The Overlap Read Online Free

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