That last thing I said made me think about when I got my first Covid jab. “I think that will stop other bigger hurts from happening.” “I think I need to open myself up to the possibility of hurt,” I told her. “Do you have to tell him? Can’t you just draw a line under it yourself? What if he didn’t even realise and now you’ve just embarrassed yourself?” I could tell my friend Vicky thought it was a shit idea because her mouth bunched up at one side. In pretending not to care I only showed how much I really did. But I’m sure he could smell the desperation on me like I could watching Abbey. I thought that in order to win his interest I would have to trick him into it because no one would do it by choice. I guess somewhere along the way I just stopped feeling like myself was enough. I asked him about how decorating his room was going, told him his top looked nice. We laughed about how the five minutes while you sit in a car and wait for the other person to come back with the parking ticket are the most blissful and warm on earth. He told me to keep going because he liked hearing the things that managed to calm me down. Like “I will go to the gym and the workout will be good and no-one will come up to me and tell me I’m doing it all wrong” and “I will look really nice in that dress and I don’t need to buy something else just so I feel like I have more options”. I told him about myself, like how recently I’d taken to listing the best possible scenario for the things I was anxious about to calm myself down. In the lead up to our first, second, third kiss I acted around him the same as I always did – largely because I had no expectations of anything progressing. I wasn’t like this with my friend before. “Not that well,” she responded, rolling her eyes, running her tongue over her teeth. When Kamari said hi, Abbey pretended to not remember who he was. But then the first time he flirted with someone else, she walked right up to them and stood so close their shoulders were rubbing. Kamari said it was cool because he didn’t either. She told him she didn’t want anything serious. Leaning so far into Kamari it looked like she might fall over, staring at him with syrupy come-fuck-me eyes while licking his ice-cream off her spoon. She adopted this very intense, combative flirting style. Within the first 15 minutes, I was struggling to watch the way Abbey acted around Kamari – not because it was particularly inappropriate or upsetting, but because it reminded me so much of my own behaviour around this friend of mine, and other men. The reality show centres around eight single guys and girls who’ve just moved into adjacent houses and who’re trying to find themselves in their careers and love lives. That is, until a couple of days ago when – about a year too late – I started watching Netflix’s Twentysomethings: Austin. Told myself I’d do better next time, and planned what I would wear while I was waiting for that next time to arrive. I didn’t think there was much wrong with this behaviour bar my execution of it. I invited him to a party and then uninvited him, then invited him again. I rang him when I was drunk thinking it would be cute and crazy – instead I went on a rant about how carrots have too much of an overwhelming flavour and when he wouldn’t let me come over, dramatically announced: “I don’t even know who you are anymore.” I was always trying to make him jealous, putting my hand on other men’s shoulders, laughing like a witch at their jokes. When I saw him at parties I’d walk away from conversations with him while they still interested me because I wanted to seem aloof and hard to pin down. After we first kissed I left long gaps between my replies to his messages because I liked the idea of him becoming anxious waiting on me: lobbing his phone across the room because a Twitter notification got his hopes up unable to concentrate on the sentences in his book because he couldn’t stop thinking about the cute way my nose flicks up at the end. I’ve written a column about this guy before but I’m not saying which one because then he’ll know I’m talking about him. I fancy this friend of mine a lot, so my behaviour towards him is particularly weird. It’s unfair that the more you like someone, the less attractive you are around them.
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