A Relationship

She walked into the room. It was a very cold room, the kind of cold that sticks to your skin and not your clothes, wet and chilly.
"I know what you did" Was the first thing George said. It was a really awkward way to start up a confrontation. In hindsight George would later rethink this tactic, and swear to himself that a build-up would be better than barreling directly into the matter, but now he carried on conspicuously. "You fucked him didn't you? You fucked that bartender."

The accusation caught Harriet off-guard. Not, because it wasn't true. It was certainly true. She had engaged in sexual congress with the bartender who introduced himself as Red. A man long in limb and crooked and yellow in the teeth, but still there was something she found in him.

"Yes. I did George." She said unapologetically. This was the end then. Before this very moment the relationship may have continued. This was the branching moment, where the spiral arm careened off the path that both of them had imagined laying in each others arms.

The coldness, the factual nature in which she said "Yes. I did George." cut him. It was to him as if she couldn't imagine another outcome. As if she couldn't imagine a world where his trust in her wasn't betrayed. As if she could not imagine a world where her emotional engagement in him outweighed her carnal needs. Of course that's not why it happened.

Now for Harriet the conversation took her back to that night. The drink, the drink after drink. The fear. Things with George were moving to fast, they were going too well. When this happened with Brian he had left her, just before she graduated. She and Brian had a whole life planned together, and that was less than nothing, and now she was beginning to imagine that with someone else, and lighting cannot strike twice, especially if you make sure it doesn't.

So that's how it ended between them.

"Yes. I did George"