I'm aware of abundance mentality and the idea of having oneitis, but please could you help me deal with this situation anyway. I will try and be concise I promise.

So I quite like this girl that I used to work with until recently. She was in a long term FWB situation until about two weeks ago. He was aware of me and I think he hated me for spending time with her. She has only recently started initiating Whatsapp convos with me after this break-up.

We went to a beer festival around this time last week, and we got pissed together and walked hand in hand/arm in arm with eachother to the next pub. I asked her what happened with the other guy, and she said something about not being able to feel herself around him but she can around me. She ended up walking all the way home because she 'needed time to think'. I get home to find she's sent me a weird/funny video of her cooking.

She's leaving to go to the States for a month, and when she gets back I'll be going to Greece for a while a few days after she returns. The next day we had our final shift together, and as we parted I asked her when she was leaving, following it up with 'well we need to have a date night before you go then', to which she initially said 'noooo I'm drinking too much' but soon changed her mind and said yes. So obviously I'm wondering at this point if I've been rejected or not, having explicitly used the word 'date'.

The next day, I finished work and handed the shift over to her, and out of nowhere she suggests that we go to a wine bar together on Tuesday. So we have a few glasses of wine and decide to head to the pub we used to work in. I offer out my arm for her to hold, she takes it straight away (compliance is good right). So we go to our pub, and the other girl who works there is behind the bar, and she's aware of my sentiment towards this girl as we smoke together fairly often and talk about shit. We stay for two pints, and the whole time our mutual friend is winking at me and making faces to suggest 'you're fucking in there lad'.

We head to the next bar together, this time I offer out my hand and she takes it, but after a while she says she doesn't really like holding hands so we switch back to linking arms. In the next pub we talk a lot about the future, and she seems concerned about me not coming back from Greece and if I'd want to see her when I do as maybe I'd want to start from 'a clean slate' or some shit like that. The whole time we're holding hands on the table.

So we leave the bar, and walk to the bus stop and I feel like I really want to make a move and finally fucking kiss her, but she just seemed sort of shy and it didn't feel right for me to lean in. So the next day I wake up and I've got a drunken voice note from her talking about chicken nuggets or something like that. I message our mutual friend 'I didn't do it' and she was really surprised, saying there was '100% something there' and she seemed incredibly 'on it' and how, as a close observer, me getting my willy wet that night was a sure thing in her mind. She said that maybe it's too soon after this FWB thing ending, as well as the fact that she probably didn't want to do anything with me just before leaving for a long time (I thought the opposite would be true but I'm not a woman or in her head).

So I'm thinking to myself, fuck this ambiguity so I message her 'I'll take you on a proper date when you get back, unless I get kidnapped by the Albanian mafia' to which she replies 'hahaha' and a lengthy voice note laughing at how bad an influence I am and that she still hadn't packed for her flight that afternoon. I respond with a cocky 'you're right I'm just incredible company aren't I' and left her laughing response as our last interaction.

So if you made it this far, I absolutely admire your resilience. I'll stop with the epic saga of a back-story and start asking some questions.

What do you reckon is going on here? I'm thinking it's either too soon (the fwb thing was a pretty long time), she's simply unsure about me or that she likes the validation that I'm providing. My plan now is to not message her at all unless she messages me first, and get my arse out there to meet other girls.

Thanks for reading this essay, and I look forward to hearing what you guys think. Sorry for not being concise.