Been crushing on a girl (who I will refer to as Sloth when necessary; there's an inside joke with the Seven) hard for a little over a year now, and it wasn't until early this year (February-Mayish) that I started thinking about her more seriously. She's one of a group of female friends I hang with (the group part will come into play later), and I'm wracking my head trying to figure out both where the hell I stand on my feelings, and where she stands (both in my feelings as well as hers, if there are any on her part).
Did something nice for a holiday I normally hate (Feb. 14th because always single) and that seemed to go well. After that many embarrassing attempts to spend time with her flopped (mostly because I was a nervous wreck and didn't really know how to ask without stuttering and trailing off, I loosen my collar at the mere memory of it), and we didn't really see or talk to each other for a couple months, when another of the friends hosted a graduation party for her and a couple of others.
This is where things start to nosedive, at least from my perspective. Through the course of the night (at which point I'm one of the few sober ones, mostly because I don't like being any kind of mentally unfocused and I'm also twenty) I tried a bunch of times to talk to her, all of which failed. Partially due to me being inexperienced, and partially because two dozen or so drunk people makes for a lot of topic-changing and lack of a quiet enough environment for more serious conversation. Night goes on, and I'm sitting on the porch having a smoke (I should mention also that this is a huge-ass house in the middle of some deep woods, the atmosphere was and is so fucking relaxing once things quiet down), and she comes by and sits down next to me.
Pay close attention, this is where D9's male ego gets hit and he proceeds to overanalyze and confuse himself even more.
She pulls my face towards her and tells me that I'm cute, but need to grow a pair, three or four times with different wording. That was it. No explanation as to what exactly I did or didn't do or what she wanted out of it. And to make things even more confusing at the time, before I have a chance to really process what she could've meant by it, she kisses me. Only once, after which she left, but once was enough to both put me in the clouds and under the pendulum at the same time.
Day after, we all go home, about two-three weeks go by uneventfully. Then one of the other girls in the group (a friend of mine for several years who we'll call Wrath, the one who actually got me introduced to the group in the first place, as well as the one to tell me that I should pursue her) comes up to me and proceeds to inform me of a few things;
One, that Sloth had never intended to give me a chance.
Two, that before kissing me she had told Wrath that she would do so, and when asked by Wrath if it would mean anything, she said no.
And three, that I should either confront her or quit while I'm ahead.
So as you can imagine, given that Sloth didn't really talk much to me (at the time I got the impression that she wanted me to instigate everything) and that Wrath had known her for years, I immediately took this information to be true. After all, Wrath had had a few bad relationships/breakups and had been single for a long time, so she knew to whatever extent how that felt. She wouldn't have any reason to lie to me, right?
Well, needless to say I basically stopped talking and making any effort to communicate with Sloth for about four of five months. At the time my ego was still sore from her comments and the rest hurting from third-party information I took to be fact. Then the Halloween party comes up at the awesome woods-house again.
Pretty uneventful, I don't really talk to her much, she doesn't talk to me much, on my end I'm assuming it's a mutual distancing. Late in the night once earlybirds are leaving, I'm outside for a smoke and I go down to say bye to people. Sloth's down by the bonfire doing the same, and when she sees me she comes up and - for whatever reason - thought I was leaving too, so she gives me a hug and says bye. I tell her I'm not leaving and I get another one. A much longer and much tighter one. After which she goes really quiet and mentions that I hadn't talked to her all night, and then after a few seconds heads up the stairs into the house. To this day I don't know if she was drunk or not (she didn't seem it, but she's not that much different when she is), and have gone back and back wondering whether it meant something or if (in my hopefulness, let's call it) I was reading too much into it.
That party was on the 25th of October. She and I have remained in conversation quite a bit since, by comparison to how little we talked before.
Long overdrawn backstory ends here.