The Overlap (6 page)

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.

Occasionally, if you were on a project with particularly long hours the firm would put you up in a hotel a night or two each week even if that project was “local.” That’s what happened to me on my very first project, last November and December while I was still in the corporate apartments. I was on a project way up in Ventura but wound up staying up there at least two nights each week because I would work until 8:30 or 9:00 each night and then have to be back onsite by 8:00 the next morning. So rather than drive all the way back to my apartment – seventy miles each way, which was typically an hour and a half even with traffic “light” by L.A. standards – it made more sense for me to stay up there rather than waste all that time driving back and forth all over the Valley.

At that same time, Dustin was on a project down in Orange County, in Newport Beach. His drive was a little better than mine, but not much: about 45 miles each way. So once a week, sometimes twice, he would do the same thing I was doing at the time and stay in a hotel down that way. We would try to time our hotel nights away from our apartments to be the same if possible so we would be both be back at our apartments on the same nights, otherwise we would never see each other during the week even though we lived only one floor apart in the same apartment building! And for those first couple months, the last thing we wanted to do was be apart from each other. We got along great and had a lot of fun together... when we saw each other, that was.

We caught a bit of a break after New Year’s. I shifted to a project up in Thousand Oaks and Dustin was assigned to a new client up in Burbank, which meant that at least we were now on the same side of the gigantic L.A. metro area. We started spending even more time together, and near the end of March we each took a week of vacation and went down to Cabo; sort of spring break for us, finally getting away for at least a little while from our jobs being such a major part of our daily lives.

In April, though, we both finished those projects and this time we weren’t so lucky when it came to our next assignments being close to one another. I wound up spending the next four months in Phoenix of all places, while they sent Dustin to San Francisco for the same length of time. So we spent much of the spring and all of the summer seeing each other only on weekends back home in L.A., though we each did take a couple days of vacation at different points so I could visit him in San Francisco and he could come see me in Phoenix. When he came to see me I of course had to take him home to meet my parents and my sister, as well as a few of my college friends who were still in the area.

Dustin was originally from Minneapolis and had gone to school at the University of Wisconsin, so he was totally unprepared for our blazing Arizona summer temperatures when he came to visit in early August.

“How the hell does anyone live here?” he asked in all sincerity, as if he simply couldn’t imagine that more than three million people in the Phoenix metro area did just that. Of course, the day he made that particular complaint was one that the temperature had topped off at 117 degrees and was over 90 degrees by 5:30 in the morning. So I could see how someone from Minnesota who had gone to school in Wisconsin and then had settled in L.A. could be incredulous about what we Arizonans took for granted. To us, it was mostly an annoyance for a couple of months that we put up with in exchange for temperatures often in the comfortable 70s during the winter months.

Despite his frequent complaints about the weather, my parents seemed to like him, and Lauren did as well. After he went back to San Francisco I was at my parents’ house for dinner one night and my mother, nosey as ever, asked:

“So where do you see things going?”

Before I had a chance to answer, Lauren responded for me:

“Oh Mom, just leave it alone. Lindsey is only 23 and she’s been out of school for just over a year. The chances of Dustin being the one she’s going to marry are pretty low, wouldn’t you agree?”

At first I was just about to jump all over my sister. How dare she! But just as fast as I got angry, that fury evaporated as if someone had just let the air out of a balloon. I just shrugged at my Mom in response, and my Dad artfully changed the subject to the musicals that he and Mom would be seeing at ASU’s Gammage Hall this fall and next spring as part of their next Broadway Season shows.

Shortly before Labor Day I got word that I would be headed back to L.A. right after the holiday for a new client. Even better, they sent me to the project where I now was, at MetroGen: only about ten minutes from my apartment! For the first time since I had finished the training program I was actually working in what I considered to be a “good” location, geography-wise. I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but I was supposed to be at MetroGen for at least four months, so that would take me through the rest of the year.

I had hoped that Dustin would find his way back to an assignment in the L.A. area. It didn’t work out that way, though. Dustin’s San Francisco assignment finished up at the same time my Phoenix one did, but they sent him to the project in Chicago where he now was. Worse, this one was what we had all been warned would be our fate at some point: the project from hell with horrendously long hours for months on end and mandatory weekend work out of town, meaning that coming home on every weekend was no longer a given.

And that’s where Dustin Pearson and I stood at this moment: with him 2,000 miles away and a weekend filled with work ahead of him, and me getting ready for a first date with another guy.

*     *     *

I was actually finished in the salon by 7:30, and I decided to stop for a quick tanning bed session before heading back home. I checked my cell phone and saw a missed phone call from Dustin, and another from Kensington.

I tried Kensie first, figuring that I wanted to talk through all of my roller-coaster feelings today about my date tomorrow with Zack as well as things with Dustin. But I got her voicemail, left a message for her to call me back, and then figured I might as well call Dustin now. I hadn’t talked to him all day; I hadn’t received a text from him nor had I sent one to him. Out of sight, out of mind? Perhaps, though not nearly as much as tomorrow, I guess.

His phone rang once and then started ringing again for half of a beat and then flipped over to voicemail. He shushed me! I looked at my watch – almost 8:00 P.M. now here in L.A., which meant it was close to 10:00 in Chicago – and was instantly agitated at being shushed on a Friday night.

A half minute later my phone lit up and even without sliding the bottom bar to unlock it, I could read the single line that Dustin had texted me:

Still working gonna b a long 1 will call you later if not 2 late I love you

At least he had shushed me because he was going through consulting hell on this Friday night, not because he was “otherwise occupied” or anything like that. Now the guilty feelings and remorse really started to hit me. Here I was, getting my nails done and tanning for my clandestine date with another guy tomorrow night, and my boyfriend was slaving away out in Chicago very late on a Friday night with – apparently – no end in sight for his workday. And he would still be there throughout the entire weekend, all the way through next week...

I forced the guilty feelings from my mind and concentrated on what he
hadn’t
typed in his text. True, he had written “I love you” but number one, those words seemed to have been grafted onto the end of his “busy, don’t bother me” message; almost as afterthought. And also, he could have added “I miss you” or “can’t wait to see you” or something along those lines... but he didn’t.

I was probably grasping at little reasons, perhaps even concocted reasons, to justify in my mind where I would be (I looked at the digital time on my cell phone) 23 hours from now. It was easy to demonize Dustin, to blame him for shortcomings he probably wasn’t even aware of, to convince myself that I was totally in the right to go to dinner with a guy I had met only one night earlier.

I shook the thoughts from my head as I started home. Even though my phone had both the ringer and the vibrate turned on, I found myself looking at the screen every fifteen seconds or so the entire walk home, waiting for either a text or call from either Dustin or Kensington. But by the time I got to the outside door to my apartment building: nada.

I microwaved myself a whole wheat tortilla with some low-fat cheese, avocado, and salsa; a light dinner, typical of what I usually ate at home by myself. You know: no muss, no fuss. I finished the tortilla in like a minute and thought about making a second one, but instead went to the freezer for some sugar-free chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. (Will the wonders of technology never cease!) I ate a bowl of about three scoops, and then another one with three more scoops. By the time I was finished it was getting close to 9:00 and I felt like doing nothing but soaking in a bath... and thinking.

I sat in the bathtub until the water was cool enough to be annoying, and by that time it was getting close to 10:00. I got out, dried off, blow-dried my hair, and put on my long ASU T-shirt that was part of my sleeping wardrobe rotation (at least when Dustin wasn’t around).

I drifted off to sleep a little bit past 11:00 watching some tearjerker movie I had seen about a zillion times before, and just before I zonked out for good I checked my cell phone for about the zillionth time.

Nothing.

Twice on Saturday I came within a split-second of texting Zack to cancel.

The first time, around 10:00 in the morning shortly after I woke up, I had a lame excuse – I mean, a lie – all ready to go. Not feeling well; wouldn’t be very good company tonight; maybe later, but how about another happy hour this week? I figured that standing around a high-top at
Cerise
or another bar for an hour or two after work was “safer” for me in getting my head around where things with Zack might go; you know, a more measured pace given my relationship with Dustin, right? After all, with Dustin out of town most of the time for at least the next two months I could hold off making the commitment of a one-on-one dinner with Zack until a week or two or three down the road; until the point at which I might be certain that Dustin represented my past and Zack was my future.

The second time, though, right around 3:00 that afternoon, I was prepared with a text message-sized version of how I was really feeling, punctuated by “let’s talk Monday.” But either way, I was
so
ready to back out of the dinner and slow things down.

But I didn’t. It all came down to one simple fact: I
wanted
to have dinner with Zack tonight, and the thought of backing out despite the conflicted emotions racing through me made me... sad, I guess. The thought of not sitting across the table from Zack tonight, sipping wine and sharing a delicious meal and getting to know each other better, was simply not one I wanted to contemplate.