by Lynn Costa
And after a couple minutes of us laying there, when Dustin rolled onto his left side and was now facing me – watching me – a strange sensation came over me. This was my reality; at least for now. I had already broken the spell of the previous week when I stumbled back into Dustin’s apartment last night and when I let him undress me and when I put the condom on him the same way I had put it onto Zack only a couple nights earlier. (As Dustin handed the unwrapped condom to me my mind immediately tried to show me the “Trojans and ‘Cocks” clip from the mental replay of last Saturday’s dinner with Zack, but I was able to quickly force the images from my mind.) I didn’t know what next week would bring with Dustin back in Chicago and Zack back here in L.A., but right now – this late September Sunday morning, for at least the next couple of hours – Dustin and I were together as always.
Later on this day, when I would tell Kensie all about what had happened, she would tell me that she knew exactly how I felt; that I was “in the moment” and able to shut out thoughts of Zack and feeling like I really was with him and now I was cheating on him; all of that. Almost exactly like I had been able to shut out thoughts of Dustin when I was with Zack, right?
Anyway, when Dustin turned on his side facing me, I rolled onto my right side facing him and scooted closer to him until our bodies were pressed against one another. I could feel him immediately get hard and as he did, I lifted my left leg and locked it behind his butt so as he continued getting hard he would do so between my legs. I began kissing him – morning breath and all, neither of us had gotten up to brush our teeth yet – and for the next half an hour our sex was what I’m sure Dustin had expected last night to be like.
And the whole time, I didn’t think about Zack.
* * *
We got dressed afterwards and walked to one of the nearby delis; just like a normal Sunday morning. We grabbed a copy of the L.A. Times, just like a normal Sunday morning. We ordered omelets and hash browns, just like a normal Sunday morning. We chit-chatted about work and the weather and Dustin’s impending trip back to Chicago, just like a normal Sunday morning.
It felt like a normal Sunday morning.
But of course, it wasn’t.
I wished Dustin would just vanish and be replaced by Kensie or Courtney or my sister Lauren – geez, even my Mom! – so I could tell somebody, anybody, the whole story about what had happened and try to make some sense out of it... and what would happen next. Dustin might be leaving in a couple hours and Zack would be returning, but I honestly didn’t see how in the world I could go back to being with Zack and, at the same time, cordoning Dustin off into a tiny corner of my mind by virtue of his being back in Chicago.
But all the time part of my mind churned through this mess, I smiled every so often at my boyfriend and read one part of the Sunday paper while he read another as we both ate our breakfasts.
Just like a normal Sunday morning.
We had just finished and the waitress had cleared our plates, and we were relaxing with our final refills of coffee, when Dustin’s cell phone chimed. A split second later, mine chimed as well. I felt my heart jump into my throat! I thought the ringer on my phone was still turned off, as I had done yesterday morning a second after Dustin rang my apartment’s doorbell. I must have bumped the ringer setting on the side of the phone when I had been fishing in my purse for lip gloss a few moments ago, I thought to myself. OMG, it’s finally Zack getting back to me! I was certain of it!
I was wrong, though. The text I received was in fact the exact same one that Dustin received... and about 25 other people at our firm received, including Kensie and Courtney.
URGENT Chicago project team expanded as of Monday night. Those of you receiving this who are now on MetroGen will fly to Chicago Monday to be onsite by Tuesday 8:00 CST. Those of you receiving this currently on Chicago project need to get next flight there TODAY even if scheduled later - check e-mail for details
Dustin looked up from his cell phone at the same moment as I did. I wondered if he could detect that the shock I was actually feeling was a hundred times whatever might be showing on my face at that moment.
* * *
We both checked our work e-mail accounts on our phone and sure enough, we had both received the same e-mail that had been mentioned in the group text message. Basically, MetroGen abruptly decided to put a temporary hold on our project. Nobody knew how long “temporary” might be but the motto in our business, and especially at our firm, was “nobody sits on the bench.” In real-people language, that meant that if you finished up work at a client for whatever reason, you had better be on another billable assignment the next day. Ordinarily, a sudden halt to a project like MetroGen would mean it would be at least a couple days, maybe even longer, until consultants like me would be placed on another project somewhere else; at least a little lead time was needed.
But as fate would have it, Dustin’s Chicago client had decided they needed about ten more people from our firm for “the foreseeable future” (according to the e-mail), and guess what: ten of us were becoming available as a result of MetroGen’s sudden pause. So off to Chicago I would be going, and Kensie, and Courtney, and the Nerd Brothers (Steve and Jack, who had gone to New York with me); and five others.
We would have a half day – tomorrow morning – to finish up whatever we were working on at MetroGen, or at least to get any longer-term work into a state where somebody else might pick it up a couple weeks or couple months from now, but by tomorrow afternoon we should all be on flights headed to Chicago.
Curiously, Dave Evers wasn’t on the list but at the moment I wasn’t giving that too much thought. Okay, I wasn’t giving his absence any thought other than reciting a quick, silent prayer that at least I wouldn’t have to put up with Dave’s bullshit and deal with everything that I knew was waiting for us out in Chicago, from what Dustin had been telling me all along the way.
My mind was, however, focused on one very important, very worrisome problem: what would this mean for Zack and me if I was now stranded in Chicago?
And for that matter, what would this mean for Dustin and me?
* * *
The instructions in the text had been clear. Dustin was immediately on his phone to log into our firm’s travel website and change his flight to one he could make and still pick up his car on the way at the Santa Monica Pier, where we had left it last night. I was just about to see if I could make a flight reservation for tomorrow afternoon when a text from Kensington came through:
U believe this? WTF???
Realizing that Kensie knew absolutely nothing about the latest with Dustin and Zack – no doubt she presumed I had done the dirty deed of breaking up with Dustin sometime yesterday – I sent her back a quick text that read “Yeah – text you back in a little bit, WITH DUSTIN RIGHT NOW.” I’m sure she was wondering how in the world that could possibly be, but no doubt she was astute enough to catch my meaning that whatever was going on I didn’t want to do any back-and-forth texting while Dustin was around.
The rest of the morning was a blur. Dustin and I agreed that we would each go back to our respective apartments straight from the deli, since he had to hurry and do any additional packing (he hadn’t actually unpacked since he had been back such a short time, but he did have to swap out some dirty clothes for clean ones) and then get going to pick up his car. I thought about volunteering to go down to Santa Monica to pick up his car for him so he could go straight to LAX from Beverly Hills, but caught myself as I was about to make that offer. I didn’t exactly have a lot of time myself, and besides packing and finishing up my travel arrangements I desperately wanted to sit down with Kensie – or anybody! – and talk about what had happened with Dustin.
So we parted on the street in front of the deli. Dustin took my hand as we walked outside, led me a few steps away from the front door, and then turned to me and looked me in the eyes for a few seconds. He leaned in to kiss me gently, for about five seconds, and then pulled back to gaze at me again.
Just like Zack had done outside Vivant, only a few blocks from here, after our first dinner date.
I watched Dustin hail a cab that was just passing by and when the cab stopped he took a couple of steps in that direction but then stopped, turned to me, and with a half-pained, half-happy look on his face said:
“See you tomorrow night in Chicago.”
Dustin...
* * *
Kensie had that combined OMG-WTF look on her face the whole time I told her what had happened.
We had met for dinner at Cerise, a choice she had suggested and which I had agreed to... even though the moment I walked into the place I wished we were anywhere else. Too much of Zack’s aura, or actually Zack’s-and-my-combined aura, still enveloped this place.
Kensie was appalled that Zack had basically disappeared from the face of the earth, and she ran through the same list of possible explanations that I had gone through myself over and over and over since Friday night. She did add one that I hadn’t thought of, though: a broken cell phone, with “broken” meaning totally smashed and not working at all. I felt a cold sweat break out all over my body as my mind raced through a scenario of Zack having dropped his phone, discovered it not working, but not having time this weekend to get a replacement.
“But he would have called me or texted me from his hotel phone, right?” I countered and even as I said those words, I realized that I wasn’t making any sense. Texting me from a hotel room phone? Um, can’t do that, Lindsey...
As for calling me from his hotel phone, Kensington refuted that possibility.
“Who even knows anybody’s phone number these days? We all just go to our Contacts or Favorites and press a cell phone screen. Who actually presses numbers anymore unless it’s a brand new number that you’ll probably save in your Contacts anyway?”
“I know my sister Lauren’s number,” I protested.
Kensie smirked.
“Okay, what’s my number?”
She had me, but I tried anyway.
My brow furled as I weakly offered:
“It starts with ‘376’ right?”
She shook her head, still smirking.
“Close – ‘763’ – right numbers, wrong order. See what I mean?”
I tried this: “But his contacts should have synched to his computer, right?”
Kensie countered with: “But maybe he hasn’t synched his phone in more than a week.”
Finally, I conceded. A possible explanation for not hearing from Zack was a broken cell phone, meaning that he had no way of contacting me. If that had happened, then I had been so incredibly hurt and pissed off at Zack that I had allowed myself to get totally drunk and all sentimental about Dustin, and had slept with him... twice!
“Forget about Zack for a moment,” Kensie said. “You still had plenty of chances to break up with Dustin. What happened?”
I had already told her the story in a jumbled, out-of-order narrative of fragments but in response to her question, I went back to waking up Saturday morning and told her everything that I could remember: the two dozen roses, Dustin’s pained “confession” about hating his job and how miserably unhappy he was, the picnic... all of it. When I had finished Kensie said, a bit more cynically than I would have liked:
“Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s pretty much what you told me Thursday at lunch, that you really weren’t ready to break up with Dustin.”
I was immediately on the defensive.
“You mean here?” I thought she was talking about when she, Courtney, and I had eaten lunch here at Cerise.
“No, the day before then; outside,” she corrected me. Then I remembered our sort-of-heated discussion while eating our baguettes; a discussion that had started with me telling her that I hadn’t been planning on breaking up with Dustin despite having slept with Zack the night before; that since Dustin was supposed to be in Chicago for the next couple of weeks including weekends, I wasn’t going to think about a breakup scene for that entire time while things moved forward back here with Zack.
“Come on, Lindsey,” Kensie said sharply at first but then she softened her tones. She could be pretty snarky, almost bitchy, even to friends but I could tell in the year I had known her that she was increasingly making an effort to dial down her bitch-meter whenever she caught herself talking that way.
“You’ve gone out with two guys at the same time before, right? You know, an overlap between somebody you’re dating and a new guy you’ve met, and for a couple of weeks you go out with both of them; usually with them not knowing about each other. It’s exactly like you said you were going to do... sort of, even though with Dustin in Chicago you technically wouldn’t be going out on actual dates with him during that same time you would be with Zack.”
“Yeah, but now I’ll be in Chicago. With Dustin!”
“So what?” Kensie again had gone up a couple notches on the bitch-meter with those two words before she caught herself. “Obviously if you slept with Dustin and couldn’t bring yourself to break up with him, there’s at least something still there. Like I said, you knew yourself well enough to know that it wasn’t time to end things. I figured that with things so hot between you and Zack, and with Dustin headed back here, the time was right to break up with him; Dustin, I mean. But obviously not. And now you have your chance to figure it all out, just a little bit differently than you thought it would be. You know, being with Dustin in Chicago while you see from a distance how things might going with Zack.”
“But what about Zack???” I was almost crying now. “I have no chance now to try and fix things if I’m in Chicago for the next month or however long it will be...”
“Fix things?” Kensington interrupted me, her eyes narrowing. “Technically, you don’t have to ‘fix’ anything.” She made little air quotes around “fix.”
“As far as Zack knows,” she continued, “he was gone and you were here, and he is the one that for whatever reason didn’t get in touch with you. He doesn’t need to know anything about what happened with Dustin, and you can make him feel shitty for not contacting...”
My turn to interrupt.
“You think I shouldn’t say anything at all to him about...” – our waitress was coming back to our table, so I continued with “...you know” instead of saying “sleeping with Dustin” or something specific like that.
“Why would you? I mean, if we wind up in Chicago for a month or two and then come back here and you pick things up with Zack, why tell him about Dustin? Just tell him that you ‘didn’t quite break up’ but nothing more than that.”
I let out a sigh of terrible frustration and personal agony.
“This is too much,” I said as I actually lowered my head into my arms resting on the table. “I can’t believe how much everything changed in less than two days. Friday morning I was looking forward to a great weekend with Zack, and now this...”
My voice trailed off and a few seconds later I felt Kensie’s hand fall gently on my head that was still face-down into my crossed arms.
“It’ll all work out,” she said soothingly.
I knew she was just saying that, and from my perspective I could see no way at all that it would “all work out.”
Chapter 12
Monday, September 23rd
Monday morning at MetroGen was a frenzied whirlwind. Every one of us – even Dave Evers, who wouldn’t be accompanying us to Chicago – scrambled to look at every document we had written and add a paragraph or two at the end; the intention was to help somebody different who might get assigned to work on this project if we wouldn’t be coming back. We must have had ten meetings that morning – a lot considering we were all gone from there by noon – but each meeting was about five or ten minutes. We just ran back and forth between conference room (after being called on a moment’s notice throughout the morning) and our desks. I barely had time for one rest room visit the entire morning. All in all it was easily the most stressful workday I’ve had so far at this firm,
and that included the shitty days in New York that pushed my first-night-of-sex dinner date with Zack back by two days, as well as the day last week when Dave Evers was on the warpath.
And all the while, my own mind was a whirlwind, flipping back and forth between wondering what had gone wrong with Zack and me – no sign of him yet here at MetroGen all morning, and believe me I was on the lookout for him! – and what was going to happen when Dustin and I were “together” in Chicago for... well, who knew how long it would be. To Dustin, this past Saturday night and Sunday morning had been no more than a reunion of boyfriend and girlfriend after several weeks apart, just with that slight “hiccup” of some awkward sex the first time.
To me, though, this past weekend was so different than I imagined it would be that I honestly felt as if I had no control over my life at all. Not just the whole Zack-and-Dustin problem, but my work life as well. On somebody’s whim, I found out on Sunday morning that the next day I needed to be on a plane to Chicago and any personal plans I may have made based on where I had thought I would be – you know, working in L.A.; near home – had to just be tossed aside. So even without this complication of having slept with Dustin, my brand new relationship with Zack was being compromised.
In fact, suppose that Dustin weren’t in the picture at all; suppose I had never gone out with him in the first place, or we had broken up a while ago. And forget that Zack disappeared on me this weekend; let’s pretend that he hadn’t gone to San Francisco, or that he did but had texted me and called me throughout the weekend.
So that meant that even without my real-life complications, I would have just started this hot new relationship with Zack but after only one week, because of my job, I might not see him for weeks or a month or even longer. And for all I knew, that would have been the death blow to our relationship before it even got going.
