The Overlap

by Lynn Costa

  The Overlap

  by

  Lynn Costa

  The Overlap: A Novel

  Copyright © 2013 Lynn Costa. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be used, reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations for reviews and critical articles.

  First eBook Publication 2013

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-0-9857547-2-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Overlap (ō-vər-ˈlap): 1) to extend over or past and cover a part of; 2) to occupy the same area in part.

  - www.merriam-webster.com

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part I: Zack

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II: Dustin

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part III: Zack

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue: Two Years Later

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Saturday night, September 21st

  I wish he will just go ahead and ask me the question already: “Is something wrong, Lindsey?”

  I know that question is on Dustin’s mind as we lie in his bed spooning, his left arm draped over mine; his body fitted against mine though not as tightly as normal. More than that: ordinarily when we’re in bed like this after sex Dustin’s hand is also resting against my left boob, usually stroking or flicking or lightly pinching my nipple every so often until it reaches a certain level of arousal that he’ll use as a signal from my body to him that it’s time for another round.

  Tonight though, his left hand is squarely against my left arm and I can swear he is pressing his hand there rather than resting it, as if he’s trying to signal me: “Feel where my hand is, Lindsey; not where it usually is, right? I know something’s on your mind so what’s going on???”

  No way am I going to say anything, though; not right now, anyway. My friend Kensington had been right; the moment I saw Dustin earlier today for the first time in almost three weeks I should have just blurted out that ominous phrase:

  “Dustin, we need to talk...”

  But I didn’t. Instead, here I was in Dustin’s bed. But when your boyfriend of eleven months comes home from Chicago after being away for two and a half weeks straight for work, you have to have sex, right? I mean, who wouldn’t?

  Someone who met another guy while her boyfriend was out of town and has been out to dinner with this new guy three times... and who has already been in that guy’s bed twice; that’s who.

  Someone like me.

  Nine Days Earlier

  Part I: Zack

  Chapter 1

  Thursday, September 12th

  I had actually noticed Zack Buchanan earlier in the day – twice in fact – hours before we began talking at Cerise, that new bar near the corner of Wilshire and Beverly that my work friends had heard so much about. But I hadn’t actually noticed that I had noticed Zack, if you know what I mean. That is, it wasn’t until a minute or so into our conversation in the noisy bar that I remembered not only having seen him but also having thought to myself at the time that he looked kind of hot, with his shaggy blond hair and surfer-boy-in-his-twenties looks definitely standing out from the crisp haircut, Armani suit crowd that populated our client’s three floors in their office building a few buildings away from this bar. But I saw plenty of hot guys all over L.A. almost every single day, especially when I was working up near Beverly Hills; so not many of them made an instant impression on me to the point where their faces or physiques became immediately imprinted in my memory, haunting my thoughts (and fantasies).

  Then again, being in a steady, monogamous relationship with Dustin Pearson for almost a year usually curtailed my wandering eye and imagination. Not that I didn’t notice a guy here and there and then fantasize about being at dinner or in a club with him, or maybe even something more; but for the most part those fantasies never lasted more than ten or fifteen seconds before I came back to reality.

  And “reality” for me was pretty good overall. My job as a management consultant in one of the top-tier firms involved long hours and was usually fairly stressful, but overall I enjoyed it. Here I was, my Bachelor’s degree in business (double-major: management and finance) from Arizona State less than a year and a half in the rear view mirror. It was also now slightly over the one year mark into my consulting job, an offer that I had actually accepted almost two years ago now. For someone with an undergraduate business degree from ASU, an entry-level job with a big name consulting firm like the one I now worked for was fantastic; just about the best of all the career paths ahead of us, except for maybe going straight out of ASU to some top-twenty MBA program like Harvard or Stanford or Southern Cal. So I not only enjoyed my job – for the most part – I was particularly proud of myself for having landed a position here and getting the opportunity to do some really interesting, intense work.

  And apparently this guy who was approaching me traveled in the same circles.

  “I saw you over at MetroGen earlier today, right?” I heard the voice behind me and turned to see if the question was directed at me. Which I presumed it was, since indeed I had spent the day working with my client at MetroGen Studios. Our firm was doing a project there and I was part of a ten-person team. Other than long days of meeting after meeting in one conference room or another I was having a blast. In the week and a half I had been working at their Beverly Hills location, I had seen four different movie stars strolling through the offices, apparently in the building for some sort of business. We had been warned not to gawk or – much worse – approach some star and ask for an autograph or picture, so the sightings had all been in passing. Still, this was the best project I had been on so far in my year with the firm, and I hadn’t even been there for two weeks.

  For a quick couple of seconds this guy looked familiar, but then I thought that might be because he looked a little like a fairly well-known actor who had been in a lot of comedies for the past decade. Slightly shaggy blond hair; about two days’ worth of stubble; that surfer-dude-in-his-late-twenties image and aura. Very blue eyes, though; the actor I was thinking of didn’t have blue eyes, so I was pretty sure that this particular guy wasn’t anybody famous from the movies. (“I’ve never been with anyone with blue eyes before,” I suddenly realized and said to myself as I locked gazes with this guy.)

  “I was,” I willed a smile onto my face. “You mean the offices near here, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” he replied as he took a drink from whatever trendy orange-tinted beer was in the glass in his right hand. My gaze followed the glass and his hand downward after he finished drinking, and I took in the glossy teal shirt – untucked of course – and stylishly faded jeans. The complete “Hot L.A. Guy” package, I thought to myself just as my brain decided to remind me that I had noticed this guy – wearing the exact same clothes – earlier today at MetroGen. In fact, I had noticed him twice, and the second time had made a mental note that I had seen him earlier in the day. So why did it take me a minute or so to make the connection here at Cerise?

  It doesn’t matter, I told myself and for
ced my attention back to what he was starting to say to me.

  “So do you work there?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No, I’m a consultant there,” and mentioned the name of my firm and a brief acceptable-for-public-knowledge description of the project we were working on. One of the things they drilled into us during our new hire training was to keep our mouths shut about the work we were doing at our clients, because much of it was very sensitive. So far I hadn’t been assigned to any client work that I had to refer to as “Project X” or something like that; you know, “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you” sort of work. Dustin was on one of those right now in Chicago, though, and in fact that work was so sensitive he wasn’t even allowed to tell me or anybody else in the firm (other than the most senior partners who had the right to know pretty much everything) exactly what they were doing out there. He could talk in generalities to others consultants like me, but that was about it; nothing more.

  As this thought crossed through my mind – thinking for a flash of a second about Dustin’s work in Chicago as I gave this guy a quick sound bite of what I was working on at MetroGen – I felt a wave of uneasiness wash over me. Even as I was talking to this guy part of my brain was trying to figure out what had happened, and just as I finished talking I put two and two together. My brain (my conscience?) had insisted on a quick snippet of Dustin – my boyfriend, right? – somehow making its way into my thoughts, but I knew that this bar conversation with L.A. Guy wasn’t going to be ending any time soon.

  * * *

  He introduced himself first.

  “I’m Zack Buchanan,” he offered as he held out his hand as if we were meeting on the fourth floor of the MetroGen offices instead of here in Cerise.

  “I’m Lindsey Barnes,” I replied as I shook his hand.

  “So what are you doing for MetroGen?” I asked, having to raise my voice to be heard above a sudden increase in the bar’s noise level.

  “I’m a marketing consultant,” he answered, but didn’t offer anything more.

  I took the bait.

  “So does that mean you work on advertising campaigns and things like that?”

  He took another sip of his orangey beer.

  “Sort of,” he replied. “I help them take movies that did only so-so in the theaters and position them to do a whole lot better when they come out on cable and DVD, or get released later in other countries, or when they’re available for download. Basically, my whole job is to help them make a lot more money than they have so far from a film that has done nothing and maybe even was clobbered by reviewers. I mean, you could also put it that I help them turn losers into winners by giving them a second chance. You know how some movies do nothing in the theaters and are only there for a couple of weeks and nobody goes to see them, but later they turn into a cult classic on digital that everybody watches over and over? Or a movie that everyone in America hates but is a hit later on somewhere in Europe or Asia?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s what I specialize in, helping studios and distributors put together campaigns to make that happen.”

  “That sounds pretty interesting,” I offered.

  He shrugged.

  “It’s a specialty area in film marketing that not many people or companies focus on.”

  “Do you work for a company that does that?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, I have my own little one-person boutique firm,” he replied.

  I looked at him, trying to gauge how old he was; trying to determine if indeed he was in his late twenties as I had originally guessed. Out here in L.A. it wasn’t uncommon to see a guy who looks to be in his late twenties or early thirties but is actually in his early or mid forties. You get fooled by not just the clothes but all the primping these guys do to look younger than they actually are. I know that goes on everywhere, especially in bigger cities or in certain areas of those cities (like Scottsdale when I’m back home in Phoenix), but it seems that here in L.A., and especially centered around the Beverly Hills and Hollywood area, a whole lot of guys go to great lengths to look ten or fifteen years younger than they actually are.

  And almost always for the sole purpose of appearing hot and virile to much younger women... like me.

  I pressed with some questioning, trying to hone in on his age as well as honestly being interested in what he had told me so far about what he did.

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “For about seven years,” he answered after finishing the last of his beer. “I spent one year after UCLA working for an advertising agency but then I figured I could do just as well on my own, plus I had been thinking about this particular area as a specialty. So I left and set up shop for myself.”

  “So were you a marketing and advertising major at UCLA?” I asked.

  He shook his head but didn’t immediately answer. Instead he looked down at his now-empty beer glass and over at my Cosmo that was almost finished.

  “Can I get you another?” he nodded towards my drink, lowering his eyes for an instant to the glass but then quickly looking upwards again directly at me. “I love his blue eyes!” I thought to myself and felt a bit of a flutter run through me as we locked eyes.

  I looked over at where Kensington and Courtney, my two work friends, were standing and talking to each other, five feet or so away from us. Neither one of them seemed to be in a hurry to leave; at least that’s how it appeared.

  “Sure,” I replied, smiling warmly as I answered.

  “How about your friends?” he said, nodding to where Kensington and Courtney were standing. Instantly I felt a wave of jealousy envelop me. Both of my friends knew of course that I was in a relationship with Dustin, and I could easily see one or both of them automatically assuming that meant making a play for Zack here was fair game since at most I would only be engaging in a little bit of bar flirting... but nothing more. Neither Kensington nor Courtney was in any sort of relationship, even a casual one, at the moment and in fact Kensington had explicitly stated her intentions to “meet a hot young Beverly Hills guy” when she had suggested the three of us go to Cerise after work.

  To my surprise, this was the answer that came back from Kensington directly to Zack, having overheard Zack asking about another round of drinks for them:

  “I think we’re going to leave, so no thanks.”

  Before I could interject – Leave? We had only been here at Cerise for less than an hour! I wasn’t exactly sure that I wanted to leave right now, having just begun talking to Zack – Kensington looked at me and said:

  “You should stay, I just have to get some things done before work tomorrow and I’m feeling a little tired. We should plan on coming back here over the weekend though, I love this place!”

  I looked over at Courtney, who added as she slightly nodded in Zack’s direction, and with him still within earshot:

  “You’re having a good time, go ahead and stay; I’m just getting a little tired also, like Kensie.”

  To my slight irritation Zack responded to both of them with:

  “Are you ladies sure? Just one drink?”

  “No thanks,” Courtney shook her head as she held her hand out to Zack for one of those hello-I-must-be-going types of introductions.

  “I’m Courtney, by the way.” No last name as I had offered, and her “by the way” was definitely code for “...and just so you know, it doesn’t matter if you remember my name or not.”

  “Kensington,” Kensie offered her own hand with the same type of undertones conveyed by the crisp way she offered her own name.

  And that was that. They gathered their Coach computer bags (we had all come straight over to Cerise from the MetroGen offices), and the three of us exchanged parting hugs. As Kensington and I hugged she whispered to me in a lowered voice: “He’s cute!”

  Interesting! I would have expected Kensington to have been all over Zack given her “mission statement” for the evening (to dip
into the vocabulary of our world of consulting for a moment), and especially after confirming that she thought he was as attractive as I did. But for whatever reason, she was backing off and apparently giving me the first shot at him. But she knew I was with Dustin; so WTF???

  Anyway, Courtney and Kensington left and I was sure we would have plenty to talk about tomorrow morning at work. I turned my attention back to Zack, who had slipped away to the bar to order the next round of drinks... for just him and me...

  He returned, Cosmo for me and another orangey beer for him. He handed my drink to me and raised his slightly; a half toast. I did likewise as he answered my question from about three minutes earlier.

  “I was a film major at UCLA,” he said. “I did take a few marketing classes from the business school as electives but I spent most of my time taking classes like “Film and Social Change” and “Writing Television Comedy Scripts.”

  “Wow!” I blurted out, instantly imagining that my somewhat dry, routine curriculum during my four years at ASU had instead been filled with classes like the ones he had just mentioned.

  “So how did you wind up at an ad agency with that major?”

  He shrugged as he sipped his beer.

  “I found all of those courses interesting, but not necessarily where I wanted to start focusing when I graduated. I mean, there’s probably fifty people in this bar right now” – he quickly looked around Cerise as if surveying the crowded room – “who have a pitch for a TV show or film sitting on the desk of somebody in the business at this very moment. And to be honest with you, even though I did pretty well in those types of creative courses I was nowhere near the best in the class, and I could see a future behind the bar here” – he nodded towards the bar to his left, and specifically to the four bartenders hustling to fill the accelerating pace of drink orders, most of them looking fairly stressed as they did – “or waiting tables somewhere if I went down that path. So instead, I headed to an ad agency that specialized in film marketing, and wound up on the creative teams that specialized in what I mentioned I still do.”