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That meant I was really proud of the dinner I’d made for him as a surprise when he was coming over that night. It was a big night, and I wanted to not only share it with him but mark it with a special dinner. It felt like it would be especially significant for him if he got to have a special dinner that he actually didn’t have to cook for once. I wanted him to see that I was getting better and that I wanted to do things for him as much as he did for me.
Also, maybe I wanted to butter him up a bit. We had a lot to talk about, and it always seemed easier to embark on difficult conversations when there was good food around to bury yourself in. However, when he came in and saw the meal, he didn’t seem nearly as excited or impressed by it as I thought he would be. If anything, it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable.
Finn looked at the dinner I’d set out on the table with a hint of hesitation. I didn’t want to go so far as to say he looked suspicious, but there was probably a little bit of that in there as well.
The way he reacted to the dinner didn’t improve much when I explained I wanted to surprise him or that Olly had already eaten, and it was just going to be the two of us for the chicken parmesan I was trying out. I wanted to give us a chance to just be us and to get the ball rolling on the important conversations we needed to have.
But there was suddenly a distance between us. What felt like such incredible closeness, the bond that happened so fast and felt so real, had become strained. He was starting to pull away, and I wasn’t sure why.
I really thought he was going to be thrilled for me when I told him I was able to go back to work. I’d been excited to tell him about that and felt like it was a good transition into the rest of what we needed to talk about. It would start everything off on a good, positive note and let us ease into the more serious discussion.
Because, really, that was what we needed to have. I wanted to share my news about getting to go back to work, even if it was on light duty, but that was minor compared to the other items on the docket. The conversation about our relationship, or whatever weird thing was actually going on between us, was far overdue. I knew we should have had it as soon as we started having feelings for each other and spending time together.
If that didn’t happen, if we didn’t quite want to make that leap right from the beginning, we definitely should have had a bit of a sit-down after we slept together for the first time. That was a turning point for us. It was the fork-in-the-road moment, and it could have gone one of two ways.
It could have been that we finally gave in to what we were feeling for each other, had a night of awesome sex, and then just danced around each other kind of awkwardly every time we saw each other in social settings for the next couple of months until everything died down and we didn’t have to think about it anymore.
Or it could have gone the direction of me being right about it being much more than a crush, there being real feelings at play, and a relationship forming between us.
It most certainly seemed like we’d gone the way of the latter, but there was a key element of it missing. Relationships generally involved open communication and making sure both people were on the same page. I didn’t want to think there was any possibility I could be one of those obsessive women who managed to conjure up entire relationships in their head with the men they developed feelings for, only for everyone in the outside world to know there was nothing going on and the man was either oblivious to the feelings or had already attempted multiple unsuccessful times to reject the woman.
I figured the fact that he had returned on many, many occasions, offered me rides to the doctor, kept up the awesome sex, and was, at that moment, sitting at my kitchen table eating my chicken parmesan meant the chances of it all being a delusion were low. Even without the chicken parmesan thing being a euphemism.
That just left weird ambiguity. It felt like a relationship. It felt like we both knew it was a relationship. We just hadn’t ever established that or talked about what it might mean for us now or into the future.
