The third time my gym crush and I talked, the conversation got a little more personal. He asked what I liked to do. We were past the initial introductions and into actually finding things out about each other. Then he ended it with a fist bump.
I had been trying to work out whether he was interested in me. Apparently, I also needed to work out whether I was his teammate.
He was the one who started all this. He interrupted my workout to tell a silly joke, introduced himself, and said he saw me around all the time. It wasn't a declaration of love. It was, however, a man I fancied choosing to come over and talk to me, which was enough to get my attention.
He said goodbye later, after our workout. Since then, every time I've seen him at the gym, we've chatted at least a little. The first conversation hadn't just happened and vanished. There was enough of a pattern for me to start getting a vibe, and enough room for doubt that I felt nervous about trusting it.
By our third conversation, he was asking about my interests. That felt different from simply recognizing another person who used the same gym. I liked having something to talk about beyond the place where we kept running into each other. I couldn't know what he intended, but I was enjoying the direction of the conversation.
Then came the fist bump. Nothing about the gesture was unpleasant. The problem was that it seemed to belong to a different sort of interaction from the one I thought we might be having. I was interested in him as a man. A small part of me was now wondering whether he had just congratulated me on being a reliable member of the gym community.
This would have been easier to file away if another man at work hadn't recently fist-bumped me too. Two men, two settings, the same greeting. I suddenly felt as though everybody had received a short briefing on fist bumps except me. The work interaction didn't explain the gym one; it just made the gesture look less specific.
I can see why it might be nothing more than friendliness. I can also see why the rest of the gym guy's behavior keeps me from writing it off. He approached first, kept talking to me, and asked about my life. Those details are still there. They just don't come with a label, and the fist bump hasn't helpfully supplied one.
For now, he's still the man at the gym who came over with a silly joke and then started asking what I liked to do. I'm still the woman with a crush on him. The only part I hadn't expected was having a work colleague accidentally become my point of comparison.
