by Lynn Costa
Anyway, just about the time the lunch order arrived (sandwiches today instead of pizza again; at least that was something positive since I was able to grab a turkey sub, so maybe today would be a healthier eating day than yesterday had been), we all took about fifteen minutes to slow down on our work – not quite stop, since discussions about the change in strategy continued in smaller groups within the room – and check e-mails, enter our travel expenses into our online website so we could get reimbursed; that sort of thing.
I was looking at my e-mails, trying to get the number of unread messages in my mailbox under 100, when a brand new one came in with the subject line of “L.A. Practice Organizational Announcement.” I immediately opened it and received the news that effective yesterday, Dave Evers “had decided to resign from the firm to pursue other career opportunities” and that “the Los Angeles practice and the firm wish Dave the best in his new endeavors.”
I looked across the table at Kensington, who was talking to a guy named Rick Worthington from our Seattle office who had been part of the original team along with Dustin that had come to Chicago right after Labor Day. Kensie obviously was interested in Rick; he was really good looking and had an MBA from Ohio State, so he was about the same age as Kensie with her own MBA from Michigan. In fact, Kensie used the longstanding Michigan-Ohio State rivalry as an excuse to personally introduce herself to Rick yesterday morning after the brief go-around for the entire team in which we each gave our names, what office we were from, how long we had been with the firm, and what degree or degrees we had and from where. After lunch yesterday some seat shuffling occurred and Kensie made sure that she sat next to Rick for the entire afternoon, and she was back next to him this morning as well.
I knew Kensie was really into Rick because we had both slipped out of the conference room around 10:00 this morning to go to the rest room, and on the way there she lowered her voice and jokingly asked me: “Do you think ‘Kensington Worthington’ sounds like too snobby of a name?”
Anyway, I caught her eye and said “look at your e-mail!” The tone of my voice and the look on my face told her that this was something epic, and sure enough as she read you could see the same look come to her own face.
“Wow!” was all she could blurt out as Rick looked over at Kensie’s laptop to see what she was looking at that had caused that reaction.
“A Senior Manager in our office,” Kensie told him. “We were just working for him at MetroGen!”
More than half of the people in the room were from our L.A. office and within about thirty seconds, we all knew. Nobody wanted to say the words out loud, but we all knew that “pursue other career opportunities” was business world language for “was fired.”
So they actually did it! The firm didn’t even wait until Dave went before the partner committee in a couple of weeks. With MetroGen on hold, they apparently had decided that not only was he not going to make partner, but also to get rid of Dave immediately. So that probably explained why he wasn’t on the team that was sent out here to Chicago.
As the afternoon dragged on and I wandered from meeting to meeting in different rooms, I found myself thinking off and on about Dave Evers and his abruptly getting fired. On the one hand, I really didn’t like him very much. His impromptu total waste of a trip to New York that dragged me along; his nasty behavior last week at MetroGen with his bullshit about me being responsible for conflicting meetings the clients had actually scheduled; his snarky pointing to his watch when I was only a couple minutes late into a conference room for a meeting that hadn’t even started yet; none of that would be missed.
But at the same time I couldn’t help wonder if maybe having to work in environments such as this one here in Chicago had made him that way. Maybe long ago, when he was right out of college and had just joined the firm – so basically, in the same position I now was – he had been a decent, fun guy who got along well with people like Rick and Kensie and Courtney and me. Maybe as his career progressed at the firm he had been on more than a few assignments like this one, and that had turned him into the nasty, dysfunctional consulting manager that I had experienced.
I didn’t know, and probably would never know. I wished I could talk about it to someone – someone like Zack, of course, with his keen instincts and knowledge of this business. In fact Zack in particular, right? It wasn’t so much that I wanted to talk about Dave Evers per se, but rather from the aspect of my own career. If I were to stay at this firm for fifteen or twenty years and make my way through promotions and raises, was there a chance that I could wind up being like Dave Evers as I knew him?
Anyway, despite the immense relief that I would never again be working for Dave Evers, I did feel a little bit sad for him... and more than a little bit worried for myself down the road.
But first, I needed to get through all of this, and Wednesday was turning out to be as much “fun” (not) as Tuesday had been. We finished up a little bit earlier tonight, 8:00 instead of 8:30, but since we had started at 7:00 this morning instead of 8:00 A.M. as we had done on Tuesday, we actually had a longer working day than yesterday.
Dustin and I ate at the hotel restaurant this time, and then we went up to his room. I had upped my beer consumption from last night – three instead of two, consumed one after another; pretty quickly, too – and was fairly buzzed by the time we walked through his hotel room door. Between the stress and the alcohol, I once again felt like that overhead light with the dimmer switch on the lowest setting.
So I once again pretended that Zack, not Dustin, was behind me and thrusting into me, while I was on my knees on the bed, moaning as my body quickly came to life.
Once again, I got the endorphin release I so desperately needed.
And once again, I drifted off to sleep with confused and guilty feelings of multiple betrayal.
* * *
So far, nothing further from Zack. And as Thursday went along, and then Friday, I found myself thinking about him and our time together a little bit less each day.
By Friday night, we all got an unexpected, very welcome reprieve from the endless hours of work. At 6:30 the partners in charge decided that we were all done for the night, and in fact we could even have the weekend off without having to work because with so many of us working on the project for so many hours, we were actually on schedule with the latest round of revision work. The “fun” would resume Monday morning, but at least for this final weekend of September, our presence in our client’s office was not required.
About half of the team scrambled to get late flights back to L.A. or whatever other city they might be from, or at least get on an early Saturday morning flight. Under different circumstances, I would have been one of them: frantically trying to catch a flight back to LAX so I could meet Zack tonight and unexpectedly spend the weekend with him. But of course, given how everything had turned out, that wasn’t going to happen.
Dustin and I briefly talked about going back home for the weekend but decided with the usual travel delays out of and back into O’Hare, why bother. Instead, we would just stay here in Chicago and have a relaxing weekend together; almost a mini-vacation, paid for by our firm because technically we were still on business travel. We could put our hotel rooms, our meals, pretty much anything for the weekend on our expense reports and get reimbursed.
Courtney did head back to L.A., but Kensie decided to stay here in Chicago. Big surprise! She told me Thursday morning that she had hooked up with Rick Worthington Wednesday night, and I knew they had been together last night as well. Maybe it would just turn out to be a business travel fling, but at least for now Kensington was really hot for Rick and they both decided to stay in Chicago for the weekend.
As this news came down to us Friday evening and we all declared our intentions to stay in Chicago or go home for the weekend, Rick actually suggested that the four of us – he and Kensie, Dustin and me – go out for dinner. Of course he knew nothing at all about the backstory to Dustin and me – especially the Zack
Buchanan part of the tale – and I knew Kensie wouldn’t betray my secret to him. Still, the thought of Dustin and me as a couple, double-dating with Kensie and some new guy she was really into, actually made me queasy so I politely declined Rick’s idea before Dustin could chime in, with the promise of “maybe next weekend if we’re lucky enough to get time off again.”
So Friday night Dustin and I walked over to Navy Pier and waited more than an hour for dinner on the patio at some mediocre restaurant there. However it wasn’t an exceptional meal either of us was after that night, but rather the opportunity to just get outside after hour upon hour of being stuck in conference rooms for days on end; the intense desire to walk around downtown Chicago like a tourist and take in fresh air (such as it was in traffic-congested downtown Chicago), listen to honking horns and squealing tires; to wallow in the simple act of being outdoors for longer than ten or fifteen minutes. I was waiting to see if Dustin would try to hold my hand during the walk over there, or on the way back, but that part of him hadn’t changed; no way. We walked along side by side, occasionally talking but mostly luxuriating in watching day give way to twilight, and then on the way back enjoying the vast open blackness above us.
And of course that Friday night, after we returned to our hotel close to 10:30, my body once again had sex with Dustin while my mind was making love to Zack.
Chapter 14
Saturday and Sunday, September 28th and 29th
Neither one of us knew what to do with two whole weekend days and nights off from work. This wasn’t even like last weekend, with travel (and travel disruptions) kicking off the weekend and that unscheduled video conference taking up all of Dustin’s Saturday morning. Not to mention the frenzy on Sunday caused by the news we both received that morning during brunch.
This weekend was as close to old times for Dustin and me as we had been in almost six months; since April when Dustin got sent out to San Francisco and I got assigned to that project in Phoenix. Of course our weekend together was in Chicago, with the early fall chill now in the air, rather than back in L.A.
We basically did as many touristy things that weekend as we could squeeze into two days. The aquarium; a boat ride out on Lake Michigan; the museum; drinks Saturday night almost 100 floors above street level in one of Chicago’s two ultra-high buildings; and a great deal of walking all over downtown, The Loop, and the harbor area.
Lately I had been getting the Sunday Night Blues pretty badly. You know, the end of a weekend (sometimes the Monday Night Blues if it’s a long holiday weekend that just concluded) and realizing that work starts again the next morning, and then you get all depressed thinking about the total shit that’s waiting for you. This particular Sunday evening, a few minutes after Dustin and I (and the specter of Zack Buchanan) finished sex for the final time of the weekend, I suddenly was walloped by the worst case of Sunday Night Blues I could recall. The thought of going into our client’s offices tomorrow made me literally sick to my stomach.
And as I looked over at the man with whom I had just finished having sex, the thought of repeating that act with him one more time all of a sudden induced the same feeling of intense repulsion.
What had I done?
Chapter 15
Monday, September 30th
Lately, my weeks have all been starting out with bombshell news. Two weeks ago it was very early on a Monday morning with Dave Evers calling to tell me I had to go to New York with him, and then last week the news had come on a Sunday morning when we found out about MetroGen halting our project and having to go to Chicago.
This week, it was back to Monday. Specifically, the totally unexpected word that the MetroGen project was suddenly back on and six of us – including Kensie, Courtney and me, plus Steve and Jack – were being abruptly pulled off of the Chicago project and sent back to L.A. to get MetroGen going again. Filling out the list of six was Rick Worthington, which of course made Kensie incredibly happy.
The news came at the very beginning of a 10:00 meeting, which meant it was 8:00 back in L.A. John Watson, one of the partners in charge of this project here in Chicago was heading up this meeting and he started the meeting by saying:
“Well, it looks like six of you better get going to pack your bags and head to L.A.”
As he announced the names of those of us who were being abruptly reassigned, and as I heard my name, I looked over at Dustin, who was looking back at me in total shock. Poor Dustin: after only six days of being back to a “normal” relationship (or so he thought) with his girlfriend he had just had the rug yanked out from under him, to borrow another old-fashioned phrase from my Dad.
And that was that. I was in shock too, but to be perfectly honest I was glad to be leaving behind this hellhole of an assignment. Four days of this had been more than enough for me! And besides, going back to MetroGen also meant that some new senior manager – not Dave Evers – would be in charge of us now. True, there would be fewer of us working at MetroGen than before our work was halted, and that might mean some longer hours at least until some others could be added onto to our team. But whatever faced us there, it had to be better than what we had just gone through.
We all hurried back to our hotel rooms, packed up, and caught a shuttle to O’Hare in time to catch a 1:15 flight that afternoon back to LAX. In the shuttle on the way there, Kensie and Rick Worthington sort of snuggled up against each other, as much as they could in public and still “be professional” about it. You know: seated next to each other, legs and butts and torsos pressed together, each one definitely encroaching on the other’s personal space. Sort of like being in high school and coming back from a field trip and seated next to a guy you like and who you know likes you back, but you have teachers on the bus so you have to be at least a little discrete about it. At least that’s how I used to do it back in those days.
We were about halfway there when Rick turned past Kensie towards me (I was sitting on the other side of Kensie in the back row of the shuttle) and said:
“I guess it’s going to be tough going back to L.A. and leaving your boyfriend behind here, huh? It must have been good being together after being apart for so long.”
I know he was just trying to be nice, and I know he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, but he couldn’t have said anything worse to me at this particular moment. I choked off one bitchy response, then another, and then finally just muttered:
“Well, you have no idea.”
* * *
I wound up sitting by myself on the flight on the way back. Our firm’s travel agent had done their best to get us seats near one another but given the short notice there were only seven or so seats open on the flight by the time they got word to book flights for us, and only two of them were near each other. My seat reservation was actually next to Kensington’s but being the good friend I am, I switched seats with Rick so he and Kensie could sit next to each other.
My seat was next to a window on the right side of the aircraft in the back portion, and the two other people in my row – a guy in his late 20s and either his wife or girlfriend, I wasn’t certain – were traveling together and watching a movie on his laptop with their headphones plugged into a splitter so they could both listen. So I was alone with my thoughts for the flight... and OMG, did I think and think and think for four straight hours until I was so sick of thinking that all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball for the rest of the flight.
The first thing I thought about, actually anguished about, was that my entire life had turned into this big accident of geography. Think about it. If Dustin hadn’t been stranded in Chicago, then when I met Zack I still might have talked with him for a while at Cerise that first night and you never know, maybe something would eventually have happened between us at some point. But I’m almost positive I never would have agreed to go out to dinner with him only two night later, because Dustin would have been in town and it would have been just about impossible for me to make that happen. Chances are I would have flirted with Z
ack for a couple of weeks at MetroGen and “accidentally” met up with him at another two or three happy hours over the next couple of weeks. And then... well who knows?
But because Dustin had been out of town I jumped headfirst into hooking up with Zack, and before I knew it there was all this chemistry between us and was sleeping with him.
Then I had two more accidents of geography happen at the same time: Zack suddenly going out of town, and Dustin suddenly showing up. Because of both of those I wound up sleeping with Dustin, not breaking up with him, and since Zack was gone and didn’t even contact me, it looks like that was the end of us.
And it kept going! The firm sent me to Chicago so I was there with Dustin, and we wound up sleeping together every night. But next thing know it they sent me back to L.A., and that’s that with Dustin for a while. And coming back to L.A. means that I’ll inevitably run into Zack, and I have no idea what’s going to happen there, right?
It all came down to this: I felt less in control of my life and my relationships than I ever have, and a large part of the reason I felt that way had to do with where I was – and where Zack was, and Dustin too – at any given point in time. Like I said: accidents of geography!
I also thought a great deal during the flight about what my first encounter with Zack Buchanan was going to be like. Presuming Zack was still consulting at MetroGen, which of course I had no way to know for certain. But it had only been a week since I was there and I knew his assignment with them was supposed to go through at least the end of October. So unless something unexpected had happened during the week I had been in Chicago, I would run into him at MetroGen sooner or later.
But then what? An angry scene over why he never contacted me all weekend? An anguished confession on my part that I had never broken up with Dustin and had been regularly sleeping with him for more than a week now? Some bullshit “let’s agree to be friends” agreement to let him off the hook for suddenly throwing me aside after just a couple of dates, and to let me off the hook for having sex with Dustin?
