23 Attempts at Love

Chapter 6: The Friendzone

Before I started dating Seth I'd made friends with a guy who lived in my halls called Chris. He was studying radiology and wanted to work in a hospital on really complex cases to help doctors figure out how to make people better. I fancied him immediately, but nothing ever happened.

Chris was friends with my housemate Katy: they knew each other vaguely from home and had classes in adjacent buildings, so they walked together to class regularly. I sometimes bumped into him on campus or on a night out, and we were always really friendly with each other. He played golf and went to the gym, and he was just gorgeous and sweet and funny and I was always nervous around him because I just thought he was so far out of my league.

It had been two months since I broke up with Seth, and I hadn't heard from him at this point. Easter had come and gone and everyone was gearing up for exams, and I – for the first time in my further education so far – was preparing to spend the day at the library. I'd packed my bag with lunch, snacks and emergency snacks, painkillers and the biggest water bottle I could find to get me through the day. I'd spent the couple of months recovering from Seth and the police report I had to file against him. My housemates and friends had been amazing: Alice and May both came to visit me and my friend from school – El – had taken a train up from Worcester to stay with me for a long weekend. I'd completely avoided boys and had convinced myself I was destined to be single.

I opened my front door to find Chris outside my house.

"Hey Lucy! I was just coming to ask Katy if I could borrow her speakers. Is she in?" He smiled. He always smiled.

"Oh I'm sorry, she's gone home for a couple of weeks to study. I think she had some family emergency kind of thing and it just made sense to revise there for a bit," I said. He paused for a second, trying to figure out what to say.

"Oh right, well I hope she's okay!" He smiled again. He had a way of looking at me which always made me melt a bit.

"I'm just off to the library. Whereabouts are you heading?" I asked. Please be walking to campus.

"I was just passing... I was going to head home, actually, but... Do you fancy grabbing some lunch? We could go to the students union and get curly fries?" Ah, my love language: curly fries.

We got along really well, Chris and I. He was from the home counties and I was from Nottinghamshire and we really didn't have much in common but a similar sense of humour and a love of curly fries. And he was just so nice. There was nothing mean or aggressive about him and I loved that. I needed that.

Lunch didn't feel like a date. It never did. We'd ended up eating together before, actually, but it was more accidental because we were both eating alone at the same time and decided to sit together and catch up. He also spent a lot of time with my housemate Katy and, although she'd been seeing someone, I didn't know if there were any feelings on either side.

"You and Katy seem to be getting along really well..." I probed, munching away on curly fries.

"She's great, isn't she? She's been like a little sister this whole year. I keep trying to set her up with one of my friends so I can be best man at her wedding, but she's having none of it." Chris said. Right, well that was cleared up then.

We said goodbye at the end of lunch: he'd decided to head to the gym and I was still off to the library. If Sigmund Freud wasn't going to explain to me what he meant in his essays then I would have to figure it out for myself. We didn't hug goodbye, or linger to spend more time with each other. I left feeling like we were close friends, and I wasn't entirely disappointed. Chris was so out of my league and we were just friends.

He texted me on the day of my last exam:

"I hope today went well! Do you fancy grabbing some lunch this afternoon to chill out now we're both finished?" He was suggesting a new coffee shop down the road from where we both lived. Katy had heard of it.

"It's supposed to be amazing there! I really want to try it... Do you think he'll mind if I come too?" She asked. I shrugged: it was just a mate date so sure, why not?

Chris was surprised when both of us turned up, but him and Katy got chatting about home life and we'd flip between me complaining about the theory behind fetishes and them trying to explain to me some long-winded story of someone they both knew and exactly why it was super funny. It was three friends enjoying lunch together, celebrating the end of exams.

"You know he likes you, right?" Katy said on the walk back home. I shook my head.

"We're just friends. He's not interested. He's just a really nice guy and we get along," I told her. I loved Katy but I didn't want her trying to set me up with someone who was clearly not interested.

"He looks at you all the time though," she said, grinning.

"Well he spends most of his days looking at broken bones so I'm not surprised he's looking at something new!" I joked back. I'd resigned myself to it: Chris and I were never going to happen.

I had no excuse to text him over the summer when we finished our course. He was on a placement at a hospital in London and I was back home in Nottingham. We still kept in touch over the course of my final year whenever I saw him, but he ended up dating another girl from his radiology course and I never really bumped into him after that.

I did, however, bump into one of his friends once.

"Why did you and Chris never make things work?" He asked, being a little nosier than I appreciated. I gave my customary shrug.

"We were always just friends," I said politely.

"You know Chris really liked you?" He said, laughing.

"No, no. He wasn't interested. He didn't think of me that way," I said politely.

"You're wrong. He thought you'd friend-zoned him. He was going to ask you out for a proper date but he didn't think you were interested," the friend said.

Whoops.