This, That, and the Other

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

K is for Kate B.

Kate was the most competitive girl I ever went out with. She was my age, had started her first real job about the same time I started mine, and she was a real Irish firebrand. Shortly after we stated dating I referred to her as “Irish,” rarely using her first name except to introduce her to other people.

Kate was a tall girl, arguably as tall as me. She had long, straight reddish brown hair and eyes that, depending upon the light, could look either blue or green. She was quite the looker.

We met at a party that a guy I knew who worked for IBM invited me to. I hadn’t been there for five minutes when he introduced me to Kate and I got the impression that the introduction was not a random event. The guy who made the introduction walked away after introducing us, leaving us awkwardly standing there.

Kate asked me where I worked and what I did and I explained that I was going through a six-month management training program for a large insurance company. She told me she was a systems trainee for IBM. Then she asked me what they were paying me and I told her that that was none of her business. She told me what IBM was paying her and asked me just to tell her if I was making more or less. “Just a little less,” I confessed. She was thrilled.

As we talked after getting through the awkwardness of her compensation question, we discovered we really did have a lot in common and by the end of that night, we were an item.

We’d been dating for about a year but I was starting to get tired of everything between us being a completion, so I finally told her that I was going to start seeing other people. She didn’t take that well at all and she would call me all the time, started showing up at my place at all hours, and she literally began stalking me. I finally threatened to take out a restraining order on her before she left me alone.

I heard that a few months later she quit her job at IBM and drove to California.

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