Is She Being Friendly or Is She Interested?

I have a situation with a girl that I work with that really confuses me and I’m not really sure how to react to it. It will take me a while to explain the full situation and I think it’s important to know everything, so sorry in advance!

Basically, I asked her out four years ago and she said no, as she didn’t want to date someone she worked with. I didn’t really buy that excuse, I felt she was showing me signs of interest and was probably using that excuse to make me feel better. Clearly I misread her signs, but she did seem to try hard to be friendly with me. Anyway, kind of irrelevant as she said no. Things were understandably awkward for a bit, but we recovered and are cool now. She didn’t mention it to anyone which was good of her.

In the last year, I’ve started working with a new girl. She’s quite different to me and we don’t connect romantically so nothing will ever happen between us. But she is quite shy and doesn’t like to mingle that much in work. She’s become really comfortable around me and we’ve become good friends, so she’s almost always around me. People seem to think we date or something along those lines because we enjoy each other’s company - that’s fine, but I insist on making the point that we don’t date. She’s very attractive which is probably intimidating to other people, and possibly encourages them all to bring it up with me because I’m open about being single.

I am casually going out with a girl I’ve known since school. Nobody ever comments on that, even though I do post on social media when we do things together. I’m slowly building our relationship to see if there’s potentially more than friendship, but whatever happens I don’t want to lose her as a friend entirely. But that’s a different situation I’ll deal with myself.

So the other day everybody in our office goes out for a meal and a night out. I go over to chat with the original girl I asked out, along with a few others. For a while before this night, I’d noticed her getting more comfortable around me and taking more of an interest than she had done for a while. The first thing she says to me when I go over is “it’s nice to see you without (clingy work girl) attached to your hip”. I knew she was joking and everybody started roasting me about that situation. That was fine, I played it cool.

We occasionally chatted about some other stuff we’d been doing recently over the next couple of hours, her even asking me about something I did over 12 months ago. Then she asked about the girl I know from school, saying “are you still seeing her?”. I told her we weren’t seeing each other and she said I should properly ask her out. It seemed quite an empty recommendation though, like she wasn’t really convinced I should.

It started to seem a bit odd to me that she was suddenly so interested in what I was doing with girls, having only seen me a couple of weeks before and not mentioned anything like that. For the remainder of the night she seemed to want my eye contact, she wanted to dance with me at times but would also dance with other guys when I was close by. I also spoke to her the following day on social media and she was very responsive.

I kind of felt like she was trying to play a game with me, sparking interest but then also keeping me at arm’s length. Then again, I could also be misreading signs again, I just don’t know. How do you guys feel about this situation? What do you think I should do? Any advice or input you can give is useful. Thanks :)