Messy things

The more time I spent talking to Alex the more I liked him. This scared me to begin with as prior to Alex I had been very comfortable with the attitude that I did not need or want to have feelings for a man. Due to the our difficult circumstances (i.e. age difference, Alex living with his ex-girlfriend and having two year old son and me wanting to move to New Zealand) I had been confident that we had stumbled on a great formula for a casual sexual relationship and friendship. There was now no question though that I seriously enjoyed his company and conversation and was becoming attached. I explored these feelings and fortunately came to the conclusion that yes, I did have feelings for him but they were not strong enough to cause me trouble and furthermore that had he asked me to be his girlfriend I would certainly have refused.

The presence of these feelings though meant that I found I had a defensive reaction to Alex's teasing about wanting to use him for sex. Any time he jokingly suggested that my attraction to him was purely physical I would contradict him and tell him that I liked him for his personality too. I had actually told him this from the beginning but he would ignore it and the more attached to him I became the more important to me it was that I made him understand this.

One freezing cold Friday evening after a long day working on the film I accidentally caught a Cranbourne train instead of a Frankston train and found myself in Murrumbeena before I realized my mistake. Frustrated, cold and tired I text messaged Alex to complain about what had happened, quietly hoping that he would offer to come and pick me up though knowing full-well that it was highly unlikely that he could. He didn’t offer. After some minutes of boredom while waiting for another train to take me back to Caulfield I text messaged him again, asking him to tell me something good, to help keep me warm. He responded, “I want to have lots of hot sex with you!” Under ordinary circumstances this would have made me blush and smile and start daydreaming but it was the wrong time for it. As can so often happen with a text conversation, a series of misinterpretations followed in which I tried to explain my feelings and desires in foolishly complicated ways. Confusion built until Alex said bluntly that he hated games. Terrified that I had somehow managed to screw up our entire friendship (or relationship?) for absolutely no reason at all I took my time to carefully spell out a long message that I hoped would make things go back to normal. I received no response and no phone call the following day.