throughout most of high school i had a friend who was kind of into me, but when he admitted it to me i told him that i didn't feel the same way and nothing could happen between us. we didn't talk for a while after that but then in senior year he started talking to me again and we were friends once more. i assumed that he had gotten over his feelings for me and that was why he was comfortable with me again.
a few weeks after this, my brother (who also went to our high school) committed suicide. i had very few close friends to support me at the time and Nice Guy was one of them. he seemed to bring up stuff related to my brother's death a lot during the weeks and months that followed. for example he would often try and coax me into talking about it, or tell me about a family member of his who had died, or once he wrote me a poem. at the time i thought he was just trying to be supportive, but i was still grieving and i never actually wanted to talk about it so i just dodged his comments as politely as i could. eventually though he started dropping hints that he himself was suicidal. i pretty much ignored this because i thought that i was reading too much into what he said, due to what i was going through.
he never said anything directly until one night when he told me straight out that he wanted to die. i had a panic attack and then got really upset and he immediately backpedaled and started spewing all this bullshit about how he just meant that he was overwhelmed by how large the universe was or something. i asked him to keep talking to me for a while so i'd know he was safe. after a few hours he started begging me to send him nudes. instead of apologizing when i got angry and told him how out of line he was, he just got defensive. in hindsight, i realize that him being so "supportive" after my brother's death was really him trying to take advantage of my vulnerable state. when that didn't work, he tried to pretend that he was suicidal too in order to evoke attention, emotion, and affection from me. finally he got desperate enough to tell me he wanted to die, but when i didn't confess my feelings for him in order to save him, he made something else up so that i wouldn't be upset. god knows how long we would have stayed friends if he hadn't asked me to send him nudes that night. before that i never suspected anything.