"It'd be bad to be pressurey but not bad to want anything."

"I'm not sure what the difference is exactly?"

"Pressure is about making it hard to say no, and wanting anything is about making it clear that there's anything she could conceivably choose to say yes to."

"Does it not make it hard to say no if I'll clearly have lots of emotions about it if she does?"

"No. She can always fuck off to a different universe if she decides she does not want to interact with your feelings."

"Oh. Well, I can refrain from filtering my emotions when I talk to her if that seems like a good idea."

"You can also, like, use words, you don't have to skip straight to the waterworks."

"I don't actually plan on crying, it just seems like a not impossible outcome, or something like that."

Nod nod.

"Are you really sure that seeming needy won't be a bad idea?"

"No, you could super fuck it up, I'm just more confident that pathologically avoiding seeming like you give a shit about her at all is a bad idea."

Nod.

"How might I fuck it up?"

"Oh, I don't know specifically, as I said you can try lines on me if you want."

"I think I'm finding it hard to be emotionally vulnerable around you under these circumstances."

"Yeah, valid, would that everyone in this situation had more tools to hand."

"Possibly if you like, left the room and gave me a minute I could come up with some lines and write them down?"

"Sure, can I borrow your phone to call my folks?"

"Uh, I'm not actually sure I'll take longer than a couple of minutes to come up with a line or two to ask you about but sure, if you want to?"

"Oh, a literal minute, sure." She steps out to wait.

One minute later he has a line written down to ask about.

"So um. Could I clarify first whether you are in fact confident that me trying out lines on you won't weird Lorica out?"

"You should probably tell her you did it but I think it's kosher yeah."

Welp, May can see the rather unimpressive line he has written down in that case.

I really want to have some sort of relationship with you. If guiding and nothing else is where we end up with I'll deal with it, but it'll be really hard for me because I really like you and that's not going to stopbut I'll be sad about that.

"Why'd you cross out the crossed out part?"

"It seemed pressurey, even correcting for you telling me I was wrong about something being pressurey earlier. Is it not?"

It is so tempting to tell him that it's hopeless and give up.

"The note I am trying here to assist you in hitting is that you have to get across that you really like her and that she doesn't need to recover from having had the worst awakening ever in front of someone who is indifferent to her existence. You literally wrote down that you really like her and then you crossed it out. I'm no longer sure you could successfully hit pressurey if you deliberately tried to write a ransom note with magazine cutout letters."