Erm. Coffee anyone?

Is the definition of awkward bumping into someone, in your work kitchen, who you already know and have in fact slept with, just the once, and being introduced with an innocent ‘you may already know…’? When it’s been several years since you saw them. When that was at an awkward kind of lunch date together, where you had no intention of keeping in touch when you went away. When you never really processed together what happened. When, when you think about it, you remember the earnest and community-spirited line they proferred when you were both hot and sweaty, which was really a question, and one you could reallly only answer in the affirmative. When you are standing there with a mucky coffee thing from the coffee machine and a tea spoon trying to demuck it as they arrive, and all you can think to say is ‘I would shake hands, but I have coffee…’. When you finish making coffee and making small talk with a colleague while the others talk about their meeting, a few steps away at the table. When you worry that your cheeks might be flushing pink. Then you summon up all your grown up grace and on your way past pause and say ‘so how have you been, how’s things at (their workplace)?’ and have a proper grown up chat about people in common you know and only have eyes glittering another story ever so quietly. You will yourself to sound normal and not too familiar but not awkward as the others are there, witness to this moment. You try for slightly familiar and friendly, to be polite, and not insensitive to the moments of intimacy shared, but maybe just in short hand, so no-one else can read the gesture. Ugh. You scuttle away, feeling a little unsettled, and wish that you were younger so you could dash off an email, with lots of exclamations in it, to a girlfriend without feeling self conscious. Instead you write it in a paragraph and call it prose and put it here.