The Overlap (3 page)

I had done that once before a couple of years ago. I had been with my college boyfriend Andrew Travers for about a year. I was up in San Francisco the summer between my junior and senior years, doing an internship with the consulting firm where I eventually went to work. Andrew was going to come out to San Francisco about two weeks after me for rest of the summer and work there while I was interning so we could be together.

About a week before Andrew arrived, though, I met a guy who had just graduated from Stanford and was waiting to go back east to New York for a job on Wall Street. We met in the gym near the apartment where the firm had put me up, and he and I hit it off. I went out to dinner with him at a trendy Thai place in the city, and afterwards we must have walked about seven or eight miles along the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf and the Marina; back and forth. Nothing happened – other than a goodnight kiss – but make no mistake about it, that night was still a “date” in every sense of the word. I just decided afterwards that with Andrew on his way out to San Francisco, I didn’t want to complicate things and I just never went out again with that other guy even though he did ask me. Eventually he figured out that I was with Andrew, and to his credit he just let things go instead of making a scene. I wouldn’t have blamed him for calling me out, though; I had gone out with him and had kissed him goodnight but hadn’t mentioned anything about being in a relationship back in Phoenix or that my boyfriend was on his way out to San Francisco. We just had that one date and that was that.

So maybe that was how Saturday night with Zack Buchanan might play out.

Or maybe not.

I got up off the toilet and as I walked to the sink to wash my hands, my mind insisted on replaying for me the images from the segment in the dream where both Dustin and Zack had been sitting side by side, nonchalantly eating off of the same plate in front of them. Yuck! No mistaking the symbolism of that part of the dream!

I hadn’t even looked at the digital time on my cable box (the only visible “clock” in my bedroom since I used my phone as my alarm clock) on my way to the bathroom, so as I walked back into the bedroom I forced my still-blurry vision into focus and could see that it was only a few minutes past 5:00; easily a whole hour before I had planned to wake up this morning. I briefly thought about trying to go back to sleep for another hour but the imagery from that dream was so unsettling that I was afraid that even after being up and about for a bathroom trip, I may well slip back into that dream.

No way, I told myself so instead I put on my sweats and running shoes and headed outside to run. Normally I hate running in the morning and while I was at ASU I invariably found time during the late morning or early afternoon hours to squeeze in a couple miles between classes or doing homework. In the year since joining the “real work world,” however, grabbing time to run during the workday was pretty much not happening. So once or twice during the work week I would try to get up around 5:30 and get in a couple of miles. That hadn’t been the plan for this morning when I had made out my schedule for the week back on Sunday night. I actually intended to go to the gym and do some running after work to keep myself busy since Dustin would be out of town, but as of last night I now had different plans for this evening... like getting ready for tomorrow night’s date with Zack. So there would be no time to work out and anyway, now that I was sort of awake I figured what the heck; might as well go running now.

The streets were still dark when I walked outside my apartment building. Official sunrise wouldn’t be until around 6:30, but the first peeks of the sun to the east would be showing about twenty minutes before then. Still, I would be finished and back by then. When I first moved to Los Angeles after the relative suburban safety of Chandler and Tempe back home in Arizona, I was a bit nervous about being out on the darkened streets in the early morning hours. But once I began carrying a pepper spray gun in the pocket of whatever sweatshirt or sweat jacket I would be wearing, my mind was put a bit more at ease. I was still on guard but given that I usually only had early morning darkened or semi-darkened hours to get in any outside running during the week, I figured I had no choice but to adjust my routine.

Sometimes when I run, especially when it’s dark, my mind wanders off into some long remembrance of the past, and that’s what happened to me this morning as I found myself thinking about how I wound up here... and all that had happened to me just in the past twelve months.

Only weeks after finishing my San Francisco internship and starting my senior year, I received an offer to join the same firm after I graduated. This wasn’t unusual, and I wasn’t particularly special. Most of the top consulting companies extended near-automatic job offers to their summer college interns who do a good job for them and carry themselves professionally; all of that. But anyway, I was able to spend a slightly more relaxed senior year than it might otherwise have been, knowing that not only did I have my post-graduation job all set barely after the fall semester started but also that I would definitely be based out of the firm’s office in Los Angeles, which was at the top of my list for places to work. I knew I would almost certainly be doing at least a little bit of travel for client projects, which I thought was great. I wasn’t tied down to anything or anyone in L.A., even though I had some friends who already lived there and several more of my ASU friends would be starting other jobs there around the same time I did.

Before actually settling into L.A. and my job there, though, I would have to spend eight weeks straight in Miami in the firm’s intensive orientation program that all new college hires had to go through. The class I was assigned to didn’t start until the day after Labor Day, which meant that I had almost four months after graduation to relax, do some traveling, party, and tie up some loose ends at home in Phoenix.

One of those loose ends – in fact,
the
loose end – was to break up with Andrew Travers. Andrew and I had been together for two years, since right after the end of our sophomore year at ASU. He was also a business major, though finance only; not the double-major that I had. Unlike many of us – including me – who were headed straight into the work world, Andrew had been accepted into the MBA program at Wharton in Philadelphia. He was one of those extra-smart guys who was able to get into Wharton right after getting his Bachelor’s Degree without any prior full-time work experience, and who also had a couple of side businesses going from his dorm room or apartment all throughout college. My parents, and a lot of my friends as well, thought Andrew was just perfect... not only perfect for me, but “PERFECT!”

When I told my mother that I was getting ready to break up with Andrew, she actually asked me to give it some thought – “think long and hard about this before you actually do anything” were her exact words – and the reaction from my Dad was this disappointed head shaking, as if I had no idea what I was walking away from and would quickly regret that decision. Of the two of them I was more pissed at my mother for what she said, and I almost instantly snapped back with “Okay Mom, I’ll think about some ‘long and hard’ reasons I should stay with Andrew! You want
details
?” But I didn’t...

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by their reaction since my parents met during their junior year in college up in Colorado and got married a month after they graduated, and have been together ever since. They always seem so happy with each other, too. In their world, I guess, someone lucky enough to wind up in the “right” college relationship should grab onto it and not let go, and all would be well with the world.

What neither one of them realized was that my relationship with Andrew wasn’t necessarily “right,” instead it was... well, it just “was.” It had started off pretty strong, especially since he was much better in bed than any of the other guys I had been with during my first two years in college or in high school before then. About six months after Andrew and I got together, I was at a party one Saturday night when this other girl walked up to me; actually she staggered up to me because she was really drunk, just about falling down twice on the way. When she righted herself she began telling me that she had gone out with Andrew for about two months right after Christmas their freshman year, and then started telling me in detail about how good sex with him had been. Then she said something like “I would hang onto him if I were you, at least through college, just for the intense sex. He’s
a lot
better than most college guys are; even the older ones. Don’t take this like I’m thinking about trying to steal him from you, but lots of times I wish I were still sleeping with him every so often just for the sex.” (If I had indeed retorted back to my Mom’s “think long and hard” comment when I told her about planning to break up with Andrew, I guess I could have also added this other girl’s “endorsement” as a reason for staying with Andrew, and asked my Mom what she thought about that!)

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.