The problem I already know the answer to

I developed feelings for a friend turned summer fling. We were talking one night and he started to panic and cry and said it was just too emotional for him. The thought of it being romantic and emotional and then it simply ending in a few months really scared him. He cut it off a few days later by saying we should just be friends. It was always the plan to have it end in the summer. About two weeks after there was a moment where he held me in his arms and clearly wanted to kiss me, but didn’t, and later told me it was because he felt it was too soon after his panic. It’s a few months later and I’m still hung up on him if I’m honest. We still talk everyday and have genuinely become closer friends. Recently he’s all but said he didn’t like me back. I want to take it at face value because what he’s telling me is what he’s telling me, but I know I’m not stupid. That clearly wasn’t true: he was the one to hold my hand and caress my face and made it way more romantic than I initially wanted it to be. But I did end up accepting it. He called me most days and loved to make me smile and laugh and would pepper my face with kisses. Hold me and looked at me with that tenderness of someone feeling something a little stronger than “like”. He was the one to show jealousy and protectiveness when his friend joked about hitting on me too. He showed me his soft side. He knows my tells and I know his. And I returned the romance too. I’d hold his face in my hands and teach him about the cool things in my life. I gave him some serious affection back then: looking him deep in the eyes and telling him I thought him beautiful. That I loved his voice. Felt safe with him. All true things. I’m more emotionally withdrawn from him and he knows it and takes a degree of offense to it because I’m okay with him telling me stuff but won’t tell him everything, and he says it’s not reciprocal. I’m just protecting my heart though. I don’t think it’s right for him to want access to it when he turned it away. All the songs he sends me are “I know I’ve messed up, please wait for me, it’s you I care about”. He told me recently that he knows I’d be a good partner, and told me ages ago that he thinks of me as marriageable. Told me recently that he’d do the whole summer again if he knew he wouldn’t panic like that. It made me really, really mad to hear that, though it took me a moment to realize it. At the time I told him I had conflicting feelings about that. I don’t know why. I guess in one way I do still want him, but my pride is injured because he clearly didn’t really want me. There’s a bitterness lately. All I heard when he broke it off was “I don’t want you”, so I cut back my feelings best I could, saw other people. I know he has a degree of jealousy towards me. It’s easier for me to find dates than him and he’s a little bitter about it. I have my own talents and a very loving friend group. He’s only jealous in the way that he desires what I have. Even as a friend I’m very private and it seems to make him insecure to a degree because I outright hold him at arms length and refuse to lean on him emotionally. He’s away for work right now and he’ll be back in two months time. He’s pretty much told me he expects to see me then again. He’s told me he might want to give it another shot when he comes back, but I don’t believe in doing things twice if the thing that caused problems the first time isn’t fixed. He’ll still sometimes flirt and joke around with me like he did when we were seeing each other. Part of me is angry and wants to tell him to get lost. Knows he’s going on dates with others to see if he’ll like them. Doesn’t want to be his back up option, his “girl back home” with no title. My family and friends tell me there’s clearly something happening, even if neither of us will say it. That it’s essentially long distance dating to talk as often as we do with emotional and affectionate undertones. If I look at what it was when we really were seeing each other compared to this, he was just more head over heels and openly into me. I feel like he’s almost ashamed to still want me now. But I can’t do with the emotional turmoil of “essentially”, it’s more clear as either it is or isn’t. And he hasn’t told me it is, so it isn’t. I know he speaks softly of me when it’s to others, it gets back to me. That he thinks I’m sweet and funny and regrets the way it went. But how could he say that, and text me when he wakes up and goes about his day, and tell me he cares about me and that he’s glad we’re friends, and also tell me he didn’t like me. It was always the plan to have it end in the summer, and this is my long winded way of saying it doesn’t matter if he did like me or didn’t like me, just that he refuses to give me something real and I can’t settle for that when it’s not what I really want. And it hurts. It’s a fling and it resolved itself that way. I created a problem that I already know the answer to: it won’t be anything real and I’m hurting over nothing. But it wasn’t nothing to me.