i think this guy i met twice has a crush on me

i'm pretty sure i met this guy when i was invited to this group hang out from one of my friends. i only knew like two or three people there but thats where i met him. he seemed chill but we hardly had anything in common so i ignored it. there was another hang out i was invited to but i didn't show up to but i assume he was there since thats when i first received a message from an unknown contact which was him. i don't even know how he got my number at all, i think he asked one of the people who already had my number and then maybe thats how he got it??

i didn't really want to associate myself with that friend group since theres a lot of shit going down in there. i'm not exactly "close" with anyone there so i could just ghost them and they'd be too preoccupied with whatever they're working on. but the guy who got my number who i'll call priestly for now, kept on trying to message me. i was so tired of that group so i just ghosted him most of the time replying days or weeks later making up excuses. i didn't think he'd be so persistent with me and i was just trying to get him to give up on me. it was nothing against him personally but whatever is happening in that group i'd rather not get involved since i knew i was gonna have to deal with "he was talking to this person" bullshit. 

he sent me a message a few days ago and i replied a few days later (to be fair i was traveling) but this time i was willing to engage in a conversation. at some point i felt like a bad person for having him try to message me for so long just for me to make up some excuse, my plan was to be so different from me that he'd get bored.

throughout these messages he was asking about my hobbies, series i watched, music i listen to, all that stuff. we had hardly anything in common which isn't his fault, i just wanted him to give up on me. something i've noticed throughout these messages with priestly is that between messages he'd go offline for almost a minute and then ask a new question afterwards. the conversation wasn't flowing from person to person, it felt like a job interview where he asked all the questions.

because of all of this it was pretty easy to deduct that he was 100% messaging another person at the same time as messaging me, telling him what questions to ask me. out of nowhere he asks me about my dating life when we were just talking about where we traveled to over the summer. what the hell??? i lied and told him that i was waiting til i was around 17 to start dating then tells me that he's single, notice how i didn't ask?

now his persistence made more sense to me since i initially thought he was doing all of this because he wanted to be friends in the way that he "looks up to me" or something. the rest of the conversation was just uninteresting, he had very questionable takes on therapy and at some point tried to egg me on to talk shit about the other people of that friend group. then he said he had to leave and i've never been more thankful for that.

i forgot to mention this earlier but when he sent the question asking about my dating life, i got on call with my friend and asked for advice. after the conversation was over she managed to find his tiktok account somehow?? but she found it through this persons account who i knew, who was also in that friend group. lets call this girl pluto. i was rethinking my conversations that i've had with her and i remembered something, i remembered that she's exes with priestly. furthermore, once they broke up priestly sent tons of paragraphs and physical letters begging to have her back which i had the honor to see the screenshots of.

so now i'm worried about entertaining priestly any longer for fear he might form this attachment to me, i already know we live in the same general area which is TERRIBLE news for me. he sent me a message two days ago which i haven't responded to. i can get away with that though since i can just say i was celebrating my birthday which is true. i'm gonna respond to him today, wish me luck.

edit: forgot to mention this too but he started messaging me in january of this year and its followed me until now.