The Overlap

by Lynn Costa

  Anyway, the two years with Andrew were pretty good for the most part. Not just the sex; we had a lot of fun together. The summer we were both working in San Francisco we spent most weekends going on wine tours up in Napa and Sonoma, or taking long getaway drives both up and down the coast, or seeing the city. That summer had been a whole different dimension to our relationship than our time together during school and back in Phoenix, and had been fantastic.

  But like most second-half-of-college-years relationships, ours came with a built-in expiration date that was timestamped for sometime during the summer following graduation. Neither one of us really talked much about our future (or lack thereof) as our senior year ticked away towards commencement, though one time Andrew did bring up the idea of me asking the consulting firm to switch to being assigned to their Philadelphia office instead of L.A. I gave Andrew a half-hearted answer that I would check into it but didn’t think it was possible because I was slated to work in their Entertainment and Media practice which was based out of L.A. In fact, I had jumped at the chance for that particular job. The summer internship up in San Francisco had been fun, but they had me working mostly with computer industry clients and to be honest, the work itself was pretty boring. But Entertainment and Media? Epic!

  I never did check into switching to a Philadelphia-based job, and I’m pretty sure Andrew knew that I never did, even though I never explicitly told him so. So right around the first of June, about three weeks after graduation, we sat down and mutually decided that the time had come to break up. It wasn’t a particularly tearful scene, but I was surprised when about two days later the “shock” of not being in that particular relationship anymore hit me one morning just as I woke up, and I spent almost an entire month feeling like total crap. I was moody, and snapped at everyone in my family almost any time anybody said something to me. It didn’t have to be about Andrew; if my mother asked me what I wanted for dinner any particular day in June I would find some reason to yell at her just for asking that question.

  Finally, my sister Lauren, who is three years older than me, made me go to dinner with her one night up in Scottsdale right before the Fourth of July, to this new place that had just opened by Fashion Square, my favorite mall in all of the Phoenix area. We sat outside on the patio even though the sun was still high in the Arizona sky at 6:30 and the temperature was still around 102 degrees, but underneath the water misters we were actually fairly comfortable as we watched the sun slowly slide downwards while we plowed through not only martinis but various gourmet flatbreads until we were both more stuffed than either of us had been in a long while.

  Basically, over the course of two hours Lauren told me again and again to get over myself; breakups happen all the time, and this one in particular with Andrew was not only months in the making but was the best thing in the world for me at this point in my life. She talked me through the other alternatives I had considered but dismissed, such as following him to Philadelphia or trying to have a cross-country long-distance relationship while he was in grad school and I was starting my new career out in L.A. Or even (putting everything on the table for the sake of completeness) getting married! By the end of dinner (and three martinis later for each of us) I was feeling much better that I had indeed made the right decision. We left her car there and called a cab to take us home since neither of us was in driving condition (Lauren lived about ten minutes away from my parents’ house down in Chandler, so the one cab would work for both of us), but halfway home we abruptly had the cab pull off the highway to take us to one of the bars near the main Arizona State campus. Lauren had decided that a hookup was just the thing I needed to complete my “healing” and as buzzed as I was, I was inclined to agree. It didn’t happen; for me anyway, though Lauren did meet some older guy who was around thirty, and went home with him. So after she left I grabbed another cab back home, gave my mother (who was waiting up for me) a sort-of-apology for being such a bitch the past month, and did my best not to throw up before passing out.

  I did hook up with two other guys at various points during the rest of the summer. Everyone agreed that I needed some rebound sex to wash away any remaining misgivings about breaking up with Andrew and to help keep me from backsliding and getting back together with him, and who was I to argue with them? (“Everyone” except my parents, that is, though I’ll bet if I weren’t their daughter they would have made the vote unanimous.) The first guy was a one-nighter I met in mid-July at that same bar near ASU that Lauren and I had gone to a couple of weeks earlier, and the second guy I met at a baseball game in early August and besides me staying at his downtown loft the night I met him, we also spent one more night together the following weekend; but then that was it.

  Throughout August I did a little bit of preparation work for the upcoming new college hire program every time the firm e-mailed me new information (and I was getting at least two e-mails every day from someone there). I managed to get in a lot of pool and tanning time, both at home in my parents’ backyard as well as at least once a week with a couple of my girlfriends at one of the resorts that offered day packages. I had received a $7,500 signing bonus as part of my job offer, with half of that already paid to me. So even without a summer job, I had a couple thousand dollars to spend having a good time during my last summer before joining the “real world,” as my Dad liked to put it.

  Labor Day arrived and shortly after noon that day, I powered down my cell phone as my nonstop flight to Miami – almost five flying hours, plus losing three more hours because of the time zone change – took to the air from Sky Harbor and I began this next stage of my life.

  * * *

  The last thing in the world I had intended to do during the eight weeks of training in Miami was get involved with someone... at least someone in my training program, and definitely not anything even close to a “relationship.” I figured that if I made friends with some of the other girls in the class we would be going to South Beach clubs on weekends, and there was a good chance of hooking up with some guy down there. But that would be it.

  As it turned out, though, the first opportunity any of us had to go out to any clubs was in a group consisting of ten of us; almost one-third of our entire new college hire class. That was the first weekend we were in Miami, but only after we had endured four incredibly long days that began the Tuesday right after Labor Day.

  Our long week started when they had us in our training room at 8:00 that Tuesday morning even though most of us finally made it to the hotel fairly late Labor Day night, and for four days they brought in lunches and dinners while we listened to lecture after lecture, broken up only by group exercises where we at least got to talk with one another. We didn’t even get off of the training floor of the building until after 8:30 each night... only to go back to our rooms for about two or three hours of reading and assignments that had to be completed by the next morning. This was turning into something like a college finals week on steroids; non-stop, exhausting, and stressful.

  Still, I was already enjoying my plunge into the full-time, post-graduation work world and figured that even if the training program remained this intensive the entire time (which I had heard wasn’t the case; supposedly at the halfway point they lightened up a bit), it was only for eight weeks and then I would be off to L.A. and the temporary corporate apartment they would be putting me up in at no cost until I found my own apartment or located a house to share with some of the other new consultants, or whatever I would decide.

  That first Friday night, almost everyone was too exhausted to do anything more than break into smaller groups to go to dinner at 9:00, or even later, after they let us go for the weekend. I was so tired that I went to the hotel restaurant with six of the other girls in the class, and immediately after dinner we all went up to our rooms for the night. I started watching a pay-per-view movie, some rom-com I had missed over the summer that had gotten only mediocre reviews anyway, but wound up wasting twelve dollars since I think I fell asleep no more than ten minu
tes into it.

  The next night, however, was a different story.

  I slept until almost noon that Saturday then went to the hotel’s exercise room to work out. I had done nothing exercise-wise for five days now and was already feeling “meh” because of it. I figured I would go through a circuit on the weight machines and then go outside to run, even though I was having a lot of difficulty with the Miami humidity. It gets pretty hot in Phoenix during the summer, but our dry heat that everyone makes so much fun of (“Yeah, it’s a dry heat... but it’s also 130 degrees!”) was turning out to be easier on me than the high humidity here in southern Florida. Still, I figured I could get a couple miles of running in without too much trouble.

  I never made it outside, though.

  There was only one other person in the exercise room; this guy Josh Chamberlain from our class. Actually, that would be Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain IV, from Maine via Dartmouth, as he told one and all when we took turns introducing ourselves that first day of training. Apparently he was a great-great-great-nephew or twelfth cousin or something like that of some famous Civil War hero who later was Governor of Maine back in the 1800s. He wasn’t a direct descendant but shared that guy’s name, and he definitely came across as carrying an air of supreme self-importance; you know, the “legend in his own mind” type because of his pedigree rather than having actually accomplished anything yet.

  Ego aside, Josh Chamberlain was fantastic looking: almost six feet tall, not over-muscled but definitely ripped (I would get some serious close-up time with his six-pack before too long), and darker-complexioned than you would think “someone from Maine via Dartmouth” would be. Jet-black hair, $350 haircut. Canali, Armani, Burberry, and a splash of Brooks Brothers comprising what we had seen so far of his wardrobe. Pretty much a poster boy for “Ivy League guy turned junior management consultant.” He was headed to our midtown office in New York, and I could easily see him fitting in with the young, hot Manhattan crowd.

  Anyway, we had said only a couple of words to each other over the past four days, mostly because we had each gravitated towards different cliques that were forming in the class. The one I was in was all girls, seven of us, while his was a group of eight that was comprised of a couple other New England preppies and some Southern California types. Plus there were five guys and three girls in his little cluster there, and to the rest of us he seemed to have his eye on one of those SoCal girls, at least for the first couple of days.

  We started talking in the exercise room as he trailed one behind me on the machines. Mostly we talked about our training program so far and some of the people in our class: pretty safe, bland topics. But a bit of flirtation by each of us made its way into the conversation, and we made plans to be in the same group from our class heading out to dinner that evening and then to at least a couple of clubs afterwards.

  Our group went to dinner at this South Beach fusion place our instructors unanimously agreed we could not miss while we were in Miami. I sat next to Josh and of the two hours we were there, Josh and I spent probably an hour and forty-five minutes talking only to each other. We were so blatant that about fifteen minutes before we left one of the guys with us who was sitting directly across the table looked at both of us, rolled his eyes in mock exasperation, and – not caring at all what he said after about five martinis – growled: “Will you two get a room already?”

  (Already have one ready and waiting, I thought to myself. Thank heavens the firm where we worked wasn’t one of the others we had heard about that made you have a roommate for weeks while going through training. So a nice, private luxury hotel room with a king-sized bed was just waiting patiently...)

  Somewhere around 1:30 in the morning after visiting a couple of clubs with the rest of the group, Josh and I stumbled into the elevator in the hallway off the lobby and during the twenty seconds or so it took to get up to the 33rd floor where his room was, we had picked up where we had left off in the cab on the way back from the last club we had been at. In the cab it had been some serious deep kissing, his hand high on the inside of my bare right thigh, partially and slightly underneath the very short skirt I was wearing; his fingers every so often brushing upwards to lightly graze my thong for half a second, getting me hotter than I had been in a long time. Then in the elevator he pulled me close to him as we resumed kissing and this time he slid his hands under my skirt against my bare ass cheeks peeking out from my thong...

  Everyone in the entire class, not just those who were in our group that first Saturday night, knew that Josh and I had hooked up. Our instructors knew it too, and I could tell they were keeping an extra-close eye on both of us the entire next week. One of the lectures on our first week’s itinerary had been all about the firm’s policies regarding relationships among employees. The woman who gave us that two-hour lecture was the partner in charge of the firm’s Human Resources group, and she told us that whereas some of the other consulting companies had very strict rules against relationships among their employees, ours was fairly lenient. We went through the standard pitch about sexual harassment and what blatant – and illegal – actions were grounds for immediate dismissal. She also covered the next tier down: various scenarios which weren’t outright harassment or illegal, but which were viewed as damaging to the morale and operations of the firm and were subject to disciplinary action, up to and including being fired.

  However, she was also pretty cool about telling us that in any professional setting where young, unmarried professionals wound up working together, relationships were bound to result. Consequently, the primary rule she stressed to us was that if we entered into a relationship with another employee – whether a “single-night project” (as she tongue-in-cheek referred to hooking up) or something longer-term – as long as we left our libidos outside the workplace and working hours, there should be no problems at all. And when a relationship ended, it needed to end professionally: no angry texts to one another; no social media back-and-forth flame-war posts; no posting any previously hidden drunken making-out (or worse) pictures or videos for the world to see; none of that.

  “I don’t care how many angry, dramatic breakups you had during high school or college,” she warned us. “You will not have any here, at least to the point where working relationships are affected. And God help you if you ever play out a toxic breakup in front of a client; you will find yourself fired!”

  She even gave us a 25-question quiz that was comprised of various scenarios and every one of us had to score at least 92% otherwise we had to retake the quiz over and over until we did. Fortunately, I had no problem with mine the first time through: perfect score!

  And so all eyes were on Josh Chamberlain and me that week, wanting to see if we would be texting each other during our classes or showing up together late in the morning, or anything like that. No way! Both Josh and I were on high alert and that entire second week, we only got together one time; that Wednesday I spent in his room and since it had now been four whole days since that first Saturday night we had together, I was really ready for a steamy night, as I’m sure Josh was. And we didn’t disappoint each other.

  The pattern repeated pretty much the same for the next two weeks. Then that third week “together” I spent one of the weeknights in his room where we had sex over and over until around 4:00 in the morning. I was dead on my feet the next day and it took every bit of willpower and about two gallons of coffee to get me through that day’s lectures and group exercises, but that night Josh stayed in my room and we had an encore presentation of the previous night.

  But when the weekend came, and I expected that Josh and I would do something together at least one of the days we didn’t have any classes, he surprised me over lunch on Friday by saying that two of his Dartmouth fraternity brothers were going to be up in Fort Lauderdale and he was going to hang out with them for the weekend. At first, I didn’t really care, given that we had just had two nights in a row of the best sex yet. But as the weekend went on, and I didn’t even hear
from him by text, I began to get increasingly pissed.

  I was in my room studying Sunday night around 7:30 when he finally texted me:

  Back now want 2 come up?

  I was fuming. I went storming out of my room to the stairwell to stomp the two flights up to the floor where his room was. I was just about to head down the hall to his room to start yelling at him when I realized that angry or not, I was doing exactly what he had “asked” me to do in his text: come up to his room. I stomped right back down the stairs, down the hall to my own room, and as soon as I flopped onto my bed I called him from my cell phone.

  He didn’t even have a chance to say “Hello” or “Hi” – the best he was able to do was squeak out the “H” sound – when I launched into him.

  “You dick! You’re ready for me to come up to your room NOW for a booty call, now that you’re back from hanging out with your Dartmouth FRIENDS?”

  I instantly regretted the last part – it made me sound possessive, like one of those girls who won’t let her boyfriend hang out with his buddies – but I didn’t really care. I got my message across in the first part. Here was Joshua L. Chamberlain IV, back from the “battles” in Forth Lauderdale, and he was signaling to me that it was time for him to be “serviced.”

  We argued back and forth for about five minutes, both of us in lowered tones. We had already inadvertently found out that the walls in this hotel, luxury or not, were sort of on the thin side. The morning after the first night Josh and I had sex together I ran into Whitney Anderson in the hotel restaurant. I hadn’t realized that she was in the room to the right of Josh’s until she mentioned that to me, and then smirked:

  “I counted three.”

  At first I looked at her like I didn’t know what she was talking about – which I didn’t, at least initially – but as soon as I realized where her room was and that she had been counting my orgasms, I turned as bright of a shade of red as was possible.