The Overlap

by Lynn Costa

  A thought occurred to me.

  “Did you see her again on Saturday? On Sunday?”

  Then another terrible thought occurred to me, and I didn’t even give him a chance to answer my question.

  “Oh my God! She’s why you stayed an extra night in San Francisco, on Sunday night!”

  Zack was already shaking his head.

  “No, she had already left earlier in the day.”

  Seeing the blatant skepticism on my face, he “swore the truth” for the third time in about two minutes:

  “I swear that’s the truth, Lindsey. She was gone. I met this executive from one of the studios that I’ve been trying to get as a client for years but have never been successful, and this guy loved what I had talked about on my panels. He has a house up in Marin County and he invited me up there for dinner that Sunday night, and we met last Thursday morning up in Burbank. We’re meeting again tomorrow morning up there, and I’m almost positive I’ll land them as a new client.”

  “Congratulations,” I replied, wishing as I spoke that I could have put more sincerity into that single word. But my mind was on things other than Zack’s business fortunes right now.

  “Then what about Saturday night?” I pressed. “Did you have dinner with her – your ex-fiancé – again that night?”

  A second’s worth of a pause, then:

  “Yes, I did.”

  I felt myself prepare to explode, but Zack asked me this first:

  “Do you want to know what we talked about Saturday night?”

  “What?” I snarled, and from my tone Zack knew that I wasn’t asking what he had talked about, but rather that I didn’t quite get his question.

  He repeated his question, and there was something in his tone that made me realize I probably didn’t want to know the answer.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.

  “We talked about you,” was Zack’s reply.

  And then:

  “We talked about you and Dustin.”

  * * *

  I instantly felt like I was on the defensive... rightfully and guiltily so, I should add.

  “What about me and Dustin?” I said in clipped tones.

  Zack paused for a few seconds before continuing. I felt like we were fencing with each other: move, counter-move; move, counter-move...

  “I should ask you that question,” he said quietly. “What about you and Dustin? How did your breakup go? You never texted me Friday night to let me know...”

  “His flight was delayed and he didn’t get into L.A. until around three in the morning,” I interrupted. “So I didn’t see him at all Friday night.”

  That seemed to catch Zack off-guard, but – just like in a fencing match – he quickly recovered.

  “Okay, then, what about Saturday morning? How did your breakup go?”

  There was something in his voice that told me he knew. Even without actually knowing, he knew.

  I lowered my eyes to the table.

  I felt my shoulders slump.

  I felt tears come to my eyes.

  But then I also felt Zack’s hands come to rest gently on top of mine.

  * * *

  I told him the whole story. I didn’t leave out a single thing. Well, actually I left out one thing. I was going to tell him that in Chicago, almost every time I was having sex with Dustin I was feeling nothing until I fantasized that it was Zack, not Dustin, in bed with me. But before I did I thought better of it, and figured that comparison probably wouldn’t be thought of as a “complement” by the man sitting across from me at Cerise listening to my tortured confession.

  He had a pained look on his face as I talked and talked, but to his credit he didn’t look away from me, or roll his eyes in disgust, or do anything like that. He patiently listened to my tale; he didn’t even ask any questions, but only uttered an occasional “uh-huh” or “sure” or “I get it.”

  “That’s what I talked to Lacey – my ex-fiancé – about most of the time at dinner Saturday night,” he finally said. “I told her all about us and what was supposed to happen with your breakup that weekend, and given what she and I had gone through she knew how tough that was going to be for you and honestly thought that you probably wouldn’t go through with it.”

  I started to get angry and was about to say something when Zack cut me off.

  “It’s the same thing she did to me, Lindsey,” he said, his face once again pained as he spoke. “We were engaged like I said but then she met another guy and she started going out with him, and this one weekend after she had already... you know... with him she was going to break up with me but couldn’t bring herself to do it. So I wound up spending another two weeks with her while she was also with her new boyfriend, back and forth between the two of us, who actually thought she had already broken up with me.”

  I was about to say something when Zack continued speaking, as if reading my mind.

  “Yeah, it’s not exactly the same as with you, me, and Dustin, but it’s pretty close.”

  I was confused about something, though.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean you talked to her Saturday night about all of this?”

  “Because I knew, Lindsey,” he said. “I knew that you hadn’t gone through with the breakup. I honestly couldn’t tell you how I was so certain, but I was. Like I said, you would have texted me as soon as you had told him because you were sad, and you would have let me know. I was sure of it.”

  Ah-hah! My turn to get off the ropes, as my Dad likes to say, referring to a boxing match.

  “Oh yeah? Well I expected you to have texted me to ask if I was okay and how I was doing. Didn’t you think that maybe I was so sad and depressed that I couldn’t even bring myself to text you, and that you should check and see how I was?”

  “But you weren’t, were you?” was Zack’s quiet reply.

  Oh yeah.

  “Well, I might have been!” I was grasping here.

  “But you weren’t,” he repeated.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I didn’t want to text you really late on Friday night after Lacey and I finished our drinks. Besides, I had no idea of your timetable with Dustin and for all I knew you were in the middle of talking with him late Friday, or even Saturday morning after I finished my panel.”

  He paused and took a breath before continuing.

  “Well, when you finally texted me at 12:30 or whatever time it was Saturday afternoon I was on another panel, and I actually didn’t look at my phone for three more hours since I had to immediately fill in for somebody else who was sick and do a presentation on cultural differences in humor. You know, how some movies are funny in America but nobody else in the world thinks they are, or vice versa? Anyway, when I got nothing else from you other than that one ‘U there?’ and nothing about the breakup, I was so sure it hadn’t gone as planned and probably wasn’t a good situation.”

  A waitress finally came over to the table – service wasn’t great tonight at Cerise – and I realized that I hadn’t had anything to drink yet. I ordered one of Zack’s orangey beer favorites as he ordered another one, and after the waitress was out of earshot he continued.

  “I was moping around Saturday in the hotel bar, sitting by myself, and Lacey came over to ask me what was wrong. I figured what the hell, of anybody in the world – or at least in the bar – she would understand what was going on, even though she would probably empathize more with your side of it than mine. And actually, I guess that’s what I really needed because I was so hurt that...”

  His voice trailed off. I thought he was going to say something like “...I felt like finding some woman to hook up with” but even if that were true, I didn’t want to hear it! And hopefully he didn’t, at least from what he had told me so far.

  “Anyway, Lacey and I decided to have dinner again and we talked through the whole thing. What she said was that I should just take a step back and let it go for the weekend and when I got back to L.A. see where t
hings were with you. Even if you didn’t break up with Dustin he would be back in Chicago and basically, nothing would have changed and then the next time he was back in L.A. you would more likely than not go through with it then.”

  He paused again as our waitress returned with our beers. He didn’t make a move to touch his, nor did I. I was waiting for us to make a toast as we usually did, but so far there was nothing in our conversation worth toasting over, right?

  Zack looked straight at me.

  “I will tell you that I asked Lacey what I should do if I got back to L.A. and you told me that not only had you not broken up with Dustin but you had also slept with him. You want to know what she said?”

  I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded anyway.

  “She said ‘So what? Even if she did her body might have been with that other guy, but her heart was still with you.’”

  I felt the tears return to my eyes.

  “She said that’s the way she felt when she had sex with me after meeting the other guy, and even though it was like she was cutting open a five-year old wound with her words, I did appreciate what she was saying because she had been in the same position as you and she was speaking from experience.”

  He sighed, and then continued.

  “So I waited until Monday morning, figuring I would try to see you that night as soon as I could even though I had a client dinner and then had to fly out the next morning, and of course that’s when I found out about you going to Chicago. So not only were you not going to be around, you had gone to where Dustin was. And from everything you had told me about that project out there, I figured that now I might not see you for months.”

  Then his face suddenly brightened.

  “But you want to know something? If you promise – I mean you have to swear – to keep this a secret from everyone, even your girlfriends at work.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Last Friday I heard that MetroGen was going to bring your team back in, at least those they could get back from Chicago. I was in Margie’s office when she got the word and she said to me: ‘Who do you think I should ask them to bring back from Chicago?’ So I pretended to think for about five or ten seconds, and then I said ‘they’re all pretty good, but if you can, try to get Lindsey Barnes and Kensington Reynolds back.’ I couldn’t remember your friend Courtney’s last name so I didn’t mention her, and I figured that if I only mentioned you then Margie might think... well, you know...”

  I finally smiled for the first time the entire day.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly. “You have no idea how bad it was out there.”

  “I know,” Zack replied. “I thought that even if we didn’t have a chance to salvage anything between us, that was the least I could do for you, to help get you out of there.”

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  “You’re welcome, Lindsey,” Zack said, a sad smile now on his face.

  I looked down at our untouched beers.

  “We need to toast,” I offered.

  Zack hesitated as if he hadn’t expected to hear me say that, then nodded.

  “You go,” he said.

  “Okay, I will.”

  I raised my glass then continued.

  “To new beginnings?” A toast with a question mixed in; with hope mixed in.

  “To new beginnings,” Zack said without hesitating.

  * * *

  “We’re not going to sleep together tonight,” I suddenly said a couple minutes later.

  “In fact,” I continued, “I’m not even sure what to do about all of this. I really need to absorb this, to think it through...”

  I caught the look in Zack’s eyes.

  “I mean me,” I said to him. “I mean what I did. Maybe you can come to terms with what happened between me and Dustin after talking to your ex-fiancé, but I’m still pretty messed up.”

  “I get it,” he said, but didn’t offer anything else.

  I looked at him.

  “Zack, tell me the truth. Can you honestly say that if we get back together or whatever you want to call it, you won’t hold it against me for what I did with Dustin? Not breaking up with him and sleeping with him and all that?”

  “No I won’t hold it against you,” he quickly replied. “The only thing I want is that you tell me for sure that you will break up with him, sooner than later. I’ll give you time to do it on your terms, just like you were going to the first time that didn’t happen. But whenever you decide you’re going to do it, this time you need to go through with it, okay?”

  And to emphasize the significance of what he was saying, Zack added:

  “I don’t think I could stand winning you back, or whatever you call this, and then really losing you. You know what I mean?”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  * * *

  I was true to my word. I didn’t sleep with Zack that night or even go to his apartment, though we stayed together at Cerise for two more hours. We drank plenty (I felt it the next morning) and ordered dinner but other than a couple of rest room trips for each of us, we never left our table. The place got crowded as the evening went on, but to me and I think also to Zack, there was only the two of us in the world tonight. Now I felt as if it were the last week and a half that was the unfocused, sketchy, fragmented dream. Suddenly all of the memories from the weeks before then, when Zack and I first met and became enthralled with each other, had been given new life and were again as vivid as they had once been.

  We made plans to meet at Vivant later tomorrow night for dinner after Zack got back from Burbank. We talked about where to go and we both contemplated trying someplace new that neither one of us had been to before. You know, really playing out the “new beginnings” theme, right?

  But then we both came to realize: what better place to mark this new beginning than where our “original beginning” – our first dinner date, followed by our first kiss – had been?

  Chapter 17

  Wednesday – Friday, October 2nd – 4th

  I had left Cerise and Zack Tuesday night feeling the greatest sense of relief I had ever felt in my life, but by the time 1:00 A.M. Wednesday morning rolled around and I was still tossing and turning in my bed – alone – that relief had largely escaped me.

  I had discovered time travel. At least that’s what it felt like as I finally decided to put my bedroom TV on for a little bit in hopes I could find something to half-watch and finally lull me to sleep. I had turned the calendar back about two weeks, maybe a little bit longer, and here I was: starting something new (again) with Zack after a long conversation at Cerise and now planning to meet at Vivant for a special dinner date, while Dustin was 2,000 miles away in Chicago, thinking his relationship with me was something that it was not as I prepared to break up with him.

  This time, though...

  I told myself over and over again that this time I wouldn’t be so stupid as to put this fantastic new relationship with Zack at risk because I couldn’t bring myself to start a sentence with “Dustin, we need to talk.”

  At the same time, though, I was starting to become uneasy about Zack’s whole story of his San Francisco weekend, especially his explanation for why he didn’t text me. His explanation of that Friday night and then Saturday morning until I finally gave in and texted him... sure, his timeline was plausible but I couldn’t help think that all he had to do was text me just once, especially in response to my “U there???” text to him, and things would have turned out way different with Dustin and me. Even Dustin’s flowers and picnic basket and all that wouldn’t have been enough to keep me from looking at him and saying “Dustin, we need to talk” because I would have been certain that Zack was there for me; to give me the emotional support to help me through my inevitable post-breakup depressed feelings.

  There was something about his story...

  Part of me thought that despite his insistence that he hadn’t slept with his ex-fiancé, he actually had. Or may
be he had gone up together to his room or her room and they had started to play around but didn’t go through with it, and he was standing on a technicality. You know: “I didn’t have sex with her, Lindsey” meant that he didn’t finish anything with her.

  That thought kept coming back to me but every time I did my best to force away the images of Zack and this woman starting to make out and then him kissing her while their bodies pressed into each other’s...

  I was in no position to hold it against Zack even if he did have a one-night stand – or maybe a weekend fling – with her, especially given what I did. Still, if he did that and lied to me about it, then there would never be any foundation of trust between us, and we were doomed.

  But I had no evidence whatsoever to lead me to think that’s what Zack had actually done! I kept telling myself that; that I suspected him only because of my own shame and self-reproach at what I had done with Dustin, along with a general skepticism about guys in general when it came to faithfulness. So even when my rational mind asserted itself and tried to send away these disturbing thoughts, what was bothering me?

  Maybe I felt that Zack didn’t care enough, or wasn’t attentive enough, or something like that to send me that single text on Friday night or Saturday morning that would probably have prevented me from taking the path that I had that weekend. Like I said, his explanation for the timeline of why he didn’t text me made sense – sort of – but if he had just cared enough to say “oh, what the hell, I’ll take a chance and text her anyway” things may have turned out very differently.

  I would never know, but shortly before I finally fell asleep sometime around 2:30 I convinced myself – hopefully forever – that this was all in the past now. Whether he did it on purpose or not, Zack’s disappearing act that weekend had set into motion an unforeseen string of events; but I was the one who hadn’t broken up with Dustin and wound up having sex with him almost every day for a week and a half.