So there's this guy I work with and we had Chemistry™. Always around each other, always an almost aggressive amount of sexual tension. I went over to his plave a couple times and we hit it off. He plied me with drinks and bud and was always like, "no, stay longer, you dont have to go, have another drink of my ridiculous 150% moonshine," etc, etc

I'm not a particularly sexual person, I need to really know someone to be sure I wanna do anything (and even then, I'm normally rocking some grey ace vibes. That was not a problem with him, bar the uncertainty) and I wasn't sure, so I left with the intention of getting to know him better based on his telling me I was welcome anytime for any reason, multiple times.

And then he got flaky. It fucked me up because there was no reason for it but he just... distanced himself. So, I assumed I had been irritating or made some sort of faux pas and felt terrible about myself for months. 

We see and talk to each other daily at work. We still get along. He still was touchy and...just the vibe of someone who wants more, I dont know how to explain it. Wait, no, I do:  flirting lol. I got teased about it occasionally. But he remained flaky af. So I figured I'd active induce a switch and get over him. I tried for weeks, which is about 100% longer than it normally takes me to forcefully get over someone, and ultimately didn't work.

I decided I'd just suffer until my crush disappeared and we could just be friends but I was still extremely interested in him. Cue a lot more of his normal touchiness, intense eye contact that went on long enough for other people to comment, and constant pigtail pulling.

I was finally getting to my breaking point and considering just taking him down and then he comes over, puts his arm around me, and apologizes for being a flaky bastard because he "really enjoyed our time, its just that he started seeing someone."

Oof.
Alright.

I told him it was fine because it was literally in the middle of work and I was fully on autopilot. Then I finished what I was doing and had a sit where I refused to cry because we'd been dancing around each other for *months*. Months of me thinking I was imagining everything because BPD and I was just some creep who took things too far. Months of trying to figure out what exactly I did to make one of my friends not want to hangout ever. Months of feeling turned inside out because he'd give me some attention, disappear for a while, and then run it again.

And then he tells me, nah its just because he was talking to a few people and didn't wanna close his options. 

I go home and do some mental gymnastics to convince myself I wasn't affected at all and decide to go back to work the next day firmly treating him as a friend and nothing more.

I go in today and suddenly he just wants to be around me, vying for my attention constantly, but I'm pretty friendly with everyone at work so I treated him like everyone else and he was awkward and unhappy. 

I don't typically like being touched, makes my skin feel like it's crawling with most of the exceptions being extremely good friends. So, I avoided most of his normal touchiness and he was moody. And I wasn't mad up until that point but then I felt heated. 

Because he essentially told me he was off limits, so I treated him like it and he got his feelings hurt. I don't even know, I'm trying to let myself feel about it but I did that thing where you  block off all emotion about a topic and I haven't been able to undo it yet. 

One of our coworkers joked that we'd broken up because I wasn't prioritizing him or responding as enthusiastically to his normal shenanigans and it was beautifully inopportune timing that made everything more awkward. Which was also irritating because I'm a grown ass adult who's normally willing to talk anything out until it's 100% settled and this dude is like a decade older than me and should at least be able to speak openly. But everything was awkward because he couldn't just tell me straight out when he was vibing more with whoever he's with now.

I still like him but now its tainted with this gross mix of bitterness and like, "oh, I see who you are," vibes. Yeah, so thats life right now. 

I'd give a tl;dr but this post is kind of already that, despite how long it is. I could go into detail about the flirting and subsequent mind-fucks but I don't want this to be (more of) a novel.