Time heals, as they say

So after last week's exchange of goods and phone calls, I didn't hear from Him. No calls. No text messages. No online chats. It was dead silence. And that shocked me a little because we had ended the call on Monday evening on a positive note.

Every so often I would get the urge and start to dial or key a text but then stop myself because I had told myself it was up to him to initiate the next contact. That he deserved the space he needed. I would even see him online and think about starting the conversation... hoping for it, but then after a while I would sign off and move onto something else.

Finally, Thursday evening came and I got a call. He said he still wanted to have a face-to-face talk, and although I had come to dread the idea, he of course deserved whatever he needed to move forward. We agreed that at the end of the weekend we would meet.

I ended up going out Friday night with a (female) friend, which was the escape I needed after a hellish work week. We shared a lot of laughs and it was nice to be out and not thinking about answering to anyone to dispel any insecurity.

Saturday, I got up and ran some errands and then when finishing my lunch I got a phone call from Him. It was quite normal except for a slightly muted tone in his voice. He asked a couple of times during the call about whether I would be heading out to one of the gay bars in the city. I said that it wasn't likely, although at that point in my day I had no idea if I was doing anything that night. It also made me aware that if I did, chances are he would be checking it out, to see who I was hanging out with. I asked if he would be interested in seeing Avatar and then talking and he didn't really provide an answering either direction.

Sunday came, I got some groceries and was putting them away when I got a text message from Him. He hates texting but tried to carry on a conversation in this medium and I finally told him to call me because I couldn't text and do dishes at the same time. He called, we agreed on lunch and then a movie. After the movie I asked if he wanted me to come up to talk and he agreed. We sat on the couch and thru some tears he got out that initially last week he thought there was no way he could be my friend. That he wasn't sure how he would heal to have me in his life but the time he spent that week had made him realize that he wanted me in his life in some way rather than not at all. And I told him how I felt and that neither of us knows what the future holds but that I didn't want to give false hope either. That my feelings weren't romantic at this point and who knows what the future brings.

There was a level of relief achieved. Conversation returned to normal and we just enjoyed hanging out. We grabbed sushi for supper, watched a bit of TV and I went home at the end of the night. Things will be okay. Although I never want to hurt this man, it was necessary for him to feel some upset now to save a lot in the future (if things continued to breakdown). We'll see what happens from here on out.