste of time the whole thing had been even if we had been able to bill the time to MetroGen, and in fact they had sort of enjoyed
GeekFest: The Extended Edition
with their SoHo counterparts, I fully knew we never should have gone there... and Dave knew that I knew.

So for an hour and ten minutes I alternately seethed at two different things: today’s after-work hours possibly being at the whim of this guy I increasingly thought of as a total loser, as well as the news that Zack had just dropped on me in the kitchen area.

Oh, right; there was one more topic that made its way into the rotation in my mind this morning as I pretty much was unable to absorb one single word during the meeting. And that third topic was, of course, what I was going to do about Dustin. And speaking of which...

*     *     *

In a perfect world – or at least in my perfect world – here’s what would happen.

Dustin would stay safely tucked away in downtown Chicago for another couple weeks, never getting more than about three miles away from Lake Michigan, working horrendously long hours every single day without a break; and Zack and I have those weeks to be with each other and learn more about each other, and see how good we are together... or not. And
then
I would know for certain if it was time to break up with Dustin or not. Dustin would be out of sight and mostly out of mind, never getting closer than 2000 miles away from LA. Basically, things with Dustin would go on hold – even though he wouldn’t even know that they were on hold – so I could figure out where things were going with Zack.

At least that’s how I saw my little “perfect” world, but the first little flaw in that plan had already happened when Zack told me about having to go to San Francisco tomorrow and stay through the weekend. Fortunately, though, Dustin would still be stuck in Chicago this weekend. That’s what he told me as of yesterday when he texted me while I was on Wi-Fi during the flight back from New York; that even though they were working horrendous hours to have everything done by Friday morning, now he and the whole team from our firm were looking at yet another weekend stranded in Chicago, working the entire time.